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

by Kelly Weinersmith

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

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.

The Earth of 2022 puts on about 80 million people per year. If saving our ecology requires us to reduce Earth’s human population, then we need to launch and house 220,000 volunteers per day just to tread water.

Nations don’t fight over land, they fight over particular land. You can’t solve disputes over Jerusalem or Kashmir or Crimea by promising the parties involved equally large stretches of Antarctica.

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.”

The Moon is also an excellent place for rocket launches. From an energy perspective, the hard part of spacefaring isn’t traveling a long distance, but getting off-planet in the first place. On a trip to Mars, most of the propellant you will ever use gets burned up reaching a stable orbit above Earth. Once orbital, a relatively modest use of propellant will sling you elsewhere.

Moon is probably only valuable for settlement if somewhere else is even more valuable. If humanity decides, either with public or private spending, that sending humans deep into space is worthwhile, the utility of the Moon may justify a full-on settlement. But while this possibility is compelling to many space enthusiasts, most of them see the Moon not as the goal, but as a stopover en route to somewhere better. And usually, the better location they’re talking about is Mars.

A more nuanced version of this argument would say that space stations don’t just make new land, they make new biosphere, sparing our overtaxed planet from humans and human-made pollutants.

“The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn’t have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don’t have a space program, it’ll serve us right!” But as Deudney notes, giant asteroids are rare. Humans haven’t been around that long, while the dinosaurs had a good long run. “Given these possibilities, perhaps the reason the dinosaurs lasted for nearly two hundred million years is because they did not have a space program.”

Argument 1: The Survival Cathedral Should humanity begin the process of settling space purely because it makes us less vulnerable to species extinction? Dr. Stephen Hawking liked this argument. Elon Musk likes this argument. We’re no longer sure it’s a good one. If humanity were governed so well that war and terrorism hadn’t existed for ages, then we should build the cathedral.

Argument 2: The Hot Tub Do humans have any right to bind their fellow humans to Earth? We said at the beginning of this book that the question here is whether the choice to settle space is more like the personal choice to buy a hot tub or more like the highly regulated choice to buy a nuclear missile. Given that space settlement is unlikely to deliver huge benefits anytime soon, given that the path forward might lead to legal chaos, given that space activity won’t reduce the likelihood of war and might increase it under some scenarios, well, it’s hard to argue that this is just a matter of personal preference. Is this merely a personal choice? We think, at the end of everything, the short answer here is no.

Here’s where we’d allocate funds: Track 1: Biology, Reproduction, and Ecology The life sciences pose hard problems for long-term survival in space, and they are also problems about which we know very little. The big answers we need are about the very long-term effects of life in space—not just in space stations, but in partial gravity. We also need answers on how to safely reproduce off-world.

Track 2: International Law Human legal norms are substantially more confusing than space monkeys in love. We believe the right law more or less already exists—it should be something like UNCLOS or the Moon Agreement, but calibrated to be signable by the major space powers. There is no doubt research that can be done here, but a big part of the job is advocacy—getting people to understand the actual deal on space settlement. Why it matters, how it should be done, what time scales are reasonable, and where we can go from here.

Track 3: Geopolitics, Sociology, and Economics

Because this book is designed for a general audience who doesn’t want to read texts that weigh more than they do, we were forced to skip some topics that might one day be useful to know more about: the design of constitutions, the effects of religion, how culture is influenced by geography, and detailed treatments of economic factors like the effect of six-month transit times on the value of commodities. Economist friends of ours, it seems, would’ve preferred exhaustive analyses of every possible scenario, which we suspect would’ve tried the patience of even the nerdiest of pop-science consumers. However, if humanity must settle space, these details not only matter, but they can be adjudicated rather than speculated about.

Going to the stars will not make us wise. We have to become wise if we want to go to the stars.