Curated from MIT Technology Review — Here’s what matters right now:
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are bitter rivals in the commercial space race, but they agree on one thing: Settling space is an existential imperative. Space is the place. The final frontier. It is our human destiny to transcend our home world and expand our civilization to extraterrestrial vistas. This belief has been mainstream for decades, but its rise has been positively meteoric in this new gilded age of astropreneurs. Expanding humanity beyond Earth is both our birthright and our duty to the future, they insist. Failing to do so would consign our species to certain extinction—either by our own hand, perhaps through nuclear war or climate change, or in some cosmic disaster, like a massive asteroid impact. But as visions of giant orbital stations and Martian cities dance in our heads, a case against human space colonization has found its footing in a number of recent books. The argument grows from many grounds: Doubts about the practical feasibility of off-Earth communities. Concerns about the exorbitant costs, including who would bear them and who would profit. Realism about the harsh environment of space and the enormous tax it would exact on the human body. Suspicion of the underlying ideologies and mythologies that animate the race to settle space. And, more bluntly, a recognition that “space sucks” and a lot of people have “underestimated the scale of suckitude,” as Kelly and Zach Weinersmith put it in their book A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? , which was released in paperback earlier this year. A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? Kelly and Zach Weinersmith PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE, 2023 (PAPERBACK RELEASE 2025) The Weinersmiths, a husband-wife team, spent years thinking it through—in delightfully pragmatic detail. A City on Mars provides ground truth for our lofty celestial dreams by gaming out the medical, technical, legal, ethical, and existential consequences of space settlements. Much to the authors’ own dismay, the result is a grotesquery of possible outcomes including (but not limited to) Martian eugenics, interplanetary war, and—memorably—“space cannibalism.” The Weinersmiths puncture the gauzy fantasy of space cities by asking pretty basic questions, like how to populate them. Astronauts experience all kinds of medical challenges in space, such as radiation exposure and bone loss, which would increase risks to both parents and babies. Nobody wants their pregnant “glow” to be a by-product of cosmic radiation. Trying to bring forth babies in space “is going to be tricky business, not just in terms of science, but from the perspective of scientific ethics,” they write. “Adults can consent to being in experiments. Babies can’t.” You don’t even have to contemplate going to Mars to make some version of this case. In Ground Control: An Argument for the End of Human Space Exploration, Savannah Mand
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Original reporting: MIT Technology Review