What do you think?
Rate this book
448 pages, ebook
First published November 7, 2023
“So, humans are squishy and weak. The real estate options are toxic. And pointy. And cold. You’ll be growing vegetables in your own waste, tending your food bugs, and fighting off bark scorpions while drunk on beet wine. This is humanity’s new dawn.”
Yes, I do own this shirt and wear it often.
“The typical behavior of a non-Earth planet encountering a human is to cook it, freeze it, or crush it.”
” The only way you could believe this would be if you had no idea how thoroughly, incredibly, impossibly horrible Mars is. The average surface temperature is about -60°C. There’s no breathable air, but there are planetwide dust storms and a layer of toxic dust on the ground. Leaving a 2°C warmer Earth for Mars would be like leaving a messy room so you can live in a toxic waste dump.”
” Professor, prolific author, and triathlete, Dr. Erik Seedhouse wrote an analysis of space cannibalism in Survival and Sacrifice in Mars Exploration. We don’t know Mr. Seedhouse personally, and he didn’t respond to our email, but we will note that his book’s index contains precisely one entry on “behavioral challenges,” a very important topic, but FIVE entries on the gustatory mode of crew integration.
Seedhouse asks, “Imagine you’re stranded on the Red Planet with three crewmembers. You have plenty of life-support consumables but only sufficient food to last one person until the rescue party arrives. What do you do? . . . One day, while brewing coffee for breakfast, you realize there are three chunks of protein-packed meat living right next to you.” He argues that the largest people should sacrifice themselves first, since they both consume and provide the most food. We don’t know where Seedhouse would fall in the buffet line because we couldn’t find his height and weight online, and honestly we’re scared to ask. Mostly because his book includes a weirdly detailed look at how to butcher Homo sapiens. Also, on page 144, the reader will find a photo of ten astronauts floating happily in space, with the caption: “In the wrong circumstances, a spacecraft is a platform full of hungry people surrounded by temptation. Is it wrong to waste such a neatly packaged meal?”
That is, as they say, a question for philosophers. But we do have one pragmatic piece of advice for any potential Mars settler: Leave Erik Seedhouse at home.”
“Fantasies about going to space usually involve escape. Sometimes it’s the personal escape of a single character in a story, but just as often it’s about humanity escaping institutions and traditions seen as repressive or ugly or dying or dull. But here’s the thing: You can’t leave. Not really. Not in time to stop any calamity on the horizon or any social decay you see as imminent. And if you could leave and build a new civilization, do you know what you’d do first? You’d start re-creating Earth as we know it. Not just our biosphere, but social institutions we’ve had to wrench away from the darker side of our nature—things like the rule of law, human rights, and norms of behavior between societies.”
“Earth isn’t perfect, but as planets go it’s a pretty good one. We aren’t saying you should give up on the hope for a life off-world—that’s too pretty a dream to part with. What we are saying is that if you do want that dream, you have to see the challenges as they are—real, profound, and present at every level from molecules to sociology. We hope, at the very least, when you read an article or hear a conversation about space settlement as an idea, you’ll be able to see it as a very rich problem, which won’t be solved simply by ambitious fantasies or giant rockets.
————
“We don’t know how to do it yet, but we still believe that someday, with enough knowledge, we can have Mars. And one very faraway day, other solar systems. But we have to earn it, both by gaining in knowledge and by becoming a more responsible, more peaceful species. Going to the stars will not make us wise. We have to become wise if we want to go to the stars.”
"The little book you’re reading right now, which admittedly begins with a Uranus joke and contains an explainer on space cannibalism (stay tuned), is nevertheless the only popular science book we’re aware of that offers the whole picture without trying to sell you on the idea of near-term space expansion.[*] Rather, we’ll try to clear up a lot of misconceptions and then replace them with a much more realistic view of how feasible space settlements are and what they might mean for humanity."
"Consider the 2015 Newsweek article “ ‘Star Wars’ Class Wars: Is Mars the Escape Hatch for the 1 Percent?” which claims “the red planet will likely only be for the rich, leaving the poor to suffer as earth’s environment collapses and conflict breaks out.” The only way you could believe this would be if you had no idea how thoroughly, incredibly, impossibly horrible Mars is. The average surface temperature is about -60°C. There’s no breathable air, but there are planetwide dust storms and a layer of toxic dust on the ground. Leaving a 2°C warmer Earth for Mars would be like leaving a messy room so you can live in a toxic waste dump. The truth is that settling other worlds, in the sense of creating self-sustaining societies somewhere away from Earth, is not only quite unlikely anytime soon, it won’t deliver on the benefits touted by advocates. No vast riches, no new independent nations, no second home for humanity, not even a safety bunker for ultra elites."