A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? - Hardcover

Weinersmith, Kelly; Weinersmith, Zach

 
9781984881724: A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1984881728 ISBN 13: 9781984881724
Verlag: Penguin Press, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

* THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * Scientific American’s #1 Book for 2023 * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * A Times Best Science and Environment Book of 2023 * A Tor.com Best Book of 2023 *

“Exceptional. . . Forceful, engaging and funny . . . This book will make you happy to live on this planet — a good thing, because you’re not leaving anytime soon.” —New York Times Book Review

From the bestselling authors of Soonish, a brilliant and hilarious off-world investigation into space settlement

Earth is not well. The promise of starting life anew somewhere far, far away—no climate change, no war, no Twitter—beckons, and settling the stars finally seems within our grasp. Or is it? Critically acclaimed, bestselling authors Kelly and Zach Weinersmith set out to write the essential guide to a glorious future of space settlements, but after years of research, they aren’t so sure it’s a good idea. Space technologies and space business are progressing fast, but we lack the knowledge needed to have space kids, build space farms, and create space nations in a way that doesn’t spark conflict back home. In a world hurtling toward human expansion into space, A City on Mars investigates whether the dream of new worlds won’t create nightmares, both for settlers and the people they leave behind. In the process, the Weinersmiths answer every question about space you’ve ever wondered about, and many you’ve never considered:

Can you make babies in space? Should corporations govern space settlements? What about space war? Are we headed for a housing crisis on the Moon’s Peaks of Eternal Light—and what happens if you’re left in the Craters of Eternal Darkness? Why do astronauts love taco sauce? Speaking of meals, what’s the legal status of space cannibalism?

With deep expertise, a winning sense of humor, and art from the beloved creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, the Weinersmiths investigate perhaps the biggest questions humanity will ever ask itself—whether and how to become multiplanetary.

Get in, we’re going to Mars.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

The Weinersmiths, a wife-and-husband research team, cowrote the New York Times bestselling popular science book Soonish, a Wall Street Journal and Popular Science book of the year. Dr. Kelly Weinersmith is an adjunct faculty member in the BioSciences department at Rice University. Her research has been featured in The Atlantic, National Geographic, BBC World, Science, and Nature. Zach Weinersmith makes the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. He illustrated the New York Times bestselling Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, and his work has been featured in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Forbes, Science Friday, Foreign Policy, PBS, and elsewhere. The Weinersmiths live on an old farm in Virginia with their two children.

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1.

A Preamble on Space Myths

Idyllic views of the future always seem to come with the hidden assumption that human nature will change. That somehow, the flaws of mankind will just melt away amongst the awesomeness of living among the stars. People will abandon mundane flaws like booze and drugs, and also everyone will be super-efficient like some kind of environmentalist's dream. But that's never been the case as we march forward, so I don't see why it would happen in the future.
—Andy Weir, world famous sci-fi author who also writes really insightful commentary in books about booze in space. 


Outlandish ideas about space settlement often function as a justification for the whole project, typically promising vast wealth, an improved humanity, or an escape from Earth-awfulness. Because much of this book hinges on the idea that there is no urgent need to settle space, here we'll try to convince you that most of the pro-settlement arguments are wrong. Some of these arguments may be unfamiliar to you, but all of them have at least some powerful advocates in government, military, or business settings.

Bad Arguments for Space Settlement

Argument 1: Space Will Save Humanity from Near-Term Calamity by Providing a New Home

The idea of a multiplanetary humanity as more resilient to extinction is a common one and is plausible over the very long term. However, over the short term, space settlement won't help with any catastrophe you're imagining right this second. Not global warming, not nuclear war, not overpopulation, probably not even a dinosaur-style asteroid event. Why? In short, because space is so terrible that in order to be a better option than Earth, one calamity won't do. An Earth with climate change and nuclear war and, like, zombies and werewolves is still a way better place than Mars. Staying alive on Earth requires fire and a pointy stick. Staying alive in space will require all sorts of high-tech gadgets we can barely manufacture on Earth. We'll elaborate on all of this over the course of the book, but the basic deal is that no off-world settlement anytime remotely soon will be able to survive the loss of Earth. Getting any kind of large settlement going will be hard enough, but economic independence may require millions of people.

We believe there's a decent case for a Plan B reserve of humanity off-world, but there isn't a good case for trying to do it fast. A commonly made argument for urgency is what's sometimes called the "short-window" argument. The idea is that historically, "golden ages" don't last long, so our current age of space travel might come to an end before we get to Mars. We don't know if that's a good analysis of history, but what we can say is that the current age is simply not golden enough to deliver an independent Mars economy. If you want a Mars that can survive the death of Earth, you'd better make sure Earth doesn't die for a very long time.

Weinersmith Verdict: Nah.

Argument 2: Space Settlement Will Save Earth's Environment by Relocating Industry and Population Off-World

There are various flavors of this argument, many of which are popular with the rotating-space-station settlement community, including Jeff Bezos.

One version of this idea is that the solar system contains more than enough mass to create rotating space stations that can accommodate an almost endless number of humans in space. This is literally possible in the sense that there is lots of stuff in space, and the stuff could be refashioned into space bases, but we need a sense of proportion here. The Earth of 2022 puts on about 80 million people per year. If saving our ecology requires us to reduce Earth's human population, then we need to launch and house 220,000 volunteers per day just to tread water.

A related idea is that space should be zoned for heavy industry, while Earth returns to an unpolluted Edenic state. All the nasty mining and manufacturing can be done elsewhere, with by-products cleanly disposed of into the vast landfill that is the solar system. As Jeff Bezos says, "Earth will be zoned residential and light industrial." Again, this is literally possible, and perhaps as long as you're just thinking in terms of big concepts like pollution and mass it sounds doable. But the details are where the difficulty lives. Consider for example cement. It's a major contributor to global warming, so can we make it in space?

Technically, most of the components of cement by mass exist on the Moon, but they won't be easy to dig up. Construction equipment will need to be built to function in an airless environment at low gravity with equatorial temperature swings from -130°C to 120°C. Little things start to loom in this context. Just getting a lubricant that can handle these temperature shifts without degrading is nearly impossible. The same goes for the machines themselves. At extreme cold some metals can undergo a ductile-to-brittle transition; below a certain temperature, metals behave more like stone. However strong they may be, they can't flex and bend. It's speculated that the Titanic sank because its steel hull experienced a ductile-to-brittle transition before hitting the infamous iceberg. That's a nontrivial problem when you desire to use construction equipment that regularly slams into hard surfaces.

And that's just one detail of one part of the process, never mind replicating all those factories. How soon can we plausibly get all these problems solved and then scaled to the needs of Earth, which currently requires over 3.5 billion metric tons of cement per year? And does it sound economically competitive with Earth-made cement even if we could do it? And, by the way, what are the rules for dropping 3.5 billion tons of rock on Earth annually?

Part of what's supposed to make these ideas work is cheap, plentiful energy thanks to space-based solar power. This is another bad idea. Space-based solar power figures prominently in space-settlement proposals for giant rotating space stations. It's also frequently proposed by governments and private space companies as a way to make money while greening the planet. You may have read an article recently about Chinese universities or the European Space Agency, or some new start-up planning to field this technology in the near future. They probably shouldn't.

It's certainly true that there's a whole Sun's worth of sunlight in space, unobstructed by annoying Earth features like weather and the atmosphere. Exactly how much more energy you might get per panel depends on exactly what assumptions you're prepared to make, but different estimates expect about an order of magnitude improvement. That sounds like a lot until you ask yourself what the cost differential will be between a panel in space and a panel in Australia.

It's conceivable that in a world where solar panels are incredibly expensive and there's an extreme collapse in the cost of launching objects to space, you might want to maximize your energy per panel by putting them above the atmosphere. But panels are cheap, and even if we assume pretty steep drops in the cost of space launch, the numbers don't add up. This becomes especially clear when you start to think about maintenance. Try to imagine acres upon acres of glass panels in space, regularly pelted by intense radiation and bits of space debris while enduring the extreme heat of perpetual sunlight. They'll have to be repaired and cared for either by astronauts or an army of advanced robots. Solar panels in Australia can be cleaned by a teenager with a squeegee.

When dumping solar power back to Earth, you have another problem. Solar panels on the ground can send their power right into the grid or to batteries. Space-based power has to...

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Verlag
Penguin Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1984881728
ISBN 13 
9781984881724
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
448
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

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