A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?

"That’s right, some of the same names, the same mega-billionaires, appear in A City on Mars , Your Face Belongs to Us, and Why We Die . But yes, this book is—as the title implies—about the possibilities of us settling in space. There are two things that are very cool. First, it’s written by a husband-and-wife couple, one of whom is a science writer and the other is a cartoonist. They have pooled their talents to write a really engaging, fun narrative that ties together a huge array of multidisciplinary lines of evidence of what it would take to achieve different stages of living in space. How hard is it to reproduce in space? How hard is it for babies to grow? We essentially have no idea. How hard would it be to live on Mars? Well, there are lots of reasons why it is really, really hard—far worse than any environment here on Earth—and we have no idea yet how to truly solve the problems of living there. “We’ll figure it out as we go along” probably is a foolish strategy. Kelly and Zach Weinersmith evaluate the steps we might be able to take if we wanted to settle in space, and a lot of those steps still need to be achieved here on Earth. We even are getting ahead of ourselves by thinking we could settle the moon this century. It’s too optimistic in how our technologies are going to progress; we know so little about certain key things. Going somewhere like Mars is incredibly challenging, because it might take a year to get there. How do you establish supplies going back and forth? If you’re not self-sufficient and able to grow your own resources, which you won’t be able to do until you have a sizeable city, there’s a kind of Catch-22 situation. The moon is much more achievable. Settling on the moon is a good start. They talk about where on the moon might be doable, and what there is on the moon that we could use—which is not much. Well, it sounds like we are very far away from that. I certainly wouldn’t go. They do a nice job of covering what we have achieved in extreme environments here. Settling on Antarctica is brought up as a good example; we’ve done pretty well with that. But that’s nothing compared to settling on Mars. There was also an experiment called Biosphere II, which put eight people in a closed ecosystem in the 1990s and saw how long that group of people could persist with no input of resources. Those people had to grow everything they ate, which is a good simulation of how it might be settling on another planet. They didn’t last long, and things went pretty horribly wrong socially. So that gives good cause for caution if we are not able to do something even that basic. We haven’t solved the problem of forming a society that is completely isolated. The Weinersmiths also get into space law: who owns space? Who could own part of the moon, or part of Mars, and what are the implications? They go through the laws that actually exist, and are not even binding—more like moral codes—and they evaluate what might be possible. Yes, it’s a good read and also very funny, which I think is important for this kind of book, where the message could be taken as a bummer. But it comes across as very reasonable and amusing. Oh yes. It was a treasure trove! There were more than 250 books that I had to at least skim through, personally, as Chair. I winnowed it down to 52 that we considered together as a panel. Just choosing those 52 was so hard, because there were so many more that I still want to read. It was a delightful cornucopia of very, very diverse books. I think this shortlist of six is a great sample of that diversity: a little bit of everything. We have cell biology, evolution, extinction—so quite a bit of biology—but also statistics, space science, and AI. It’s all very relevant and covers a good spread of the STEM subjects. The rest of the submissions were even broader. The winner of the 2024 Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize will be announced on 24 October, 2024 ."