A City on Mars

About the book

Book author: Kelly and Zach Weinersmith

This book is about founding a city on Mars. That challenge won’t be without it’s difficulties, but some of them have potential solutions. It’s a popular science book and wittier than normal (although I’m quite boring so I was seriously annoyed by the style).

Reflection and takeaways

I love the concept about settling on Mars. I think it’s one thing that everyone’s favourite controversial entrepreneur Elon Musk particularly deserves credit for. I truly believe SpaceX to be the coolest company in the world.

In any case: this book shows that dream is harder than you might think.

For one thing, space really tries to kill you all the time. Exposure to it will blow you up, boil you and freeze you at the same time. If you’re pressurized on some ship or whatever the radiation will kill you eventually. It’s really hostile.

Even if you settle in some comfy lava tube (seems to be the most practical start) and manage to seal it, there are other problems (after you have secured water and food).

We know that microgravity (in space) is harmful for a long time. Astronauts on ISS get poor eyesight, weak skeletons and enlarged hearts. If we want to colonize, we’d need a population that could give birth and be self-sustainable. But the thing is, nobody really knows what low gravity does to giving birth or to the development of children. I guess the same goes with the lower martian gravity, but less severe than no gravity. We need Earth-like gravity to become anti-fragile and strong (and probably to develop without problems). One potential solution is to have some sort of space station with 1.0G due to rotation, but it would suck having to spend your entire childhood on a space station to develop normally.

Anyway - we also learn that it’s quite unclear politically what happens with any sort of space settlements and who can claim areas. There are some old treaties but they’ve never been tested. For some parts of the world, like parts of Antartica, many countries claim them, but nobody actually goes there. Personally, I think that crap is so boring. The book got boring there and reality got even more boring. I’m optimistic in the sense that if people actually want to solve these political (and bureaucrat-invented) problems, politicians can actually do so pretty fast. Politicians just usually don’t – but let’s not get into that here.

I feel like such a nerd here, but I want to argue about the authors and their “verdicts”. I’m optimistic. Sometimes, things just sound too crazy or downright impossible, but people make it work anyway if the stakes are high enough. Just think of landing the rovers that are already on Mars. We launch the rover on a giant rocket. The martian atmosphere is really thin, so we can barely stop our payload with drag and a heat shield. We deploy a parachute. Can’t stop speed enough, so we deploy a mini space-hover-ship that hovers above the landing site and sends an elevator down with the probe. If someone pitched that to me I’d say it’s impossible, but it’s not – we’ve done it. I’m optimistic because very few things are actually impossible, but ones perspective might be that it is impossible, when the thing itself is just very hard.

Why did I pick it

Saw it mentioned somewhere on Hacker News. Got interested, but it was pretty meh.

Verdict

2.⁵⁄₅. Couldn’t deal with the style and all the politics were pretty boring. Skipped some pages and chapters when it was a little too verbose, which is very rare for me when reading.