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

by Kelly Weinersmith

In 2020, for example, SpaceX’s internet service provider, Starlink, released a Terms of Service agreement that declared that “no Earth-based government has authority or sovereignty over Martian activities.” This clause is like many statements about outer space settlement: it was promoted by a powerful advocate, widely shared and commented upon, and profoundly misleading. Earth-based governments do have authority over Mars activities—Mars is regulated by long-standing treaties and is an international commons. Admittedly, the treaties are weird and vague, but they do exist and can’t be de-existed via a Terms of Service agreement.

Leaving a 2°C warmer Earth for Mars would be like leaving a messy room so you can live in a toxic waste dump.

We can’t make these choices properly unless people actually know what the truth is about space settlement. All of it. Not just the size of the rocket or the power needs of a settlement or the available minerals in asteroids, but the big, open questions about things like medicine, reproduction, law, ecology, economics, sociology, and warfare.

We wanted to contribute. We saw space settlement as a near-term possibility and intended to write a sort of sociological road map—how to scale to one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand people, and beyond. A little guide to explain to the public what comes next. But we also had a few nagging concerns. Things we didn’t understand, like how to design the legal regime to make it safe to live in a solar system where dozens of nations, corporations, and possibly single individuals can sling dinosaur-annihilation-size objects at the homeworld. A clear protocol would be nice. What we found was that, with just a few exceptions, concerns of this sort were ignored, sometimes even treated with hostility by space-settlement advocates.

While we fell in love with space settlement as a field of study, we became more concerned about all the proposals for doing it in the coming decades. It turns out when you just talk about technical things like the size of rockets, or whether Mars has water and carbon, the picture can look pretty solid. When you get into the more squishy details of human existence, things start to look, well, squishy.

The most detailed treatment of the issue comes from international relations scholar Dr. Daniel Deudney and his book Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity. It’s an involved argument, but the basic idea is this: humans being what we are, the move into space creates at least two forms of existential peril: the risk of nuclear conflict on Earth due to a scramble for space territory, and the risk of heavy objects being thrown at Earth if humans are allowed to control things like asteroids and massive orbital space stations.

Both Bezos and Musk overhype things, yes, but the evidence is that they actually believe in a space-settlement future. What concerns us is not that they’re lying, but that they have weird beliefs about human sociology that may shape the future in undesirable ways.

A quotation used in 99.9999 percent of all books about space settlement comes from rocketry founding father Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who wrote in a 1911 article, “The earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot forever live in the cradle.” Perhaps. But we should remember that what emerges from a cradle is not a full-grown adult, but a toddler—lacking in knowledge, very excited, and prone to self-destruction. If we do plan to leave this place, better to do so as an adult. Let’s spend the awkward years learning and then strike out for new vistas.

An Earth with climate change and nuclear war and, like, zombies and werewolves is still a way better place than Mars. Staying alive on Earth requires fire and a pointy stick. Staying alive in space will require all sorts of high-tech gadgets we can barely manufacture on Earth.

Also, there’s a real difference between access to commodities and universal wealth. Consider aluminum. Discovered in 1825, early on it was so valuable that only the wealthy could afford it. Victorian-era jewelry sometimes includes aluminum as a precious metal. Today, it’s a way to cover lasagna.

To illustrate why, consider an idea we call the “Necrosphere,” in contrast with the Biosphere. The Necrosphere is a built structure on Earth. Inside it, the ground is poison, there is no air, and cascades of radiation are fired at the inhabitants on a perpetual basis. Why did we build it? In the sure knowledge that we can stick engineers inside who, due to the harsh environment combined with their need not to die, will spew forth valuable ideas like a spigot spews forth pressurized water. If this sort of thing seems implausible to you, you should ask yourself why anyone would expect a Mars base to generate all these supposed benefits. You should also ask yourself why it is that so many innovations on Earth come not from anarchic wastelands but from cities where an engineer’s main hardship is eight-dollar espressos.

Combine this with the facts that literally nobody has been to space for longer than 437 days in a row, and the total time the Apollo missions spent in the Moon’s one-sixth Earth gravity is just under two weeks, and it becomes very clear how little we know about the most pertinent question for space settlement: can regular people flourish for long periods off-world?

The “banana equivalent dose” is a frequently used metric for radiation exposure, since bananas contain potassium-40, a radioactive isotope, yet remain a healthy dietary option that 50 percent of your authors believe is excellent in pudding. Some behaviors apt to increase your relative radiation dose include eating Brazil nuts, going to bed with a human next to you, or taking a trip to Denver, Colorado. Some daredevils may have done all three at once.

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.

We know most about how this problem impacts eyeballs, though it’s possible eyes are just the most detectable form of damage, and more subtle effects are happening to the brain itself. We aren’t going to linger on this because at the moment the data are unclear, but there is a possibility that space conditions have cognitive effects. Frankly, between the radiation and the fluid shifts, cumulative brain damage doesn’t sound like an especially wild conjecture. If this is a subtle issue that gets worse over time, it’ll take on a lot of importance for any space-settlement plan.

If you accept Daniel Deudney’s argument that a large human presence in space gives us a lot of power to destroy ourselves, you should think twice about creating settlements where you anticipate the culture will place a low value on human life.

If current technology barely permits survival and only permits natural population growth via throwing conventional moral standards out the window, and if there’s no reason to leave right this second, why not be patient? Spend a few decades at least in order to advance the science of human reproduction, as well as every other technology relevant to space settlement. Then, we can send a population large enough and with advanced enough technology that we aren’t required to “set new or higher criteria for valuable offspring.”

So here’s our problem: we want to stick at least a few thousand people somewhere in space, and ideally quite a few more. We don’t have long-term data, and the data we do have comes from the professional class of liars known as astronauts.

Oberth was something of a prodigy. As a boy in Romania, before he’d learned any advanced mathematics, he noticed an error in Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. Verne has his spacefarers fired from a 275-meter-long cannon. Young Oberth calculated that this would produce 23,000 times the normal force of gravity—enough to have liquefied the main characters in chapter 26. This was both precocious intelligence and, for a future rocket scientist, quite a high level of concern for human welfare.

It is not hyperbole to make the statement [that] if humans ever reside on the Moon, they will have to live like ants, earthworms or moles. The same is true for all round celestial bodies without a significant atmosphere or magnetic field—Mars included. —Dr. James Logan, former NASA chief of Flight Medicine and chief of Medical Operations at Johnson Space Center

No moonlit night will ever be the same to me again if, as I look up at that pale disc, I must think “Yes: up there to the left is the Russian area, and over there to the right is the American bit. And up at the top is the place which is now threatening to produce a crisis.” The immemorial Moon—the Moon of the myths, the poets, the lovers—will have been taken from us forever. —C. S. Lewis, the Narnia guy

We think skipping over the law is a colossal mistake if you want to have any idea about how space settlement is likely to happen. In our experience talking to enthusiasts, they frequently assume that space law will just melt away due to the amazingness of space settlement. Or will be bowled over because nobody has the right to stand in front of the United States, or just Elon Musk in particular. There’s no reason to believe this, and in the meantime the law already affects spacefaring behavior. Chris Lewicki, who was president of Planetary Resources, Inc., told us that the vagueness of the law was a serious barrier to investment and contributed to the fall of his asteroid mining company. Legal scholars we talked to had even bigger concerns—that the law is unprepared for modern developments, and that any kind of race to grab, say, Moon territory, could spark conflict. That’s a depressing thought, especially if you agree with our assessment that the Moon doesn’t hold a lot of economic value.

Perhaps maturity in the Space Age, as in any technological revolution, can be measured by the growing realization that these latest creations of man do not and will not change man himself. —Dr. Walter McDougall, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian

Three unusual men are generally considered to be the founding fathers of modern rocketry: Russia’s Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935), America’s Robert Goddard (1882–1945), and Germany’s Hermann Oberth (1894–1989).

When Sputnik 1 flew in 1957, the Eisenhower administration considered there to be a serious silver lining: the Soviets had established a precedent for freely orbiting over other nations. The United States quickly took advantage of this standard to field spy satellites. Although space’s status as an “open skies” domain was debated as late as 1963, the custom has solidified, and it is now beyond question. It’s worth noting that things could have gone otherwise.

This creates potential legal gaps. Suppose a group of Canadians, using Canadian money from the Canadian government, launch from Paraguay. Is liability now held by Paraguay or Canada? Under the OST, that’s for Canada and Paraguay to work out between themselves. This sort of thing could really matter for space settlements of the future. In our experience, people often have a vague idea that if Elon Musk does something on Mars, that is the business of Elon Musk. But legally, Elon Musk would likely be the US’s responsibility, making the US liable for anything he does off-world.

Under Artemis, this is all technically temporary. But try to imagine a rival country, especially one like China, which already has a rocky relationship with the United States, telling them to leave. Again, that American safety zone isn’t a claim to sovereign territory; it’s not a claim that some lunar region is literally America. But it sure gets close. Throw in the limited quantity of good places on the Moon, add the lack of any limits on the total number of bases nations can place, add that the nation pushing the new interpretation is the one with the most space capability, and add that the two countries most interested in the best spots on the Moon are nuclear powers, and you have a recipe for danger.

If you believe, as we do, that there’s no obvious economic case for Moon mining, that any settlement science can be done just fine under the old framework, then this new Moon Race is a pointless escalation toward a crisis, possibly even a conflict. If you believe, as we do, that safely and sustainably settling space requires a high level of human harmony, conflict over our nearest celestial neighbor does not advance the goal of populating space.

To some this is a disaster. All those potential resources, all those places people might have lived and developed and commercialized have been left alone, to the detriment of human flourishing. Others see unbridled success: the first half of the twentieth century saw claims and counterclaims in the Antarctic that could have led to warfare. Yet Antarctica and the deep seabed have remained peacefully managed commons with reasonably clear, if quite restrictive, property regimes. This has worked on Earth, so it would likely work in space. It is not the most romantic option or the most awesome option. It’s likely not the option that produces the most rapid development. As we’ll see, it’s not even likely to be especially equitable between nations. But it is an option that could permit widespread space activity while avoiding a needless conflict between nuclear powers.

But there are other goals than efficiency. When we think about the future of the Moon or Mars, the goal may not be rapidly extracting maximum value. It may also be things like preserving a pristine environment or preserving humanity from blowing ourselves up in a territory dispute. To the extent these things are the goal, regulating space the way we regulate Antarctica is a good option.

Finally, we come to a question we teed up way back in the introduction—war. Is war less likely in space? If not, is it apt to be especially dangerous? If we apply the standard analysis of war theorists rather than trying to reason from pop theories of why wars start, we find that, as in so many areas of human behavior in space, we should expect humans to behave as we do on Earth. If space wars are apt to be especially dangerous, that’s a problem.

We understand it’s weird for a discussion on space settlements to ask what the cost of rent is going to be or whether the local store is charging too much for canned goods, but this is the stuff regular lives are made of. Space-settlement proposals tend to skip this, assuming that our awesome spacefarers will be focused on the task at hand and perpetually oriented around the glory of settlement itself. We should always remember that these settlers will be regular people, and regular people’s daily concerns are much less about grand narratives than about their homes, their jobs, and their groceries.

Who controls low-Earth orbit controls near-Earth space. Who controls near-Earth space dominates Terra. Who dominates Terra determines the destiny of humankind. —Dr. Everett C. Dolman, professor of Military Strategy

Space settlement will be much harder than it is usually portrayed, without obvious economic benefits. Attempting space settlement now may increase the likelihood of conflict on Earth in the short term and ultimately increase human existential risk. Even the awesomeness of the view out of a Martian habitat is not worth all this.

Earth isn’t perfect, but as planets go it’s a pretty good one. We aren’t saying you should give up on the hope for a life off-world—that’s too pretty a dream to part with. What we are saying is that if you do want that dream, you have to see the challenges as they are—real, profound, and present at every level from molecules to sociology. We hope, at the very least, when you read an article or hear a conversation about space settlement as an idea, you’ll be able to see it as a very rich problem, which won’t be solved simply by ambitious fantasies or giant rockets.

International law is one of the few fields where by understanding history and law and writing about it you can have a vast long-term effect on the future of humanity. If you want the sort of space settlements that sci-fi geeks dream about, we need a legal regime that regulates away the possibility of territorial scrambles in the short term, allows peaceful scientific work together in the medium term, and perhaps, perhaps, one distant day, will permit the peaceful creation of independent nations off-Earth. Just as Dr. Oscar Schachter writing in the 1950s helped shape the law that governs today’s solar system, scholars writing here in the 2020s can shape the law that governs the 2050s and beyond.

Can we just say, this is all fun? Our pessimism about the possibility for short-term space settlement has in no way interfered with our fascination for the topic. What other endeavor requires you to understand everything from orbital mechanics to ecology to history, law, and war?

We don’t know how to do it yet, but we still believe that someday, with enough knowledge, we can have Mars. And one very faraway day, other solar systems. But we have to earn it, both by gaining in knowledge and by becoming a more responsible, more peaceful species. Going to the stars will not make us wise. We have to become wise if we want to go to the stars.