Book Review: A City on Mars

A City on Mars sounds like a futuristic urban planning book, but it’s not. The book is about the challenges humanity will have settling space, whether it’s on space stations, the Moon, or Mars. As a long-time space nerd and urban planner, this book had the potential to be an interesting exploration at the cross section of multiple interests. Unfortunately, the book falls into the same traps as others who envision what space colonies will be like, but in the other direction. Most space settlement advocates describe space as a potential human-made Eden. This book describes space settlements as a potential human-made hell. The truth is probably somewhere in between, but we can’t know because there are no detailed plans for any space settlements and we simply don’t know enough to make an accurate prediction on what space settlements could be like or the challenges in creating them.

The book starts with a look at what we know about the physical and mental impacts of spaceflight on humans. The truth is that we don’t know much, and what we do know isn’t exactly promising when it comes to the long-term settlement of space. The book then goes on to examine each of the likely places for space settlement, including the Moon, Mars, and space stations. In these sections, the authors discuss the reasons for settling each, and the challenges. The book then goes into a lengthy discussion about the current international legal framework for space exploration and settlement, including a whole chapter on create new nations in space. The final section of the book is about the risks space settlement poses to all of humanity, which might have been the most convincing part of the book, but the arguments still ended up falling fairly flat.

After all of this discussion, the authors propose a wait-and-go-big approach to space settlement. Their contention is that space settlement is risky (it is), and that the best way to mitigate those risks is to do as much research upfront as possible, and then send a large colony over a short period of time. The thinking is that a large colony has more resources in the form of humans, which will allow for more specialization of workers and therefore have a greater chance of success. Unfortunately, the authors seem to severely misunderstand the way both technology and the law are developed.

Technology, and law, are developed only through necessity. The law to safely govern space will not be created until an international crisis arises that requires that law. The necessary technology for space settlement will not be created until we try to colonize space and know what tech is needed. There are certainly many unknowns to space colonization, but the only way to identify and solve those unknowns is to attempt to colonize space. A wait-and-go-big approach will never allow us to solve those unknowns, so we will never be ready to colonize space.

Of course, one of the big drivers for entering space is economic growth. The book acknowledges that as a driver, but really questions what it’ll do for the economy on Earth. While this might be true, the promise of wealth was often the driver for exploration and settlement from Europe but it rarely paid off in the near term. However, over the long term, past waves of exploration and settlement allowed for significant economic growth. The problem with the authors’ point of view is that they’re focused solely on Earth’s economy. This is like looking at the colonization of the Americas through the lens of the European economy, while ignoring the American economy separate from Europe. Now here we are, 400 years later, with an economy that dwarfs Europe’s. There is no real consideration of the economic activity between future space colonies that don’t have Earth acting as the middleman.

In fact, many problems described in the book with growing the space economy involve getting things off Earth or back to Earth. Either we’re launching huge amounts of mass into space from Earth, or we’re delivering finished industrial products back to Earth. They don’t really consider using the industrial output of space for use in space. That way we don’t have to deal with the Earth’s gravity well once we’re out of it.

For example, they take on the argument that there are significant amounts of precious metals available for mining in space. The argument goes that returning these precious metals at the current prices for those metals will represent a great increase in wealth for humanity. As a counter-point to this, the authors use the commoditization of aluminum to show how the price of precious material goes down as the metal becomes more common. Basically, even though aluminum was once a precious metal, now that it’s available to everyone doesn’t make us all millionaires. However, think of how much better off our lives are because we have aluminum. In very real ways, the commoditization of aluminum hasn’t made us rich as a precious metal, but it has improved our quality of life. What else is wealth other than the ability to improve one’s quality of life. If extraction of space resources makes gold, platinum and other precious metals common commodities the way aluminum is today, there’s no telling how we might be able to use them to improve the quality of our lives. This won’t make us rich by increasing our bank accounts, but it will make us rich in more important ways.

In fact, the entire first chapter is the authors setting up a series of straw man arguments for why space settlement is a good thing, and then knocking them down. Unfortunately, they don’t spend any real time getting into the details of any of the reasons for space settlement or giving a good faith argument as to why space settlement could be beneficial.

Not only do the authors attempt to cast doubt on the reasons for colonizing space, they spend a significant portion of the book detailing the risks of colonization on the people that go to space. A lot of their concerns about these risks and the well-being of the folks moving to space, ring hollow. It is a personal decision on how much risk and discomfort a person is willing to tolerate. It might be more than the authors are willing to take on, but they can’t dictate what others can do. Throughout the book, the authors seem to come from the view that exploration and settlement are not worth the risk of suffering and death. While this may be true for them, it is hard to say that it will be true for everyone. The exploration and colonization of the world required similar risks and hardships, yet people still did it. It is unreasonable to think that the only way a space colony will be successful is if the length and quality of life for the colonists is the same as it would if those same people stayed on Earth.

The final chapter of the book attempts to make a list of unknowns that that need to be figured out before we can successfully settle space. They then go on to say that we need to continue to slowly enter space with longer duration space flights and research stations on the Moon and eventually Mars, before we begin a colonization effort. This final chapter felt discontinuous from the rest of the book where they detail all of the challenges and problems with colonizing space.

In the end, their recommendation is similar to how NASA pursued the early space program. In other words, create a list of unknowns that need to be figured out and then create a plan to systematically figure them out before we can colonize another planet. Just like with the Mercury, Gemini, and early Apollo programs, where NASA figured out everything the American space program needed to learn in order to successfully land on the moon. Whether that was how to do EVAs during Gemini 4, or how to rendezvous and dock to spacecraft on Gemini 6A/7, and Gemini 8.

At the end of this book, I agree with their conclusions, that to successfully settle space, we will need to identify these unknowns and figure out how to make them known. The only way to do this is by identifying what we can now, and to start chipping away at them, while knowing that there are things we don’t even know we don’t know yet. This will only happen as we enter space, start to have increasingly long lives in space, and slowing start filling the stars. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the main body of the book supports the authors’ own conclusions.

At the end of the introduction, the authors riff on a famous quote by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.” They say that when humans emerge from the cradle, they are toddlers prone to self-harm and destruction. They go on to say that when humanity emerges from the Earth, it would be better if we did so as full-fledged adults. The problem is that if humans are kept in the cradle to adulthood, they never learn the necessary lessons to be adults. Humanity will no doubt make mistakes as it enters space, but it is through those mistakes that we will learn how to be a spacefaring civilization.

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