I have not read either of the books discussed in the rest of the post that follows, but the review itself makes a lot of interesting and what I think are valid points.
Book Review: Are We Ready to Head to Mars? Not So Fast.
by Christie Aschwanden
November 10, 2023
Introduction:
(Undark) IN AUGUST 1998, 700 people came to Boulder, Colorado to attend the founding convention of the Mars Society. The group’s co-founder and president, Robert Zubrin, extolled the virtues of sending humans to Mars to terraform the planet and establish a human colony. The Mars Society’s founding declaration began, “The time has come for humanity to journey to the planet Mars,” and declared that “Given the will, we could have our first crews on Mars within a decade.” That was two and a half decades ago.
In their hilarious, highly informative and cheeky book, “A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?”, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith inventory the challenges standing in the way of Zubrin-like visions for Mars settlement. The wife-and-husband team serves a strong, but never stern, counterargument to the visionaries promising that we’ll put humans on Mars in the very near future. “Think of this book as the straight-talking homesteader’s guide to the rest of the solar system,” they write.
Just as in their previous book, “Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything,” the authors — she’s a faculty member in the biosciences department at Rice University and he’s a cartoonist — use humor and science to douse techno dreams with a dose of reality. “After a few years of researching space settlements, we began in secret to refer to ourselves as the ‘space bastards’ because we found we were more pessimistic than almost everyone in the space-settlement field,” they write. “We weren’t always this way. The data made us do it.
While working on their deeply researched book, the Weinersmiths came to view sending people to Mars as a problem far more complicated and difficult than you’d know by listening to enthusiasts like Elon Musk or Robert Zubrin. It’s a challenge that “won’t be solved simply by ambitious fantasies or giant rockets.” Eventually humans are likely to expand into space, the Weinersmiths write, but for now, “the discourse needs more realism — not in order to ruin everyone’s fun, but to provide guardrails against genuinely dangerous directions for planet Earth.”
Read more of the
Undark article here:
https://undark.org/2023/11/10/review-city-on-mars/
Where to order the book
A City on Mars : https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo ... nersmith/
Where to order the book
Soonish:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/book ... 039956384
Soonish is described as “a hilariously illustrated investigation into future technologies — from how to fling a ship into deep space on the cheap to 3D organ printing.”
Don't mourn, organize.
-Joe Hill
We could give them the very best for a couple of years on mars until they pass away.