City on Mars

Accessible and intricately researched, with scattered humor to keep the reader's interest.

Getting to space is the easy part. Staying there is going to be a lot more complicated than anyone wants to believe. There are plenty of established tropes in science-fiction and among serious space enthusiasts, but a lot of them have major gaps in them when you start pressing for details. What happens to a fetus in microgravity? Can you scrape together enough soil nutrients to supply agriculture for a whole Mars city, or do you need to constantly import fertilizer from Earth? How do you make sure you have enough medical supplies on-hand?

The authors wanted to write about what we know about space settlement. But it turns out it's a really good primer for what we don't know and need to research before we can get serious.

It's also an interesting companion to Under Alien Skies, which takes the approach of "assuming we're able to work out the details, this is what it would be like there." And, well, we have a lot more details to work out.

(Cross-posted from my website.)

This is a careful, immensely well-informed, and persuasively comprehensive examination of the domain of settlements in space.

Kind of spoiler alert (but not really): They are not optimistic, certainly not in the short- or even medium-term. What the book does is share the reasons for their stance. And while there is a certain accuracy to the term 'disillusionment' here, in that they started the project optimistic and wanted to provide a popular introduction to how it will all be achieved, the end result is not a 'downer'.

What the authors get across - I think implicitly, but they also take time at various points to be very explicit about it - is that they love the science. They enjoy not the power fantasies of "Wild West in Spaaaaaaace!!" but the complexity, intricacies and crazy dynamics of life, and just as importantly living; being human in space, and on other planets.

They point out that striking out for the Final Frontier is less a prospect of strapping on a space suit and marching, steely-eyed toward Star Trek, or even the Expanse, world conquering and infinite fame. It's a bit more like saying "I want to move to live and work in one of those toxic rare metal manufacturies in China. Maybe raise a family in the foundry there, if we can avoid dying of poisoning, asphyxiation, or radiation." Except the China thing is likely to be more pleasant.

What they suggest instead is more ambitious, more visionary, and ultimately a great deal more heroic too. Something that would really stretch what our species is capable of, require efforts to transform technology and social organisation. They see that as worthwhile and inspiring, and they aren't afraid of the hard work and long-term thinking it would require. (Or at least, they aren't afraid of signing other people up for it, let's be realistic here.)

It's a book that can change your perception of space, space settlement, and your relationship to the world around you. I really like the Weinersmiths. They seem like excellent people.

As a chaser to this excellent shot, I would recommend the entirely different "How Infrastructure Works" from Deb Chachra. A different perspective on our relationship to the world, but one which makes very similar points about how deeply and fundamentally we are bound into our own world. bookwyrm.social/user/wildenstern/review/3831758/s/debchamastodonsocials-book-will-change-your-perspective-on-the-world-connect-you-to-roots-and-implications-you-werent-aware-of

If you've looked askance at Elon Musk's claim/plan to settle Mars this century, this book will validate your priors in a most entertaining way. The first 3 parts cover the physical & mental aspects of space settlement. As someone who works on satellites, none of this is surprising to me. At least a couple times a week, someone in the office will exclaim "space is hard!" as we try to solve a problem. Additionally, the book spends 2 parts of the legal and geopolitical environment of settling space. The authors' position is that space settlement nerds don't really spend enough time thinking through the ramifications. In particular, while there are better frameworks for space settlement than what we have, there's not a clean path to get there and space settlement nerds aren't really moving society in a real way to get there. There's an extended discussion of an attempt to establish a new state in space by dint of a small cubesat launched by a space society. (As a side note, I'm quite surprised that the book doesn't go into the attempts to create micro-states such as Sealand. Those would be a lot easier to attain statehood with that space environments, and yet none of those has even come close to succeeding.)

What really makes the book though is that the authors are both funny and pay attention to the weird facts of space. Steve Bannon once ran Biosphere 2! The humor won't be a surprise to regular readers of Zach Weinersmith's web strip, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

A City on Mars is an enjoyable and easy to read non-fiction book about the (non)feasibility of space habitation. It's got a comedic-but-serious tone, which is not unexpected as half of the authors are responsible for the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic strip. Lots of digressions and breadth, but all enjoyable and accessible.

Despite space being really cool, I am personally went into this (and left!) with extreme skepticism about the feasibility of humans living in space any time soon. (It just feels like billionaire escapism from real problems that they are disproportionately responsible for causing!) There's probably some confirmation bias in my enjoyment here, as a warning. This book also treats several billionaires with much more respect than they deserve, although it's not fawning over them either.

We're pretty good at shooting things into space at this point (even if it's expensive) but largely past that I think I was amazed at just how little we know. We haven't had people in space for very long periods of time at all. We don't really know how radiation in space affects people long term. We have no idea if/how birth could work in low/no gravity. We have extremely little understanding of creating successful closed ecosystems. We certainly aren't doing a good job keeping our own planet going well.

One unexpected neat part was how much it went into space law (with a lot of deep sea and Antarctica analogies). It's not a topic that I feel like a lot of similar books have talked about, but it's incredibly depressing how exploitation-heavy all countries seem to be leaning at the moment. (Space socialism when?)

But we have not moved beyond conflict. Our ability to harm ourselves vastly outweighs our ability to protect ourselves. Settling the solar system will likely increase the danger, and we will not be leaving for distant suns anytime soon.

Even with my space skepticism, I had previous thought of space exploration as value neutral (or at least competing for resources that could have been used for better things), but this book convincing me that putting more people in space (and competition over space resources) would probably be actively dangerous for earth itself, especially given the lack of agreements (and peace) we currently have on earth.