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A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (Penguin, 2023)
By Matthew Sparacio
Assuming humans will go to space and settle places like the Moon or Mars may seem like a fairly recent development, and the recent string of successful private spaceflights and the loudly confident declarations by corporate moguls make it seem that a Mars settlement is within grasp. But the literature on space travel has a much longer history. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an age of technological and scientific revolution in part inspired by new awareness of the Americas, writers considered what sites Europeans should colonize next. The Strange Voyage and Adventures of Domingo Gonsales (London, 1638) was one of several books that outlined the leap from exploring the Americas to travel to space. In fact, the device that Gonsales used for his lunar flight was powered by resources discovered during his travels in South America: geese. Gonsales built an armature to help distribute his weight evenly, harnessed it to twenty-five geese, and set off for the heavens (you can see a print of this flight device in a 1768 reprint here). Yes, he and the geese did arrive safely on the moon. And yes, he did encounter aliens (Gonsales called them the “Lunars”). And – surprise! – his team of geese returned Gonsales safely to Earth. See, space exploration and settlement is easy!
If that sounds ridiculous, then you better brace yourself for what plans have been bandied about by billionaires, space settlement enthusiasts/bros, and policy makers for space settlement in A City on Mars. The premise of this witty yet informative book is clear: it asks whether humans should settle Mars at all. And although this conversation seems to have already ended – again, we are already blasting private citizens into space – maybe we should pump the proverbial space brakes. Why? We don’t need to mince words – and the married author team of Kelly and Zach Weinersmith rarely do – but “Mars sucks” (137).
Mars has a 95% cardon dioxide atmosphere. Sure, this is less than ideal for humans, but altogether a good thing because (unlike Brawndo) CO₂ is what plants crave. Being able to grow plants in controlled environments is a big plus. Our red neighbor also experiences temperatures not too different from Earth’s extremes. And it seems to hold significant strategic positioning for potential asteroid mining. That all sounds very good until you remember that Mars is loaded with regolith, jagged glass particles that cover everything (including the solar panels that will be the settlement’s main power source). And Mars is too far away for any kind of rapid crisis management from Earth...in this case “rapid” means still waiting at least a half-year and more likely two to three-years for a response team. Settlers on Mars would be pretty much on their own.
A City on Mars does a good job explaining how much everywhere else in space sucks worse than Mars, at least compared to good ole’ Earth. What about the Moon? Settlement prospects there are “fairly bleak” (128). How about a giant space station à la Christopher Nolan’s 2014 Interstellar? Probably even more difficult to construct and maintain than a settlement on Mars. But what about all those asteroids that may or may not be getting targeted for mining operations? The current research suggests there may only be twelve that are (A) close enough to Earth and (B) likely to contain a significant amount of platinum to make it worth the start-up costs of any national or private settlement venture. The prospects of human survival anywhere else are even lower than on the Moon or Mars. Earth has problems (and they are getting worse) but it still holds the best conditions for human survival.
There is some reason for optimism. For now let’s ignore the reality that astronauts get stuck in space fairly often – the most recent example being Boeing’s Starliner malfunction earlier this summer that stranded two people at the International Space Station. Let’s focus instead on the fact that we do a pretty good job of keeping humans alive once they reach space. This is admittedly kind of badass and cool, and something that we should be proud of. That said, “keeping people alive” is a significantly different measure of success than having a space settler population grow and (ideally) thrive.
As the Weinersmiths note, there is a lot about life in space that we still don’t know much about. Does sex work the same in environments with different gravities? What about childbirth (again, assuming pregnancies can even happen)? And what does child rearing look like in a (more than likely) subterranean Martian settlement? Children are, of course, somewhat important for sustained space settlement, but we also don’t really know what kind of health – physical and mental – issues an adult stuck in space for periods of time longer that one year will face. Will a person born on Mars even be able to survive on Earth if they need to return? These are questions that are ignored and outright dismissed by most space settlement bros.
This book has two oftentimes conflicting messages. On one hand, humanity has already accomplished remarkable stuff. On the other hand, quite a bit of that stuff has been remarkably BAD: genocide, mutually assured destruction, environmental disregard and accelerated degradation, ongoing settler colonialism and land dispossession, the growing gap between the global North and South, the mere existence of Altoona pizza. You get the picture.
And it’s for this reason everyone should read A City on Mars. How readers will receive its suggestions really depends on their ideas about humanity. Although this is a book that offers wide ranging frameworks for the (it would appear) distant future, it hinges on a major debate that emerged during Enlightenment, right after the scientific revolution that sparked the imaginative voyage of Domingo Gonsales with which this essay began: what is the nature of man? John Locke’s notion of economic individualism shows up a couple of times in the text as the preferred ideological inspiration for Mars or lunar settlement and resource exploitation. It is worth remembering that Locke also lived through the English Civil War and concluded that governments are in fact necessary to, you know, keep people alive because when left to their own devices, men cannot be trusted to respect each other. Locke was not as big a humanity hater as Thomas Hobbes, who described the human condition as summum malum or a type of existential distrust that will lead to violent anarchy. But Locke watched English factions slaughter each other for decades and as a result took it as a given that humans will act out of self-interest, even to the point of theft and harm. And mind you, all this theorizing occurred – and I cannot stress this point enough – pertains to human behavior on Earth. What does summum malum look like on the Moon or Mars, on celestial bodies viewed as uninhabited or terra nullius?
Not to be a meteor and fall on the space bros’ parade here, but that vision of the future looks pretty bleak. It’s also a future that runs contrary to current international law. One of the strengths of this book is that it takes seriously the few parallels to space that exist on Earth (such as Antarctica and the ocean seabed, also known places that you will definitely die in without significant technological aid) and how nations have (for the most part) respected international laws drawn up for these sites. Indeed, the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 treats the Moon and the rest of space as part of the “common heritage of mankind” (257). If all of space is a commons, then nations are unable to legally (for now) make sovereign claims on the Moon or Mars. According to law that already exists, there will be no Martian homesteaders.
Remember those space settlement bros? They want Locke’s economic individualism without the burden of government or international oversight. What we’re left with is incoherence on the level of “team of geese flies to space:” gung-ho space settlers looking to imitate the land runs of the late nineteenth century and assume nations will (1) recognize and (2) protect these claims *while at the same time* denouncing common sense regulations. This is astronomically mad (pun very much intended). It is also a good way to start a war, something humans have proven quite proficient at.
The fact that a book like this needs to be written says a lot more about space bro culture and their libertarian anxiety about the “wussification” (33) of the human species than anything else. Lots of space bros think that Mars will be celestial panacea for mankind. Folks like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos believe Mars will allow them to cosplay their own frontier thesis while lining their own pockets.
It is hard to say if Mars will save humanity. The Weinersmiths don’t definitively say one way or another despite their doubts. They just argue that we all need to take a couple moments (or centuries) to figure out how this is all going to work instead of flying by the seats of our pants. All that we know is going to happen for certain if/when a Mars settlement is successfully established is that humans will exist on two planets. Will that be a good thing?
Matthew Sparacio is a lecturer of colonial and Native American history at Georgia State University. He mostly posts about dogs and pizza on instagram @calumetsncrowns
