A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?

by Kelly Weinersmith

Biosphere 2 cost around a tenth of a percent of the ISS. People can debate what the point of space stations is, but if they’re part of a project leading to human settlement off-world, this is not a good allocation of resources. For the same cost as the ISS, five hundred biospheres could’ve been built. Better yet, a decades-long sequence of experiments could’ve been run in order to create what we really need—an extremely detailed computer model for how to design sealed worlds. What life forms to use, how to arrange them, how to make them as efficient as possible, and how to maximize human population and well-being inside. Oh, and there’d be the side benefits of deeply enhancing our knowledge of ecosystem sustainability and our ability to create food efficiently in environments without hospitable climates—both potentially relevant in the coming decades.