A City on Mars
Kelly and Zach Weinersmiths' A City on Mars was a pretty big nonfiction bestseller. And, as with many best sellers, that doesn't necessarily mean that lots of people read it all the way through. But having just finished it a couple of days ago, I hope that lots of people do, because this book sits in a very interesting and uncomfortable place:
The Weinersmiths are absolutely space-colonization enthusiasts, very much in favor of humanity expanding across the solar system. And they're huge nerds about it, who've spent years interviewing everybody who's working on space exploration, including a fair number of living astronauts.
And they don't think it can be done, not any time in the next century, more or less, because they're appalled, to the point of being amused, by just how much hand-wavium gets invoked. This is an entire book about all of the things we do not know enough about, and need a lot more time to find out, before we can put any kind of permanent settlement in zero-G, on the moon, or on Mars, let alone anywhere even harder.
Don't get them wrong, that they're space colonization enthusiasts is why, all the way through the book, once they've highlighted a deal-breaker they say that that's why we should be spending research money on answering those questions instead of spending 20 to 100 times as much on "let's just hope it's not a problem."
They're also not shy about how a lot of the anarcho-capitalists who are pouring money lobbying for the idea are doing so for reasons that are almost certain to ignite World War III as soon as they try to do it their way. Even if, as is highly likely, everybody in those first settlements will be dead in a matter of months even if they're left alone.
... a humanity advanced enough to save itself from asteroid impact is a humanity advanced enough to deflect an asteroid into itself. ... in a world of easy access to doomsday weapons, it takes only one society gone autocratically evil to create a nightmare scenario. If some aspects of space-settlement actively increase the likelihood of this outcome, the point becomes even more worrisome. Space geeks often cite a quote by science fiction author Larry Niven: “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 ... 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.”
