A book debunking Elon Musk’s claims that humans could live on Mars in the near future has won the £25,000 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize.
A city on Mars by the American couple Kelly and Zach Weinersmith was announced as the winning book during a ceremony at the Royal Society in London on Thursday evening.
The book is an “entertainingly literal and impeccably scientific war game of what would actually happen” if humans colonized the red planet, Stuart Jeffries wrote in his book. Guardian review. It assesses the feasibility of space settlement by unraveling the scientific, political, legal and ethical questions that the idea raises.
A City on Mars “blew me away with its incredibly ambitious cross-disciplinary perspective,” says John Hutchinson, professor of evolutionary biomechanics at the Royal Veterinary College and chairman of this year’s judging panel.
“We finish the book with the understanding that, while a city on Mars for humanity may still be centuries away, there are still many good reasons to pursue the lofty goal of settling space. Many of those reasons begin with more science and the development of more technology here on Earth – and in the meantime we try our best to preserve our precious planet.”
last month, Musk claims that humans could land on Mars in four years and live there in a self-sustaining city in 20. “Being multiple will greatly increase the likely lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet. ,” he wrote in a place on Xthe social media platform he owns.
A City on Mars, which also contains illustrations, is the Weinersmiths’ second book – they first co-wrote Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve And/Or Ruin Everything, published in 2017. Kelly is a part-time lecturer in the biosciences department at Rice University, while Zach is the creator of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.
The pair are the second married couple to win the award, after Alan Walker and Pat Shipman in 1997 for their book, The Wisdom of the Bones.
The other books shortlisted for this year’s award were Eve by Cat Bohannon; Everything is Predictable by Tom Chivers; Your face belongs to us by Kashmir Hill; The last of its kind by Gísli Pálsson; and Why We Die by Venki Ramakrishnan. The five authors will receive £2,500 each.
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Joining Hutchinson on the judging panel were Booker Prize-winning author Eleanor Catton; New Scientist commentary and culture editor Alison Flood; teacher, broadcaster and author Bobby Seagull; and Royal Society University Research Fellow and Lecturer in Functional Materials at Imperial College London, Jess Wade.
The prize was awarded for the first time in 1988. Previous winners include Jared Diamond, Stephen Hawking, Bill Bryson, Caroline Criado Perez and Merlin Sheldrake. last year, Ed Young took home the award for An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.
