A City on Mars: Reality kills space settlement dreams - eviltoast

A book review on the latest Weinersmith creation. It’s true, there is so much we don’t know.

Just throwing this out there on this forum because missing technology is the problem that kills the dream of Mars, according to the authors.

  • masquenox@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    It’s not missing technology that kills the (pretty silly) idea of “Mars colonization” - it’s missing ecology.

    They can’t even maintain functioning civilization in Antarctica… yet they “dream” of doing so in a place that’s hundreds of times more hostile to human life.

    • SCB@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      One of the things standing in the way of an"civilization" on Antarctica is that it’s illegal to build a civilization on Antarctica. We could absolutely do it, assuming we were willing to fight a war and the resources were worth it

      • lloram239@feddit.de
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        2 years ago

        We could absolutely do it

        Every exploration into hostile environments heavily relies on goods and services imported from the rest of Earth. Biosphere 2 is as far as I know still the only time we ever tried to actually build a completely independent ecological system, but that was 30 years ago, in a non-hostile environment, only run for a short amount of time, still had tons of problems and would still be missing a lot of stuff to be truly self sustaining for long time periods (e.g. no industrial facilities).

        • SCB@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          Every exploration into hostile environments heavily relies on goods and services imported from the rest of Earth.

          These would be the problems that are currently being worked on prior to manned Mars (and to a lesser extent, lunar) missions.

          We absolutely will not be shipping containers of food to Mars. That’s absurd.

          • WHYAREWEALLCAPS@kbin.social
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            2 years ago

            We absolutely will not be shipping containers of food to Mars.

            We absolutely will be. You have no concept of the amount of energy and resources needed to feed a single human being on Earth for one meal, let alone a whole colony on another world without a breathable atmosphere and possibly toxic dirt for an indeterminate time. Farming under the best of conditions is extremely energy consuming, then there’s the need to either import hardware from Earth that is specially made for Mars or go old fashion and do a lot of it by hand. There is no where else in the solar system where you can just throw seeds at the ground in large enough quantities and feed whole cities. I do homesteading, my dad tried to be totally self sufficient foodwise when I was a teen. Guess what? Turns out that’s really, really hard to do. And that’s under the ideal conditions of Earth.

            • SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              2 years ago

              But you didn’t have NASA level technology. There is a lot you can do to increase food production using less space if you’re willing to pay the upfront and energy costs.

            • SCB@lemmy.world
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              2 years ago

              I do homesteading,

              Lol no wonder you know so little about this

          • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
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            2 years ago

            I disagree, I believe we would ship containers of food to Mars in the early days. Just like we do for mcmurdo in Antarctica.

            • SCB@lemmy.world
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              2 years ago

              It’s doubtful we’d ship past the initial landing and support phases, which was my point. It’s likely we’d send several ships out for any permanent presence, but 18 months is just too long and too much investment between trips.

              • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
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                2 years ago

                If you send say 20 people to Mars, let’s do the math. An average person requires approximately 2 to 3 lb of food per day. 18 months = 6,500 days x 20 people = 131,000 pounds of food, or about 65 tons. You could probably drop the weight significantly by freeze drying it and recycling the water.

                In any case, 65 tons isn’t a whole lot - that’s about what, half of a starship payload? Zubrin’s a case for Mars likewise discussed the need to bring all of your food supplies over with you.

                Now over many years you could build up enough buy a waste and build a recycling system to start recycling to buy a waste in a greenhouse, but we don’t know how viable like greenhouse on Mars will be for growing food. It’s likely going to have to be more of a grow lab/vertical farm setup. Very energy intensive.

            • FaceDeer@kbin.social
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              2 years ago

              It prohibits countries from claiming sovereignty over territory beyond Earth, but the colonies themselves can still be sovereign. Assuming the treaty continues as it is it just means that countries won’t be able to draw borders around vast lifeless regions on Mars or the Moon and claim jurisdiction over them, they’ll still be able to build cities there and the cities will be theirs to control.

              Treaties like these lapse or get amended over time as the realities of life make them obsolete, though. I expect that once there are cities on Mars there’ll be borders as well.

            • SCB@lemmy.world
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              2 years ago

              Yeah it’s just that the sheer scale of planetary colonization kind of makes this a problem for the year 4,000 or so.

      • masquenox@lemmy.world
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        2 years ago

        illegal

        Oh, right… that is what has stopped the Phony Starks from building capitalist Utopia in Antartica - it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it’s utterly inhospitable to human civilization at all.

        • SCB@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          That and lack of exploitable resources, meaning a lack of capital. There’s no shortage of capital for the modern space age.

          • masquenox@lemmy.world
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            2 years ago

            exploitable resource

            Yeah… because Antarctica lacks water. And wind energy. And some of the most protein-rich waters on the planet.

            Poor, poor Phony Starks… imagine being held back by legislation they could easily bribe into non-existence if they wanted!

            • SCB@lemmy.world
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              2 years ago

              Because Antarctica lacks water

              We’re not exactly hurting for water

              And some of the most protein-rich waters on the planet.

              This doesn’t require building a civilization of any sort

              • masquenox@lemmy.world
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                2 years ago

                We’re not exactly hurting for water

                Oh really?

                This doesn’t require building a civilization of any sort

                I guess you’re the kind of fantasist that believe they invent food at the supermarket, eh?

                • SCB@lemmy.world
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                  2 years ago

                  California is a localized problem, as all water shortages are, because we live on a fucking water planet.

                  Fishing does not require supermarkets. It requires driving a boat to where fish are, then driving home.

    • burliman@lemm.ee
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      2 years ago

      That’s a good point. There is at least as much to learn from Antarctica as from Mars. Maybe less maybe more, but certainly more relevant since it’s on Earth. Plus easier to get to than Mars. Yet we can’t scrounge up enough to keep a larger presence there.

      Sometimes I can’t shake the feeling that we are living in another dark age. We need a real renaissance to shake it.

      • BaroqueInMind@kbin.social
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        2 years ago

        We need a real renaissance to shake it.

        One of the mandatory precursors to that is a major Hundred Years war that kills lots of people and displaces even more.

        • AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          Luckily, that’s one field where we’ve made a lot of progress, we won’t need even close to one hundred years.

        • WHYAREWEALLCAPS@kbin.social
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          2 years ago

          I’ve been hearing this “we need a new renaissance” spiel since the 80s. It really sounds like “I’ve got no ideas, so I’ll distract with mentioning a time that is revered for it.” to me nowadays.

          • BaroqueInMind@kbin.social
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            2 years ago

            “We need a new renaissance” is a dog whistle for “we need a white culture (Rome was a good example) to dominate and destroy the societies adjacent to it again, so that while they are recuperating, rebuilding and repopulating, we will assert our white cultural dominance and leverage that to impose our ideals and religion into every facet of other cultures and then call it a renaissance”.

            Notice how you never read about the Islamic renaissance or anything from India, Asia or Africa, or even South American native cultures when “renaissance” is mentioned?

            • burliman@lemm.ee
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              2 years ago

              Give me a break.

              Maybe some use as dog whistle but I am not. The color or creed of the people who were around during periods of progress is irrelevant to me. I care about the progress.

              And Rome had more people of color in positions of power and influence than we can even dream of today. However they did have slaves. Lots of white, Germanic slaves. Google it and chew on that while you think about your accusations of racism.

  • Cyrus Draegur@lemm.ee
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    2 years ago

    i mean shoot, mars is actually kinda worse than the moon in some ways. Like, the worst of both worlds except ‘worlds’ pertains to ‘celestial bodies in general’. You have the same ultrafine toxic razor sharp dust that gets everywhere, sticks to everything, and destroys mechanical joints on contact, but on MARS it gets blown around by dust storms that blot out the entire sky sometimes for months or years on end, whereas on the moon it only redistributes and resettles due to electrostatic repulsion (due to solar radiation).

    Mars’ atmosphere is just thick enough to be a hassle for creating risk of burning up on reentry but still too thin to reliably drag-brake so you end up having to thread a much more annoying needle with respect to approach velocity, whereas on the moon it’s just straight up active thrust descent every time you’re landing.

    In both cases, living on the surface is a sucker’s game and the only viable option would be to tunnel down beneath into the regolith where a sufficient rock barrier will block enough of the solar and cosmic radiation to not drastically shorten your lifespan.

    Furthermore the energy cost to get a payload from earth to mars is LITERALLY ASTRONOMICAL whereas escaping the moon’s relatively weak gravity well to reach almost anywhere else in the solar system (including mars) is dwarfed by the oomph it takes to climb out of the earth’s gravity well in the first place alone.

    I’d go so far as to say that a mars colony would never be viable until and unless we have a viable lunar colony

    but make no mistake, a lunar colony is mandatory if we ever want to explore the rest of the solar system or not have all our eggs in one basket as a species. the moon is practically MADE OF the infrastructure we’ll need across the entire solar system,some assembly required. The amount of Aluminum and Silver waiting for us in that silicate regolith will be instrumental, especially because smelting and building up there will be drastically cheaper than manufacturing shit down here and then having to carry it ALL THE WAY UP ALL OVER AGAIN.

    and like, that isn’t even factoring sending any of what’s produced back to earth, because even that might be a waste of effort when everything we could ever BUILD outside our gravity well is worth more being up there just by virtue of the fact that we didn’t have to pay through the nose to SEND IT.

    • Siegfried@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      Im a little bit disappointed, i was expecting things that where only possible because of research made in space, not things that were developed because NASA thought they were needed for astronauts.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    That was a very interesting read. I’ve always been a bit skeptical of people who say we’ll be living in space or colonizing other planets in the near future. I definitely want to read their book.

    Also, this made me laugh:

    And do you really want to create a group of hungry, disgruntled miners that are also able to sling very large rocks at the Earth?

    That said, slinging large rocks back to Earth is the only way I can see them returning whatever they mine and that doesn’t sound like a great plan either.

  • Landsharkgun@midwest.social
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    2 years ago

    Do not colonize other planets. They suck. They have all the downsides of space habitats (needing sealed environment, etc), while also adding more (breaches now let in toxic dust instead of vacuum, cannot control gravity via spin, etc).

    Just build O’Neil cylinders. If you can’t do that, maybe work on stabilizing the ecosystem we evolved to live in. Nowhere will ever be better than here, folks.

    • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
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      2 years ago

      Lol

      The whole concept behind colonizing a planet is to be able to exploit the resources.

      Which you cannot do with an O’Neal Cylinder. Since you have to manufacture it yourself.

    • Corkyskog@sh.itjust.works
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      2 years ago

      There is so much about the cylinder concept that hasn’t been thought out, it’s just an insane undertaking even if it could all work. It started as a joke, but hey maybe one day someone will prove it to be a better reality.

    • meyotch@slrpnk.netOP
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      2 years ago

      If it’s a Jack O’Neil cylinder, I will consider your proposal.

      It works like a regular O’Neil cylinder, but cooler somehow.

  • Diplomjodler@feddit.de
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    2 years ago

    Yeah, there’s a lot we don’t know and a lot we haven’t figured out yet. And it’s definitely a tough nut to crack. But concluding from that, that is impossible is dumb. Everything is impossible until somebody goes and does it.

    • AmosBurton_ThatGuy@lemmy.ca
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      2 years ago

      Just finished the trilogy last week. Amazing books, a bit dry at times but overall a very enjoyable read about what the politics and technology might look like to terraform and colonize Mars.

  • fubo@lemmy.world
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    2 years ago

    For instance, supposedly space will end scarcity… and yet, any habitat in space will naturally have only a single source of food, water, and, even more urgent, oxygen, creating (perhaps artificial) scarcity.

    Huh? Sure, if we forget absolutely everything we ever knew about reliability engineering.

    Take air, for instance. If you’re considering a community on the scale of a town or city, expect that it will be naturally divided into smaller physical units, corresponding to smaller social units in the community. Rather than having one big air supply for the whole “town” — which can fail or be sabotaged, creating an existential risk for the whole community — it’d likely be much safer to have small air systems for each household, neighborhood, commune, or other unit. You probably have to have them anyway for emergencies.

    • tburkhol@lemmy.world
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      Infrastructure for distributing the air once it gets to the settlement is one thing. At least for now, though, Earth is the only place to get oxygen in life-sustaining quantities, which is the single source they’re talking about.

      Maybe you can posit harvesting oxygen from mineral oxides, hydrolyzing water if you can find it, or capturing an ice asteroid. Whether you split every atom of oxygen you breathe out of rust or lift them out of earth’s gravity, let alone doing both for redundancy, it’s orders of magnitude more energy and complexity than growing potatoes in Antarctica.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    2 years ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Unfortunately for the Weinersmiths, they actually asked questions like “how would that work, exactly?” Apart from rocketry (e.g., the getting to space part), the answers were mostly optimistic handwaving combined with a kind of neo-manifest destiny ideology that might have given Andrew Jackson pause.

    The Weinersmiths start with human biology and psychology, pass through technology, the law, and population viability and end with a kind of call to action.

    Apparently, nuclear weapons-wielding countries won’t react negatively to private citizens claiming large bits of space.

    The magical thinking is more apparent when you realize that it is believed that encountering the vastness of space will make humanity ultra-altruistic, while still being good capitalists.

    In a more realistic take on how societies function when there is only one source for the vitals of life, the Weinersmiths draw on the experiences (positive and negative) of company towns.

    The point is that we have a tiny space station, and we have the potential to build a lot of experimental facilities on Earth where we can investigate some of the practical problems.


    The original article contains 900 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 80%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • 0x0@programming.dev
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    2 years ago

    Mars has no magnetosphere so it’s very hard to have a breathable atmosphere.

    The moon’s barely got gravity, and our bodies need it.

    A space station would be a good start so long as it spins so we can have the semblance of gravity.

    No one knows if you can turn a profit mining asteroids.

    If mining techniques reach the same level of advancement as on Earth? I don’t see why not. I also don’t see why bother to send ore back other than to pay-off some initial investment.

    (One of) the biggest obstacles in space is leaving Earth’s gravity well, so sending mining machines to the asteroids would be interesting. Then maybe move the ISS to a La Grange point instead of destroying it, use it as a base to turn that ore into a spinning space station.

  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
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    2 years ago

    The level of automation necessary for manufacturing in space is going to be very close to removing humans from the process entirely. Taking it that one step further and having robots manufacture robots would eliminate all the issues with keeping flesh-and-blood human bodies alive.

  • steltek@lemm.ee
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    2 years ago

    Is someone actually proposing that we’re simply going to dump would-be colonists on Mars with a shovel and some O2 tanks then wave goodbye? Like, no shit we still need to work things out but that just means it’s unknown, not impossible.

    This book seems unnecessarily pessimistic. I don’t know why I would spend money on doomscrolling, Kindle Edition.

    • magnetosphere@kbin.social
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      2 years ago

      Plugging our ears and going “NYAAAAAA” isn’t going to help. We need pragmatists to ask hard questions to cover all the bases, and force us to anticipate problems. Being aware of potentially fatal issues isn’t “doomscrolling”.

      The authors aren’t saying that we should never, ever try to colonize Mars. They’re only saying that there are a LOT of questions to answer before we try.

        • myfavouritename@lemmy.world
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          2 years ago

          I suppose it depends on how good of a writer you are.

          Some writers can say things we all know so well that it’s like we’re finally understanding it for the first time. Some writers have a knack for delivering facts or prose with the perfect dose of humor; it’s not what they say, but how they say it that is valuable.

          I suppose the question of what merits a book has is more complicated than just “does this book push the envelope of human knowledge”, huh?

    • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
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      2 years ago

      Sometimes books are valued for their original informational content alone. Sometimes books are valued for conveniently anthologizing disparate works. Sometimes books are valued for the entertainment quality of the writing. This is a book which endeavors to offer information and context about a hot topic to a general audience in an informative but entertaining way. I can guarantee that you’ve spent over $30 on something less valuable.

    • myfavouritename@lemmy.world
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      2 years ago

      I have a couple of books by Zach Weinersmith and they are entertaining and interesting.

      I believe you’re missing the point of this book. I also believe you’re being a bit of a prat. I don’t know, however, if those two things are connected.