Don’t Book Your Passage to Mars Any Time Soon
The first book I read in 2024 is by turns informative, thought-provoking, hilarious and reassuring.
It confirms my suspicion that when it comes to plans to colonize Mars, Elon Musk is full of … future coprolites. The challenges involve about more than the difficulty of growing potatoes in regolith and poop.
The book: A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? By Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. The premise: human aspirations to colonize space are either (a) foolhardy; (b) wildly optimistic; (c) unrealistic or (d) completely discount and even blatantly ignore the legal, environmental, biological and technological realities that will inevitably make it very, very, VERY difficult to establish colonies on the Moon, on Mars, or on orbiting space stations.
I am a huge science fiction fan, and I can’t begin to list all the books I’ve read and TV series I’ve watched that skip over the legal, environmental, biological and technical obstacles.
They usually do so by “skipping forward” — employing plot devices that relieve the author and reader of the inconvenient realities by positing that gnarly problems like zero-g reproduction, ubiquitous toxic dust, lack of water and deadly temperature swings will all have been tidily sorted between “now” and…
