Leaping Through The Sky

A City on Mars

By Kelly Weinersmith & Zach Weinersmith

18 Jan, 2024

**Miscellaneous Reviews**

23 comments

Support me with a Patreon monthly subscription! — 18 Jan, 2024

**Miscellaneous Reviews**

23 comments

Dr. Kelly Weinersmith¹ and Zach Weinersmith’s 2023 A City on Mars is a non-fiction text. City asks three questions:

Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?

The answers will astound space settlement fans!

Astound in the sense that the answers will annoy and frustrate space settlement fans by asserting that the answers to all three questions are no: we lack the technical ability; space settlements at this time are a bad idea; and no, space fans have not thought this through. Very disappointing. On the plus side, it will give Hop David someone else to despise.

The Weinersmiths tackle their questions in jocular manner, illuminating various points with Zach Weinersmith’s illustrations. His style will be familiar to anyone who follows Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. On one hand, framing the text as humor may help soften the blow of learning that we’re not going to have lunar penal colonies mining helium 3 any time soon. On the other hand, I sometimes found the attempts at humor to be a distraction from the arguments.

More on the art: the text by itself would probably be less than a megabyte. The illustrations add another 60 or so MB. Choose your formats according: if your chosen ereader doesn’t have that much memory, you will want to seek out a dead tree edition.

For the most part, the couple’s points are convincing or, if not entirely convincing, at least reasonable. There seems to be an inverse relationship between a) relevant fields like closed cycle life support requiring active funding if they are to yield usable results and b) relevant fields like closed cycle life support actually getting funding. My main objection to their argument here involves the danger of asteroid impacts used as WMDs, which I believe they overstate².

Long-time readers may notice that some points raised by the Weinersmiths, particularly those pertaining to biology, are ones that have been steadfastly ignored by space colony fans since at least the 1970s. Others, like the sheer pointlessness of lunar H³, are of more recent vintage. We may therefore conclude with reasonable confidence that this text, while entertaining and informative, will have absolutely no effect on space settlement advocacy. Nevertheless, I recommend the text to all who are not already lost causes.

A City on Mars is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Apple Books)

here (Barnes & Noble), and here (Chapters-Indigo).

The abbreviated and edited³ table of contents is as follows:

Introduction: A Homesteader’s Guide to the Red Planet?

A concise discussion of where we are and where we are likely to be in the near future (with respect to space settlements).

A Preamble on Space Myths

The Weinersmiths present various justifications for near-future space settlements, none of which appear to hold water.

Curse you, renewables, for becoming cheaper so quickly.

Part I • Caring for The Spacefaring

Keeping humans alive in space is challenging. We currently have no meaningful data on whether it is possible to have babies in space, or how children born in free fall or on lower gravity worlds would prosper. Gaining data by experimenting on children has ethical implications⁴.

Of course, as discussed in the text, there are some space fans, no doubt a minority, who conclude if ethics are an unsurmountable obstacle, ethics will have to be cast aside in the name of MAN’s GLORIOUS DESTINY.

Part II: Spome, Spome on the Range: Where Will Humans Live Off-World

The Solar System has a wealth of marvelous worlds, all of which are much more inhospitable than Earth and all of which would kill a human deader than Dillinger in very short order. Space habitats could be the answer… if only we knew how to build them, which we do not (see also Part I).

Part III: Pocket Edens: How to Create a Human Terrarium That Isn’t All That Terrible

Creating closed-loop (or at least loss-minimized loop) life support systems is both a) necessary for long term survival in space without on-going support from Earth, and b) something we do not know how to do.

This has been a known pressing issue since at least the 1970s. Space Colonies (A CoEvolution Quarterly Book) is an example both of biologists pointing out that the issue is not a solved one and space fans handwaving it away. Can handwaving sustain a functioning closed-loop ecosystem? Probably not but we may find out.

Part IV: Space Law for Space Settlements: Weird, Vague, and Hard to Change

Contrary to many space fans’ belief, there is an existing legal framework for space activities. It was not designed to facilitate space settlements, it cannot be easily changed, and the consequences of changing it are not clear.

Part V: The Paths Forward: Bound for Moonsylvania?

More discussion of the inherent legal issues involved in space settlements. Fans of independent space settlements will find the section on nation creation interesting.

Part VI: To Plan B or Not to Plan B: Space Society, Expansion, and Existential Risk

One proposed purpose for space settlement is to ensure the human future. Might space settlements instead endanger our future by exacerbating existing international tensions?

This is a point on which I hold what may be a minority belief: if war tech continually improves, and there is a point at which using it would result in human extinction, surely it is better to have the war early, when it will only reduce us to the Stone Age, rather than later, when there will be no survivors. But the authors appear to disagree for some reason.

1: To anyone reading this in Trump’s second term: in 2023, it was still legal for women to be scientists. Dr. Weinersmith is a biologist, with a co-credit for discovering Euderus set AKA crypt-keeper wasp. That link is filled with regrettable knowledge.

2: The Weinermiths (and others) point out that the same technology that would allow one to harvest asteroid wealth for the Terran market and to divert potential impacters away from Earth would also allow one to bombard Earth. The reason I do not think this is a serious issue is that asteroids are slow weapons that Earth would see coming. In the time it took the rock to arrive, the target nation could retaliate with all the weapons they possess. Also, big rocks don’t do anything that nuclear weapons don’t do better.

3: The actual TOC (table of contents) caused formatting issues I don’t feel like tackling.

4: My apologies to readers in Trump’s second term, who will of course be unfamiliar with the term “ethics.” Ethics are what you’re probably wishing the engineers who built and designed the ovens towards which you are being marched had had.

Comments

Frodo

"big rocks don’t do anything that nuclear weapons don’t do better." I agree with the rest of your argument but that last part surely depends on the size of the rock, if you could somehow nudge a dinosaur killer or bigger asteroid towards a collision course with earth you would probably exceed all nuclear weapons currently in inventory by an order of magnitude. They usefulness of such "strategic planet killers" would be limited for earth based countries though.

James NicollFrodo

Dino-killers have prodigious energy because they are the size of Mt. Everest. On a per kilogram basis, the kinetic energy of an impactor is more than chemical explosives but much less than nuclear. Nuclear weapons can be made much larger than they are. We refrain because there are drawbacks to sterilizing we live on and few benefits.

As well, potential dinokillers with appropriate orbits are rare, the alteration to their orbit would be visible across the Solar System, and the rock would likely take years to impact Earth after the orbit was altered. A nuclear warhead, on the other, could show up minutes after being launched.

FrodoJames Nicoll

Agree, but a potential "nudgeable" (as in 'is going to miss Earth unless someone decelerates it a couple of cms/second') Dino-killer could be cheaper than developing and producing all those nukes.

LilFluffFrodo

I was writing a much longer response, but I deleted it and I'll just sum it up (and yeah, this is actually shorter). You seem to be underestimating by multiple orders of magnitude how difficult, expensive, and bloody well obvious to the entire world a mission to nudge to dino-killer to have it impacted even so far out as simply in the lifetime of the grandchildren of the youngest people alive today would be. Yes, the DART mission made a noticeable change in the orbit of a rock in space. The target of Dart was around 177 meters across at the widest point. The estimated diameter of the asteroid that produced the Chicxulub crater (aka, the presumed dino-killer impactor) is around 10 kilometers across. There are a much smaller number of dino-killers in the solar system than city or neighborhood killers. If you want to "nudge" a dino-killer so it impacts within the lifetime of the grandchildren of the youngest people alive today then you will need to much firmer "nudge" than DART. It would be a mission so large that there would be absolutely no way to hide it unless perhaps you were somehow managing to do so after a massive nuclear exchange had wiped out all civilization other than your doomsday organization that wanted to guarantee the job was finished. Short of that, the world would know your group did something. Unless you fooled everyone into believing you were launching a mission to say, colonize a moon of one of the gas giants, you'd be spotted well before launch and someone or multiple someone's high risk law enforcement or special forces teams would come to pay a visit. Let's assume however you did fool everyone and it isn't until your massive probe goes off the previously announced course, lands on the dino-killer, and deploys a nuclear powered array of ion engines that everyone realizes what you are up to. There will still be years to react in and all that changes is that the swarms of unhappy armed agents of one or more states show up after launch and maybe you live to watch on TV from a jail cell that a single nuke was used to simultaneously destroy the engine array that was nudging the dino-killer and give it enough of a nudge to ensure it won't hit the Earth any time in the next few thousand years.

Unless you have a death cult that is absolutely determined to kill off humanity with a dino-killer asteroid it would be far, far easier and cheaper for them to call the conspiracy in the Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy a bunch of wannabes and build several thousand nuclear bombs and hide one in every major city and town on the planet (instead of just a dozen or so in the US) and somehow pull that off and avoid being caught before pressing the button.

FrodoLilFluff

I see, well, ignorance fought!, thanks!.

LilFluffFrodo

And for all that, it's not that we don't need to keep an eye on the sky and watch out for things. We've almost certainly spotted anything that hangs out in the inner solar system that would be a dino-killer, have their orbits mapped and predicted out for a good long time, and given the lead times if we realized one was going to hit in a few centuries we could stop them (on that time scale you probably don't even need 1/1000 of what DART did, a teensy change today plus a couple of centuries will result in a lot of change in the future). But, there's the possibility of dino-killer objects that are currently much further out in very elliptical orbits or interstellar objects, either of which could be due to visit the inner solar system in what in geologic time frames is essentially a moment from now to tomorrow (decades to a few thousand years) and there are the much more numerous, "Not a civilization destroyer, but certainly a bad day for someone's neighborhood."

The good news is given the percentage of the Earth that is ocean a neighborhood killer is most likely to make a big splash and maybe not even that (over ocean I expect the Chelyabinsk meteor from 2013 would have been little more than a blip measured on some scientific instruments if it had burst over the middle of the ocean). The JPL Fireball and Bolide Report website (https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/fireballs/) averages a little over 27 recorded airbursts a year between 1998 and 2023. 971 of them from 0.07 to 440 kilotons of energy. I would think it would be good for us to get enough of a watch on the sky to at least be able to predict the larger ones. Imagine if the Chelyabinsk object had its 400-ish kiloton boom at a lower altitude and in a more politically fraught area. Moscow, DC, over a military base on the India/Pakistan border, Korea... It's not to dino-killers that scare me, it's these bad day for a neighborhood rocks. The thing is here we're talking about much smaller objects, from less than a meter across to single and low double digit (18 meters if I'm remembering correctly is the estimate for Chelyabinsk) and at that size range there are for more objects to try and keep an eye on.

And on the subject of the book, even if on an emotional level I didn't say, "Yeah! Let's do the hard work to actually be able to build space colonies! Permanent Mars, Lunar, and orbital settlements would be cool!" It's probably worth doing said hard work simply for the benefits it might well give us down here on Earth. Considering what we're doing to the planet the same knowledge that could allow a big spinning donut or dome on Mars to survive without constant massive supply shipments from Earth could very well help us keep our cities and downs survivable. Living here in the Arizona desert water system that let us drastically reduce how much water we pulled from the ground and rivers (one a definitely limited resource and the other with inter-state and international political considerations) would be very useful.

But this has ended up big again and I probably should save large posts for my own spot on the web and not taking up James' space.

SwampyankeeFrodo

Cheaper than developing nuclear weapons?

Probably not. Nukes are quite well-known technology, with the major problem being uranium enrichment (which one needs for all present nuclear reactors except the Canadian CANDU reactor and fast breeders) (note that the first three atomic bombs built -- to two fundamentally different designs -- worked).

Changing the orbit enough of an asteroid that's sufficiently massive to cause more damage than a nuclear weapon is highly non-trivial. Doing so in a manner that's quick enough to be politically useful is also likely to be very expensive. Rather obviously, a nuclear program can take years, but -- and this is an important but -- the development program doesn't mean the weapons need to be used. Redirecting an asteroid that you wanted to be a threat last week will cost a lot of money to undo.

Matt McIrvin

Your argument for hastening the apocalypse is similar to noted ex-mathematician Ted Kaczynski's argument for doing our best to bring the crisis that will destroy human civilization.

Wayne

Rats. Annoying to know that NOW there's an Apple Books version! It wasn't available there when the book released, I ended up with the hard back.

Definitely a good read. I would like nothing more for Elon and Jeff to jump in a rocket to be the first men on Mars, as that's the last we'd hear from them.

Vicki

The SF novel argument for using plain large rocks as weapons was that the people in question didn't have any nuclear weapons, but the Moon has a lot of rocks. If I recall the scene in the novel it was something like "'we can throw rocks at them'. 'That's not funny.' 'No, we really can throw rocks at them.'...on paper, the Moon didn't have any significant weapons, but a weapon is a way to hit things hard, and they had a catapult designed to throw cargo at Earth."

James NicollVicki

Heinlein then overestimated the effects of tossing rocks, no doubt for dramatic effect. The tsunami caused by the rock that lands near Great Britain, for example, would have been a couple of inches at London. Removing Cheyenne Mountain would have needed hundreds of thousands of shots. Plus, why are cargo capsules even able to reach the surface of Earth at orbital velocity at all?

Jan VaněkJames Nicoll

I beg your pardon? I am not sure I understand that last sentence.

I sure would like to see a thorough analysis of TMIaHM's orbital mechanics (and energy budgets and stuff like that), or whatever RAH's research was, but this one aspect seems believable: As soon as you get the capsule beyond the L1, it will fall to Earth, accelerating rather close to escape velocity than just orbital; and the delta-v to determine whether it grazes the atmosphere tangentially (which is supposedly, with some handwaving, used for aerobraking the useful cargo) or falls more-or-less perpendicularly (which is much easier in principle) is quite tiny by that distance.

Mike ScottJan Vaněk

The question is why cargo capsules that were only intended to withstand the mechanical and thermal stress of aerobraking were sufficiently over-engineered to survive the much greater stresses of a perpendicular descent and so reach the surface as large rocks rather than as gravel.

JVjrMike Scott

Greater? How so, how much? The speed is comparable; the perpendicular trajectory does go through denser air, but very briefly, and even if the capsule burst (of which I am not sure, but do not have the time to try the appropriate approximations now -- I mean, the capsules must have some absurd ablative shield to survive shedding many km/s, which the bombs don't do), what is the difference between being hit by a pile of gravel at escape velocity and a rock of the same size?

Swampyankee

A lot of the space colony advocates are incredibly optimistic. (I'm looking at you, Zubrin).

Historically, one should note that just about all historical colonization efforts (possibly excepting the Polynesians) required a local population to exploit and (frequently) eliminate (to paraphrase "we have the Maxim gun; they have not"). That's how it worked in North America, South America, and Australia. Indeed, both North and South America also relied on forcibly importing millions of people from Africa (to be clear: Africans were captured by violence -- kidnapped -- stripped naked, stuffed into the holds of cargo ships packed roughly as densely as sardines in a can, raped, tossed overboard if sick or otherwise inconvenient, and tortured and brutalized after being landed in the Americas.) for labor when the native peoples resisted or died.

Also, the technology does not exist to make a sufficiently closed environment to function without significant imports from Earth. Qualifying such a system (unless you're either suicidal or homicidal) will take years.

Lastly, I'd not want to live in some company town on Mars. It sure as Hell won't be some libertarian paradise, except maybe for the local manager. If one is lucky, it's McMurdo Station. If one isn't, think working for von Braun in early 1945.

McannonSwampyankee

Worth mentioning as well that Britain’s initial Australian colonies were established as a dumping ground for convicts; earlier on the North American colonies had served this useful purpose, until that blasted Revolution upset a perfectly workable arrangement. While not slaves per se they still provided a useful, albeit reluctant, workforce to undertake the development of these new frontiers. It’s difficult to see convicted criminals, particularly those without appropriate skills, as being a useful workforce for the development of offworld settlements. Unless, that is, the development plan is somehow based on unskilled labour that can be transported from Earth incredibly cheaply and worked until they drop, along with a legal system that facilitates such arrangements.

Peter ErwinSwampyankee

Historically, one should note that just about all historical colonization efforts (possibly excepting the Polynesians) required a local population to exploit and (frequently) eliminate ...

So where did that "local population" come from in the first place? Outside of Africa (and ignoring the small genetic contributions from Neanderthals and Denisovans), they were all descendants of successful (prior) colonizations.

Even if we just stick to "history": Most of the Caribbean was colonized between about 3500 BC and 500 AD; the Canary Islands circa 1000-500 BC; Madagascar in the mid-first millennium AD; Iceland circa 900 AD; almost all of Polynesia (with New Zealand around 1300 AD); and a number of small islands settled during and after the Age of Discovery (a suggested list )

So it's pretty clear that successful colonization on Earth -- even by Europeans -- does not require "a local population to exploit". (Or a supply of African slaves.)

Paul Connelly

What can be said about colonies on the Moon or Mars must be even more extreme for interstellar colonization projects, which involve way more difficulty just getting there (and just getting to Mars without killing your human cargo may be difficult enough). So what's an aspiring author of "science fiction" (or, to give it a more appropriate name, "technology fantasy") to do when all the genre tropes that have been mainstays since at least the mid-19th century have been relegated to the trash heap of scientific nonsense? Interplanetary settlements, space travel, time travel, telepathy, uploading minds to computers...how can we still be seeing these marketed as science fiction if there is supposed to be any relation to science at all in SF? What's left?

Mark PontinPaul Connelly

Paul Connelly: What's left?

New ideas.

Lunar Explained

I loved, still do, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. But, even when I was 13, a thought did cross my mind, as I learned that the Moon produced great tonnages of rice and wheat, in tunnels, lit by artificial lights, powered by either solar , or by nuclear fusion "once ice is mined, magnetic pinchbottle set up". Professor Bernado de la Paz enthuses to Earth audiences that, because they think in "cubic", there's really no limit to Lunar agricultural productivity in those tunnels with the lights.

The thought that crossed my mind was "why don't they just put tunnels under India and light those with power from "magnetic pinchbottles", then? The Moon has absolutely nothing in the book that Earth does not have in much greater abundance. And no added costs, keeping the pressure in.

I asked for a review of a Pournelle/Niven/etc novel here a few weeks back, about literal space colonization, a satellite. The only hope for any extraterrestrial colonies died when it turned out that there was just about zero industrial processes that needed zero-G; Pournelle imagined super-fast computer chips; Joe Haldeman, "foamsteel" of great strength and light weight, only possible in zero-G; none of that happened. And zero-G and free vacuum were space's only possible special talents; when nobody needed either to make money, the dream died right there.

Robert CarnegieLunar Explained

I didn't get very far with the book but I suppose the Moon has prisoners and/or non-union labor, and less gravity, and the details are unimportant. ;-)

https://www.basicinstructions.net/basic-instructions/2009/1/8/how-to-repel-the-inevitable-invasion-of-the-moon-men.html

(the first encounter of many)

Maybe the magnetic whatsit requires a very large vacuum - or it requires that less gravity. I incline to blame Star Wars for spaceships needing to take off from the ground and deal with nearby enemies before disappearing into hyperspace which, if you could do it first, would be easiest. That is because of gravity interfering with hyperdrive. But I suppose that "The Island Earth" and "Forbidden Planet" also had relatively conventional launch and landing scenes, so...

Roy Brander

Not sure why the system glitched and dubbed me "Lunar Explained", but anyway, the notion that you can't go into hyperspace until you've gotten away from planetary gravity (Star Wars, Star Trek to some extent) or the solar system gravity (Larry Niven's hyperdrive) is necessary so that there can be space adventures at all. If "hyperspace" is accessible on a planet, then you just have "StarGate" instead.

Clarke had the aliens put their stargate way out at Jupiter, and "Interstellar" gave that a nod with an alien stargate at Saturn.

But Carl Sagan was writing your real Hard SF with "Contact". If you can make some higher-dimensional escape from the universe possible at all, you can probabably do it with a Machine right down here. And then the space-adventures all go away. Alas, that's what the audience wants, so the fictional physics are modified to provide the story.

James NicollRoy Brander

F. Paul Wilson's La Nague history features FTL going from something you can only do in deep space to something where you can punt ships into hyperspace from planetary surfaces to surface to surface portals. Annoyingly, the last is introduced by aliens led by a mad god.