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

by Kelly Weinersmith

Idyllic views of the future always seem to come with the hidden assumption that human nature will change. That somehow, the flaws of mankind will just melt away amongst the awesomeness of living among the stars. People will abandon mundane flaws like booze and drugs, and also everyone will be super-efficient like some kind of environmentalist’s dream. But that’s never been the case as we march forward, so I don’t see why it would happen in the future. —Andy Weir, world famous sci-fi author who also writes really insightful commentary in books about booze in space

if you personally just want any sort of land there’s plenty. Google it. Small towns all over the developed world are offering free land to people willing to move there instead of big cities.

Some space-settlement theorists have argued that the need for artificial atmospherics creates the potential for autocratic control of the stuff of existence. Dr. Charles Cockell, an astrobiologist, has argued on this basis that there should be “engineering for liberty,” such as making sure oxygen-creation systems are distributed rather than centralized. We don’t know whether this sort of thing will work, but it’s likely that the politics of space settlements will be influenced by the physics of space settlements, and not necessarily for the good.

Current estimates say that once you leave Earth’s protective atmosphere and magnetosphere, every single cell nucleus in your body will be struck by a proton every few days, and by a larger charged particle every few months.

if a nation wants to convey to the world that they are the strongest and best, they can of course just announce it at the United Nations. But it won’t be convincing. Talk is cheap. Space programs are not. Very few nations can successfully fire a guy around the world at 7.8 kilometers per second, then land him and send him on a goodwill tour.[*] Human spacefaring has little utility for the price, especially compared to things like military or commercial satellites, but what it does do is dramatically demonstrate wealth, organization, and technical competence. Throw in the fact that early space rockets were often literally the same as military rockets, and you have an excellent show of raw power that demands to be taken seriously. You of course never hear a politician say, “We choose to go to the Moon, not because it is easy, but because it’ll provide short-term geopolitical advantage,” but something like that is a pretty solid explanation.

Many of the most persistent voices for Mars colonization are philosophically libertarian—they think Earth is too bureaucratic, too rule bound, too oppressive. But even ardent libertarians don’t favor an increase in private possession of nuclear weapons. If you agree with us that a large-scale human space presence poses a nuclear-weapon-ish threat to humanity, almost any political or philosophical posture should favor a collective right to say what goes on above our gravity well.