Title:

A City On Mars

Author:

Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

Category:

Non-fiction

Rating:

Date Reviewed:

April 19, 2024

f you read the blurbs on the back cover of A City on Mars, you will see: "...hilarious..." - James A Corey, "...I laughed the whole way through" - Hank Green, "...hilarious read" - Mary Roach "...extremely funny cartoons" - Jorge Cham; "...the funniest.." - Scott Anderson; these comments might deceive you into thinking that this is a humorous book. It is not. There are a couple of amusing remarks, but nothing to laugh at. There is, unfortunately, too much material about going to the bathroom in a weightless environment, or the anticipated difficulties of having sex while weightless. The Weinersmiths include this material to explain how perilous outer space is to the human body. But no one, not even the Weinersmiths, thinks that humans are going to build weightless space colonies. Yes, humans might experience weightlessness traveling to the Moon or Mars, but those are temporary conditions (even if "temporary" is something like six-months-plus for a trip to Mars). All of this explanation about the perils of space travel (plus descriptions of radiation and bone-loss hazards) is included because we know so little about actually constructing colonies on the Moon or Mars, and, unfortunately, the Weinersmiths decline to provide many speculations on how such a colony might be constructed. Despite the title, there is almost nothing in this book about building/operating a city on Mars.

The Weinersmiths argue that space colonies are not something that can be built incrementally, especially for distant locations like Mars. They persuasively argue that a Martian colony needs specialists like doctors and engineers because the vast distance means Mars is essentially on its own if disaster strikes. It might be at least a two year delay before help from Earth could arrive. They call their plan: "Go Big", meaning humans should not attempt to build a Martian colony until we have existing technology to send a whole lot of people and material to Mars.

The Weinersmiths are also against Moon colonies, despite the fact that they are just three days travel away. They see no value in a Moon colony - the idea of harvesting resources there is silly, considering how many resources would be needed to be sent to the Moon to harvest those resources. The science-fiction favorite of collecting Helium 3 from the lunar surface would require tons of processing of lunar ore to collect just a gram of Helium 3. Besides, Earth doesn't have any operational fusion power plants demanding Helium 3. And did we mention the abrasive moondust which is statically charged and gets into everything? The slow rotation of the Moon means it has a two week day followed by a two week night, so the temperature extremes vary wildly.

The best place to build a Moon colony is at the Shackleton Crater at the south pole. Because there is very little tilt to the moon's axis, the rim of the crater is almost always in eternal light. The depths of the crater itself, which is thought to contain water from an ancient comet strike, is in eternal darkness. However, there is only a few square kilometers at the Moon's south pole with these features, and the Weinersmiths fear that war will break out amongst nations fighting to claim that limited territory, even though the moon itself has very few resources worth claiming.

The Moon has lava tubes left over from billions of years ago when its core was hot. Due to the low gravity, these lava tubes are expected to be much wider in diameter than Earth lava tubes. A City on Mars says that there may be as much as a billion cubic meters of space inside lunar lava tubes. If Earthlings could seal one of these large tubes, they would be shielded from deadly radiation. They would have to rely on nuclear power to run their little colony. Seems like a great idea to me - I wonder if any surveying satellite can detect lava tubes from lunar orbit. Why not build a base inside one of these tubes, and demonstrate the ability to operate a closed environment. Rescue is just three days away. The inhabitants would not have live there permanently, so the potential dangers of low gravity on human pregnancy could be avoided. (The Weinersmiths spend a lot of words warning of potential dangers of pregnancy on humans in non-Earthlike environments).

There is a short chapter titled: Giant Rotating Space Wheels : Not Literally the Worst Option. The Weinersmiths dismiss the idea of the giant orbital colonies, saying it takes too many resources now and in the foreseeable future to construct such a gigantic object. (They say the Jeff Bezos obsession with space and his Blue Origin company was fueled by the L-5 society talks of Gerard K. O'Neill. I remember seeing those paintings in a National Geographic article and thought that they were inspiring. I too would love for humans to eventually convert the solar systems resources into large living environments.)

The Weinersmiths have even less to say about colonizing asteroids, calling them low gravity rubble piles of rock and dust. Converting asteroids to habitats is one of my favorite ideas, so it is disappointing to see it discarded so cavalierly. They say that there potentially 9000 slow moving (I think slow moving meant with respect to Earth's orbit) asteroids that contain water, but the Weinersmiths seem to only consider these objects as potential sources for mining. Hollowing out an asteroid and then spinning it to create gravity is not even considered.

There is a lot of material about the Outer Space Treaty. Nations cannot just claim territory on any planetary body, though apparently non-national actors can. Space should be treated the way that Antarctica is managed. The Weinersmith's warn that human nature won't change just because we colonize space. Wars are not caused by scarcity of resources, they are caused by bad leaders making bad choices. In space, wars will be even more terrible and destructive.

Although conventional wisdom says that Biosphere-2 was a failure, the Weinersmiths disagree. (Biosphere 2 was an attempt to build an entirely enclosed, self sustaining environment that could house eight volunteers for a year.) The authors say a lot was learned, even if the experiment was unsuccessful - the eight inhabitants broke into two warring camps of four adults that were so hostile that one would spit on the other. The Weinersmiths suggest that what space enthusiasts ought to be doing is replicating the Biosphere experiment under multiple different constraints and see what happens. We might collect a lot of data that will prove to be useful if we ever try to build a biosphere inside an extra-terrestrial lava tube. Besides, the Weinersmiths point out, we might need this sort of information as our Earth environment goes through protracted warming.

Their final conclusion is that it would be best not to go into space for a very long time, not until we have the resources and technology to "Go Big", and not until Earth's primary powers have agreed on how to peacefully manage, and jointly benefit, from colonies on other worlds. The Weinersmith's book A City on Mars says it would be best if there were no city on Mars at all, at least not for a very long time.