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Book: A City on Mars by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith

Published: 2023

ISBN: 978-1984881724

Book website: acityonmars.com

I heard about this book because I've read a lot of webcomics. Maybe too many webcomics. Zach Weinersmith is well-known for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, a.ka. SMBC, a webcomic that he has been running for years at smbc-comics.com.

I learned through announcements at SMBC that Zach was writing a book with his wife, Dr. Kelly Weinersmith. The topic: settling space, humans living in the solar system, mars colonies, etc.

You might expect a book coauthored by a web cartoonist to be full of jokes and not take the topic seriously. While there are plenty of jokes (and fun illustrations by Zach), no, these authors took the topic very seriously. Subtitled Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?, the book dumps buckets of cold water all over everyone's over-optimistic near-term space colonization fantasies.

You want to settle Mars? It's cold, the soil is toxic, there's no protection from radiation, it takes months to get there, and there are only intermittent practical launch windows for resupply from earth. Similar problems are laid out for the moon.

Other problems: nobody knows how long-term life in micro-gravity affects human health, especially reproduction. International law governing space is unclear and in some ways open to dangerous interpretation about how space can be exploited. We don't know how to built closed-loop environmental and recycling systems, meaning that space settlements will require expensive resupply from Earth.

I was fascinated to learn about Biosphere 2, a facility and set of experiments in running a closed ecosystem. The tl;dr is that supporting even a small number of humans in closed or semi-closed ecosystem (like, say, a self-sustaining space settlement) is very difficult and very much an unsolved problem.

The authors cover all of these topics and more. They do a good job of pointing out a lot of un-sexy problems that any space settlement will need to overcome. Problems that are mostly or outright ignored by many prominent proponents of near-term space colonization.

I think the book's conclusion is that the authors favor a “wait and go big” approach. Basically, do everything we can now on Earth and in short-term space exploration to study, solve problems, advance our technology, and set up a better framework of international law. Then, send a lot of people all at once. The authors do a good job of selling this approach. Until we perfect the science of running something like Biosphere here on Earth where it's merely difficult instead of you're-in-space-6-months-from-help-and-you're-gonna-die difficult, it seems like we should invest a lot of focus there rather than half-baked mars colony ideas.

The book gave me some good chuckles and was very informative. The authors really did their homework (check the extensive list of sources in the back!). It did drag a bit for me in some places, but this book is closer to an entertaining textbook than a sci-fi thriller, so I don't think pacing was the main concern.

Overall, if you have any interest in science, technology, space settlement, sci-fi, etc. you'll probably enjoy this book and I recommend it.