The most charming, entertaining cold blanket to ever rain death on my joyful dream of space settlement
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| Cover design by Stephanie Ross; Cover art by Zach Weinersmith |
Before Kelly and Zach Weinersmith released what would become a Hugo Award-winning Best Related Work, most people1 only know of them through Zach Weinersmith’s webcomic, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. I’ve been an avid fan of SMBC for years, charmed and impressed by its clever willingness to combine deep discussions of philosophy, robotics, mathematics, economics, religion, literature and linguistics with some pretty crude humor. And sex.2 So I was naturally curious to see what would come out of a writing duo composed of Zach Weinersmith and the woman who was willing to live with him, Kelly Weinersmith.
And the answer is a darn good book! A City on Mars is a discussion of the scientific, ethical, and legal obstacles that stand in the way of actually building settlements on other planets, asteroids, moons, or space stations. Since reality is no fun, the Weinersmiths bear the unenviable task of breaking the news to us that, honestly, space settlement is probably not going to be feasible for a very, very long time. They don’t like it any more than we do. They say so in the introduction: they started out wanting to write this book buoyed by the enthusiasm engendered of burgeoning space tech industries. We’re so close! they thought. What are those last steps before we have a city on Mars?
And then they did the research, and discovered the full extent of the depressing Well Actually. And because they are killjoys (or perhaps because they already had the book deal), they decided to kill our joy too. But because they are not complete monsters, they do it delightfully, with sympathy and wit and a kindhearted touch that crushes all our hopes into stardust no less thoroughly for all the gentleness of their approach.
The book is organized according to the types of obstacles that need to be overcome. First, the Weinersmiths discuss the known biological complications of weeks or months in zero gravity, combined with the unknown—but, extrapolating from zero-g, probably non-trivial!—biological complications of long-term or permanent life in low gravity. There is an appropriate degree of poop-centered discussion, and due diligence given to the procreative act in space. Proposed technological ameliorations of various degrees of wackiness are laid out, of which a representative sample include 'sucking pants' (to encourage fluids to circulate more freely through the lower half of the body) and the 'snuggle tunnel' (to counteract Newton's third law, which complicates thrusting motions in zero-g). The broad takeaway is that, for a self-sustaining city with natural population growth (i.e., more births than deaths/departures), we would need to be able to gestate, birth, and raise children in lower-than-earth gravity; and given the known complications of reduced gravity on healthier-than-average, trained, consenting adults, it would be wildly unethical to impose such conditions on children.
Next, there is a discussion of where such a space settlement might be situated, with considerations not just of Mars, but also the moon, and space stations. We get some really fascinating discussions of the technology that would be needed to make such settlements airtight, including meditations on the convenience of lava tunnels and warnings about the dangers of regolith dust (very pointy particles). The broad takeaway here is that it would be so wildly expensive that there is no possible way that any degree of mining or resource exploitation from asteroids or planets could make it economically viable. Just because raw materials might be available in situ doesn’t mean they can be easily transformed into the resources needed to build and maintain a settlement, and transporting them back to Earth as an economic export isn’t any better. As the Weinersmiths put it, ‘It does you no good to know the asteroids are worth $700 trillion if it costs $700 trillion and ten cents to get them to market. After all, if you’re willing to just ignore the cost of acquisition, you’re really better off digging on Earth. Earth contains about 10^23 tons of iron. If we assume a value of $100 a ton, that’s roughly a bajillion zillion hojillion dollars’ worth of iron.’3
After a brief discussion of not-entirely-unsuccessful attempts at creating self-sustaining miniature biomes on Earth (in brief, the participants were not dead at the end of it), the Weinersmiths then move on to the less sciencey but equally important consideration of law. How does the philosophy of ownership work in space? (Latin figures here, as does John Locke.) How does public vs. private control work? How does international legal jurisdiction work? What laws are already in place? Are they adequate to govern settlements, and what would it take to change them? I found this absolutely fascinating—not least because so much of the discussion of space settlement focuses on the STEM-related challenges, while the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Jeff Goldblum turn out to have some important contributions.
The book concludes with an unnerving discussion that fans The Expanse are already familiar with: the ease of destroying a planet by chucking rocks at it from space. In brief: it’s very easy, and the more settlements in space we have—and especially the more contentious those settlement politics get (see: Humanities and Social Sciences)—the likelier it is to happen.
It’s rather a bleak picture. Space settlement is not going to solve any of the problems we have on Earth—not economic, not political, not philosophical. (There is no evidence that living in space grants any real novel perspective on life; post-space astronauts are as nutso as the rest of us. Also, they always lie on their psych exams.) And certainly it won't be any kind of solution to climate problems. Any environment off Earth is going to be wildly worse to live in than the most horrible worst-case climate disaster we can imagine here. The Weinersmiths propose a very revealing litmus test: if you run around outside naked for ten minutes, will you be alive at the end of it? On Earth, no matter how climate-changed, the answer will usually be yes. Anywhere else, the answer will most definitely be no.
However, the book is so charmingly written that I didn’t feel bad taking my medicine. Zach Weinersmith contributes lots of entertaining illustrations, and both Weinersmiths have absolutely nailed the right tone here: Look, they say. We’re like you. We’re not experts (or, at least, Zach isn’t; Kelly Weinersmith is a member of the faculty in biosciences at Rice University), but we’re pretty smart, and we’re super interested in this. And we spent a lot of time doing the research and talking to the experts and going to the conferences and reading the histories, reports, and other primary sources. We know all the bits and bobs of space trivia that caught your attention in the first place, and we can tell you what actually happened, not just that Twitter thread that you shared.4 And we really, really wanted the answer to be more encouraging. But it’s just not. It sucks, dude. Sorry.
Yes, it does suck. But if someone had to shatter my dreams, I couldn’t have asked for them to be shattered more nicely. A very well-deserved Hugo.
1 Fine, okay, me! I’m most people! For the duration of this review I hold absolute power over words herein and the meanings thereof, and I so decree that my opinions of the world are, for the next 1200 words or so, shared by the majority of the rest of humanity.↩
2 There is an awful lot of sex in SMBC, which I'm acutely aware of every time I consider whether some brilliantly erudite commentary on type vs. token phoneme frequency is appropriate to put on my office door.↩
3 When I shared this gem of expository wit with my spouse, he responded severely, ‘That’s not the right number. It’s $10^25.’ My spouse is a mathematics teacher, and highly allergic to flights of fancy that neglect the basic tenets of scientific notation.↩
4 The one about the 100 tampons being sent up with the first female astronaut? That wasn’t NASA dudes being clueless about menstruation. A female astronaut/doctor, Dr Rhea Seddon, was involved in making the decision. And the decision settled on 100 tampons because NASA’s approach to supplies was ‘take the absolute maximum amount you can imagine needing under any circumstances, double it, and then add 50%.’ Which is, y’know, not a terrible idea!↩
Highlights
Nerd coefficient: 9/10, very high quality/standout in its category
- Buzzkill
- Killjoy
- Dream-crusher
- Full of fascinating facts about the challenges across sciences and humanities preventing us from settling space
- Cute illustrations
Reference: Weinersmith, Kelly and Weinersmith, Zach. A City on Mars [Particular Books, 2023].
CLARA COHEN lives in Scotland in a creaky old building with pipes for gas lighting still lurking under her floorboards. She is an experimental linguist by profession, and calligrapher and Islamic geometric artist by vocation. During figure skating season she does blather on a bit about figure skating. She is on Mastodon at wandering.shop/@ergative.
