“YOUunless it is stopped,” tweeted Elon Musk, “the wake mind virus will destroy civilization and humanity will never reach Mars.” A compelling point, even if it does show that the genius boy needs grammar lessons. Would the 18th century pioneers have managed to ethnically cleanse the native population, exterminate all those buffalo and pave the way for that stupid dome in Las Vegas if they were a bunch of pearl-bag wussbags? Think about it.
The basic argument is that the human race is doomed if it does not revive that frontier spirit, and will remain confined to this increasingly useless planet. If we do not go boldly, then surely we must stagnate. As Carl Sagan wrote: “Even after 400 generations in towns and cities, we have not forgotten. The open road still calls softly, like an almost forgotten children’s song.” We need to chisel our jaws and put on space boots.
Wow! say Kelly and Zach Weinersmith in this romp through the many rooms of a space folly. “Leave 2C warmer Earth for Mars will be like leaving a messy room to live in a toxic waste heap.”
The Weinersmiths – Kelly a biologist specializing in parasitic worms, Zack a bearded cartoonist – believe that Musk’s dream of populating Mars by 2050 has become plausible, mainly because technology costs have fallen in inverse proportion to human- baby hubris from Musk and his ilk. .
Personally, I can only imagine one thing worse than a six-month, 140m-mile one-way trip in a small capsule eating sloppily and defecating in baggies. And that’s to spend the journey with a very annoying fellow passenger, namely Musk, who shows me blueprints for his new Mars company settlement, which the authors call Muskow kil.
But if this is the worst I can imagine, then I have to try harder. Unpleasantness will escalate upon arrival according to this entertainingly literal and impeccably sci-fi war game of what would actually happen. The average surface temperature is -60C (-76F). There is no air to breathe, but many dust storms that blot out the sun for weeks. On the plus side, radiation is plentiful. There’s no soil, but a lot of regolith – basically gravel – that’s so useless for agriculture that, if you’ve seen Matt Damon in The Martian, you’ll know that means you’ve got a taste for space potatoes with a faecal touch will develop. It’s like an off-planet Death Valley with fewer services and no coffee shops. Not even a Costa.
What’s more, we have negligible experience of the kind of closed-loop ecosystems we need to survive on Mars. Yes there were experiments, like Biosphere 2, an airtight 3.14-acre greenhouse in Arizona where semi-wild chickens refused to lay eggs and were often eaten by pigs. After a year, the people, who had survived on half-ripe bananas and unpalatable beans used to grow fodder, weakened and starved. And neither Biosphere 2 nor the International Space Station is big enough to tell us enough about how we would live on Mars.
In any case, the most likely settlements on Mars will not be glass domes, but underground lava tunnels that have been repurposed and supplied with breathable air and potable water. Ideal for those who want to pull back the curtains every morning for a view of walls made of volcanic rock.
“Mars,” Elton John told us on Rocket Man, “is not the kind of place to raise your children. Actually, it’s cold as hell.” What he did not say is that it is also not a place to conceive a child. As the Weinersmiths explain, producing offspring to settle this toxic hellscape would be a fascinatingly risky business. Sex on low gravity Mars appears to be hampered by fluids that don’t flow in the right direction. On page 76 there is a cartoon of a “pregnodrom”, a kind of birth tilt-a-vortex designed to simulate Earth-like gravity. Mothers-to-be will have to be strapped into this cosmic centrifuge, like test tubes, if they are to breed successfully. That’s before you even consider how small the settler gene pool would be.
This is what leads us to this chilling quote from a specialist in extraterrestrial ethics: “We assume that the Martian colony environment … would favor liberal abortion policies because the birth of a disabled child would be highly detrimental to the colony .” We haven’t even set foot there yet and they’re already talking about space eugenics.
The book reminds us that exploration is based on the suffering of pioneers. The first dog in space, Laika flew away with no way to return to Earth, proving once and for all how evil the Soviets were. Astronaut John Glenn spent four hours in orbit aboard Friendship 7 in 1962 with a probe (depicted in a scale model in the book) placed where the sun did not shine, even though it was essential to the mission or a kind of transparency is uncertain. Big picture: Laika, we salute you for your sacrifice.
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But the cold war obviously no longer provides an incentive for national space programs. Instead, a private space “bastardocracy” made up of Bezos, Musk and Branson will monopolize Mars real estate long before today’s superpowers set up shop there – and decades after Britain mustered enough rubber bands to launch its Neasden Explorer .
In another reversal of cold war certainty, even though the Weinersmiths are – there’s no easy way to say it – Americans, they write like communists. They despise John Locke’s thesis that anyone who mixes their labor with the land then owns it (the basis of centuries of justification for the violent acquisition of property) and prefer Elinor Ostrom’s philosophy of the common community. After all, right now space is inspiringly unclaimed. It’s one big common property, one of the few places in the universe that isn’t zoned to become a mall or luxury condos.
Unfortunately, once China and the US get their act together and join the tech bros on Mars, the authors calculate that the risk of nuclear war in space to settle interplanetary disputes will be non-trivial. It does bring a glimmer of good news, though: as far as I understand the science, we remaining earthlings will be able to kick back over pink gin and enjoy the light show, safely behind our magnetosphere. Which is just another reason to stay home.
