Book: A City on Mars

A new book by the authors of "Soonish" which explains all of the technical reasons why colonies on the moon or Mars aren't gonna happen -- "soonish" or probably ever.  I have ordered a copy, should be here tomorrow.

One takeaway I read in a review is this: the moon has zero carbon.  Life on earth relies on the recycling of carbon, from plants to animals to plants again. Everything that lives on earth is carbon-based.

Without carbon, the moon isn't just hostile to life, it's an anathema to life.  Same with Mars.  We may contemplate creating self-contained habitats that contain the oxygen and water and carbon we need to survive, but no such habitat will ever be self-sustaining because there is no carbon (or air or water) outside the habitat, and we inevitably use it up.

Anyway, it sounds like a splash of scientific cold water on today's breathless "just a matter of time until we find life in outer space" fantasies.

The book starts with a Uranus joke. How can you not like a book that begins with a Uranus joke?

It is widely assumed that long-term exposure to solar radiation will lead to increased risk of cancer.

The science on this not absolute. Astronauts who spent long periods aboard the ISS were near enough to Earth to still be protected by the Earth's ionosphere.

The twenty-four men who have ventured to the moon and back have showed no signs of excess cancer, but their exposure, the longest mission, was only 12-1/2 days.

Breast tissue and ovaries have proven to be the two organs most susceptible to radiation-induced cancers (according to Nagasaki and Hiroshima research). But barring women from interplanetary colonization "might put a damper on" creating self-sustaining off-planet outposts, according to the authors.

One of the most common symptoms astronauts report after spending time on the ISS is their tendency to break things.

They forget that if they let go of something under normal gravity, it goes rushing toward the floor.

One rather major requirement for permanent settlements off-planet is the need for reproduction in space.

Unsurprisingly, almost zero research has been done on this, even by serious advocates for space colonies.

Some of the unknowns include:

• How would fetal development be affected by microgravity
  
• How would bones and muscles develop after birth in microgravity
  
• What would prolonged exposure to cosmic radiation do to ovaries and testes and eggs and sperm
  
• What would prolonged exposure to cosmic radiation do to newborns and toddlers
  
• Would a person born off-planet in a controlled environment ever be able to go to Earth, where pathogens are everywhere and immune systems are built up to deal with them
  

Part 2 of the book examines the various options for off-world settlement.  The Moon is the closest, but has nothing we need and nothing of value. Mars has some advantages -- possible water, 60% gravity, building materials -- but the soil is toxic, dust storms envelop the planet, sunlight is weak and it's a damn long trip.  Venus is a hellhole, Mercury has no real estate that isn't too hot or too cold (or alternating between them), and the usefulness is worse than the moon anyway.

The outer planets are gas giants, whose moons might be solid and usable but they're a lot farther than Mars.

We could build rotating wheels in orbit, a la 2001, but they're never going to be big enough or populated enough to be anything but weigh stations on the way to somewhere else.

Interstellar travel?  To the authors' credit, they dismiss this possibility with a few well-chosen words:

Kelly and Zach Weinersmith wrote:

If we assume you're going as fast as the fastest-ever spacecraft, [your voyage] is about 8,000 years. Your only option is a ship [built for] four hundred generations, without killing each other. Does that SOUND like something humans can pull off?

Maybe we can have ultra-long-term hibernation. That said, you'd still need to build a spaceship with no major technical malfunctions during the next eight millennia.

If you're willing to allow a lot of sci-fi technology, you could travel at light speed in a little over four years... if you were not obliterated as you encounter small interstellar objects at velocities normally reserved for tiny particles.

We are willing to bet that well before lightspeed spaceships we'll all just beam ourselves to the next star. Maybe one day we'll find signs of alien life. Maybe we'll ask it for its nutritional value.

But the odds of humanity as we know it showing up to greet those aliens? Just about zero.

Quote :

The Forbidden Space Meal: the one option on a long Mars trip that is extremely fresh and contains precisely the nutrients a human body needs. One day, while brewing coffee for breakfast, you realize there are three chunks of protein-packed meat living right next to you.

There are already people trying to declare new nations in space.
https://asgardia.space/en/

A company town on Mars would have the disadvantage for disgruntled workers that they couldn't leave.

Geosynchronous satellites over Earth -- where centrifugal force exactly balances gravity, and the satellite sits in the same place in the sky all the time, which is useful for communications -- are 22,236 miles high.

On the moon, due to the low gravity, and because the moon is tidally locked with the Earth, no "lunarsynchronous" orbit is possible. Many orbits around the moon are possible of course, you just have to balance speed with height -- but a synchronous lunar orbit would be outside the moon's Hill sphere and so enter Earth's gravity well.

On Mars it would be 10,563 miles.

An advantageous launch window, where the planets are in the right positions with respect to each other, happens only once only every two years.

The Weinersmiths' final conclusion, after extensive research on subjects central and ancillary to space exploration, is this:

Just because we CAN doesn't mean we SHOULD. As long as mankind is a warring, petty, irrational species we won't escape war or famine or nest-fouling by taking our problems somewhere else.  Space is not like an undiscovered continent on Earth.  It has no air, it has no carbon, it has no water.  If there is no life there, there is a reason.

Escaping a bad situation to go to a much, much worse one makes zero sense.

Tonight's "60 minutes" had a story on NASA's Artemis space program, and the competition between Blue Origin and Space-X to build the hardware to get us back to the moon, and eventually Mars.

Space-X launches cost $4 billion each. Blue Origin has yet to try a launch. And it's going to take many dozens of launches to get the infrastructure needed for human cargo.

Apparently nobody in this whole chain of crazy has read the Weinersmith's book.  I kept asking the TV, "What's the payback?"  What do we hope to gain?

There are no resources on the moon or Mars that we can use.  There is no reasonable hope of a sustainable colony in either place.  And even it there were, there's be no positive to be gained from doing it.

A NASA dude was asked this question.  His answer is that the Chinese have a goal to put "Sinonauts" on the moon by the end of the decade, "and we can't let them beat us."

Ummm, why the fuck not???

I mean, I can see why Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are doing it, it's a potentially profit-making venture if they can get reliable.  But NASA?  You'd think rocket scientists would be a shade smarter than this.