A City on Mars
Earth is not well. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away—no climate change, no war, no Twitter—beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Critically acclaimed, bestselling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of research, they aren’t so sure it’s a good idea. Space technologies and space business are progressing fast, but we lack the knowledge needed to have space kids, build space farms, and create space nations in a way that doesn’t spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, A City on Mars investigates whether the dream of new worlds won’t create nightmares, both for settlers and the people they leave behind. In the process, the Weinersmiths answer every question about space you’ve ever wondered about, and many you’ve never considered. “Scientific, educational, and fun as hell.” — Andy Weir, New York Times bestselling author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary “There is simply no more engrossing, entertaining, or thorough way to understand the intense challenge of humanity's off-Earth future than A City on Mars. I LAUGHED THE WHOLE WAY THROUGH.” — Hank Green, New York Times bestselling author of An Absolutely Remarkable Thing “Listen up, humans. How to poop in space will be the least of our concerns.
Stats for nerds
23recommend
43mentions
38people
2023–2026years
63% recommend28% neutral9% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > we could already viably have multiple parallel civilizations scattered throughout the solar system
This is nonsense. A trip to Mars would take a minimum of 6 months and could only be resupplied every 2 years. Mars has a tiny amount of water, virtually no atmosphere, and receives 700x more radiation than Earth. Mars colonists would be forced to spend virtually all their time underground working hard to keep themselves alive, being bored senseless because there's nothing to do for fun (besides electronic entertainment, I suppose), or both.
Keep in mind that the Apollo program only gave us about two weeks of human time spent on the moon's surface total. In no way were we prepared to go to Mars after Apollo. We couldn't have managed a round trip around Mars, much less landing there and creating a permanent colony.
The idea that we would have "parallel civilizations" not just on Mars, the easiest other planet to inhabit, but "throughout the solar system" is delusional. Are we talking about also colonizing Venus, a planet where the surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, the wind travels at hundreds of miles per hour, and the atmosphere is composed of sulfuric acid?
The sad (?) reality is that humans evolved to live on Earth and if we ever permanently live outside Earth, it will in all likelihood be in a form no longer recognizable as human, whether it's due to our physical bodies being engineered to withstand the rigors of life on a foreign planet or because our consciousnesses have been somehow uploaded to machines.
I cannot enough recommend the book A City on Mars. It's written by two giant space nerds who are nonetheless clear eyed on the many, many, many challenges to creating permanent space settlements of any kind.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/125084292-a-city-on-m...
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/18xmkp0/a_city_on_ma...
- It’s an interesting article, but my advice is to skip the middleman and get a copy of the book discussed, ‘A City On Mars’. It’s entertaining, informative and well researched/cited. It’s also my go-to recommendation for people coming at this from a layperson/enthusiast perspective because the reasons why “colonize Mars anytime soon” is comical and an obvious lie once you dig in are complex. Unfortunately said reasons are multidisciplinary to the extreme so an overview in digestible form can be helpful for people who’ve been emotionally invested in this fantasy.
- I liked‘A City On Mars’. That said I think it didn't have the right sense of scale. The Weinersmith's offered up a bunch of reasons why the eponymous city would never be possible but I think the most important bit - which they would concede I think - is that it's not Never but rather not any time soon.
200 years? 300? Timescales like that are going to create solutions to all the problems they listed. It's why they spend time knocking people suggesting we'll have boots on the moon in 50 years.
The modest stuff being done now - say setting up something equivalent to the various Antarctic bases on the moon seem like a reasonable step today towards something in the future.
- If you want to get depressed about all the problems with trying to colonize Mars, I recommend A City on Mars: https://www.acityonmars.com/
It's by the cartoonist of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and his wife (the one with an actual science PhD). https://www.smbc-comics.com/
- Perhaps a tad overly-curmudgeonly but still a good argument against Mars is "A City on Mars"[1] by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (the SMBC[2] guy)
- Mars isn’t exactly habitable either. Not to mention the myriad of issues we face even getting there, let alone thriving.
Read the book A City On Mars recently which had a lot of interesting concerns not widely discussed in the pro space colonization community : https://www.acityonmars.com/. Highly recommended.
