A City on Mars

This is an important book. Written by a scientist and a cartoonist, it’s funny, but well-argued and well-informed. In essence it starts from a position that space exploration is cool and we should do it. But it takes a really hard-headed look at what is possible, useful, and urgent.

A Moon base is harder than the ISS and a Mars base far, far harder. Whether it is radiation, recycling, or rescue, once you get out of the Earth’s magnetic field, we’re playing survival on hard mode. I think I was aware of many of these issues, but together it’s a compelling case to get serious.

The authors look at psychology, law, and social organisation, because people are more than chemistry and physics.

If we want a self-sustaining Mars colony, as certain people preach, that means babies in space. We don’t even begin to know how dangerous that is, to mother and baby. We need probably twenty years of mammal experiments in space – under intense scrutiny from ethicists – before we even dare to open the file for humans.

Perhaps the briefest and boldest section challenges the glib assumptions about space travel. The authors say being in space might well start wars, not make them unnecessary. That for the foreseeable future the resources up there cannot be mined remotely cheaper than sending them up by rocket. That the idea we need a new frontier not to stagnate is an invention of white dudes who killed Native Americans to get free ranches. And above all, the idea we need a fully self-sustaining Mars base right now to save humanity is ridiculous.

If the Earth was hit by an asteroid, killing 95% of humanity, it would be a better place to live than Mars. And on asteroids, if we get one Extinction Level Event every 100 million years, the chance we get one in the next thousand years is 100,000 to 1. And actually, being able to nudge asteroids we see well enough in advance out of collision orbits is feasible science. (These are my figures.)

Compare this with the fact the climate doomers have been right all along. We cannot flee our responsibility to the only planet known capable of life. We cannot make a space prison and call it freedom.

I write stories with faster than light travel, time travel, telepathy and aliens. I know they’re fiction. Lots of really cool stuff is.