Fsck Men on Mars: A Review of A City on Mars

Should I read this: Absolutely

Bookshop (not a commission link): A City On Mars

Author’s Website: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal (there is probably a book site for this, but, hey, their comic is great)

This book is so much fun.

I probably should not be surprised by that because the couple who wrote it, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, also write and draw the excellent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic, but it is still one of the best non-fiction books I have ever read. It is not, however, a book to warm the heart of space settler enthusiasts. Largely because the book makes the clear, compelling, and almost irrefutable case that such settlements are pipe dreams at best, nightmares waiting to happen at worst.

Their conclusion is based along two major axis: lack of knowledge and lack of resources. There is so, so much we do not know about dealing with space. We don’t really know the long-term effects of life in space on human bodies, on reproduction, on the ability to grow crops, on human psychology. We don’t have clear laws on how space settlement and resource allocation should work, and the laws we do have are not always agreed upon by all players or workable in a multi-country environment. What we do know suggests that things can get very bad for human beings and that a space settlement will likely not look like most people think it will. There can be no city on Mars, for example, because of the radiation and toxic soil. You are most like to get a city under Mars — and no one really knows what living your entire life underground will do to people, much less people on Mars. And no one really knows if we can prevent such settlements for, say, charging for the air required to breathe. You are just as likely to end up with a company town as with a free frontier.

Even if we had satisfactory answers to those questions, or did not care about them, the process of settling space is a giant resource suck. It takes much more to build a sustainable colony, both in terms of personal and material than is generally accepted among the space settler enthusiasts. You need a lot of people to make these settlements work if you don’t want them to misery hellholes. And it takes a lot of material to build a workable settlement because, again, space is deigned to kill human beings. One of the most interesting aspect of the book is simply how little thought these requirements receive from the people pushing for quick space settlement. The Weinersmith’s are not shy about calling out bullshit when they see it, and they see a lot of bullshit in the pleadings of space settlers.

The pair is not blind to the arguments for quick settlement; they are simply unconvinced by them. Essentially, short of complete biosphere destruction, living off Earth is so much harder than living on Earth, even if the worst climate emergency scenarios come to pass. They also make a convincing case that the idea that moving off planet will save the human race from a nuclear or biological war is misplaced. Space settlement is more likely to lead to such a war than save us from its consequences. The Weinersmith’s are also not opposed to space settlement — they simply think we should wait until we have the technology and resources to go really big, to put thousands of people off planet in a fully functioning society. The patience to do this right is worth more than the desire to do it at all, in their minds. They are almost certainly correct.

A City on Mars is perhaps the best non-fiction book I have read this year after Blood on the Machine. The Weinersmith’s are excellent at explaining complicated issues without talking down to the reader, and the comics they sprinkle throughout the book help lighten the sometimes dark mood — dark if you want to settle space, that is. At a time when almost every one of our oligarchs is pushing for some kind of space exploration and/or settlement, it is good to have a clear, easy to understand, concise book about the sheer amount of bullshit these people require to even come close to making the case that settlement should procced.

I cannot recommend this enough.