pervocracy
@pervocracy

I've started reading A City On Mars and the interesting thing is that the authors clearly set out to write a different book than they ended up with. It was supposed to be "space colonization is super cool and here's how it would work!" but somewhere along the way they became convinced that space colonization is, in fact, completely pointless at this stage in history.

They make a couple points, but the one that really gets me is:

Apart from studying Mars itself, what could you accomplish on a Mars colony that you couldn't in Antarctica?

Either way, you're dependent on regular shipments from the productive parts of Earth for the forseeable future--there is a greenhouse at the South Pole, but it's only a tiny supplement to the imported food that makes up the other 95% of the crew's diet, and it needs consumable supplies that also have to be imported.

And either way, you're not really living in a wide-open wilderness; you're living in a very small indoor space where even windows are a cautiously allocated luxury. Feel the thrill of exploring... all the way from the canteen to the lavatory and back again. At least in Antarctica it's possible to go outdoors.

Like don't get me wrong, I think it would be neat as hell to live in Antarctica, but... neat is all it is. It doesn't protect you from the impacts of catastrophes back at home, it doesn't set you up for expanding your base into a real population center. There's no future for humanity in Antarctica (anytime soon); the only utility is in doing kinds of research that can't be done elsewhere, plus maybe some degree of political dickwagging that there are Americans at the South Pole.

We might get an ISS-sized Mars outpost sometime (though even that would be exponentially more difficult and dangerous than the ISS, which is already the most expensive thing ever built), but the kind of self-sufficient settlement that makes humanity a meaningfully multiplanetary species? There's a lot more than political will standing between us and that possibility.


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when I was young I read KSR's Mars trilogy and thought going to Mars and terraforming it would be super cool. When I grew up and heard Elon and co talk about settling Mars using indentured slaves to do the labour, it sounded a lot less cool and more like yet another white man's fantasy of taming a savage wilderness. The fundamental question of "why go to Mars?" has two answers: because it would be a legitimately great achievement in the same way climbing a tall mountain is, and to do science there. There's zero economic incentive, and that's true whether we're living under capitalism or in a communist utopia or whatever.

I love the Mars trilogy but if you squint even a little you can see KSR handwaving "where does all the food come from" whenever it's inconvenient. Remember how the whole Farm Team (like, a dozen people out of the First Hundred) just form a fertility cult and Leave? and it basically isn't a problem? Wild stuff

The economic incentive is that Mars can become a refueling stage in the journey to the kuiper belt. There supposedly are (rare) metal asteroids that contain amounts similar to the complete amount ever refined of some on earth.

That's the excuse anyway.

That seems like a job for a supply cache, not a permanent human population?

Oh well, it's all very silly anyway, we are so extremely far away from the technology to make space mining possible, let alone cost-efficient and safe

(like, obvious question but how do you land tons and tons of raw material without causing a dinosaur-level global catastrophe)

It's to build more rockets in space itself so you don't have to pay uplift for that.

It becomes so silly because it's working backwards from the idea of making a business from space flight, self justifying after the fact. Ambition and cool factor gets you easy investor money because you can always point to some cooler ridiculous solution just over the horizon.

Same as everything else we've been doing for the last century, you just go ahead and cause that catastrophe and bank on being personally rich enough to remain insulated from it. Any other approach is so slow and expensive you won't even get to buy your own doomsday bunker before some other yahoo drops 3000 tons of platinum directly on the commons so it's not even worth bothering about

this is how i felt for years. it would actually be WAY easier to set up a self-sustaining colony on antarctica than it would on mars and yet nobody's ever done it because it's still too logistically hard, and this feels like a pretty good indicator that mar's colonization is just not realistic or feasible

It cracks me up that so many space-colonization diehards resort to the "lifeboat"/"all eggs in one basket" argument, when there is no plausible disaster/collapse scenario where Earth still isn't orders of magnitude more hospitable to human life than any other place in the solar system...

Incidentally this was my problem with the end of Interstellar, we were supposed to believe we were in the last years of humanity because we couldn't do agriculture on Earth any more but then in the coda it is just tossed off that they've been living in self-sufficient space habs for most of a generation getting ready to go—if you can do that kind of total-closed-system agriculture in Jovian orbit why weren't you doing the same in sealed greenhouses back on Earth?

The best I've got is "because we couldn't build enough sealed greenhouses for everyone, and this keeps the hordes from beating down the door," which in addition to being horrific in general, seems overcomplicated compared to, say, moving to a remote island with a lot of guns

Much as I love it UC Gundam also has this "earth is collapsing, cylindrical space colonies are the future" thing going on and I can never help but think about things like.. the literal dirt that these colonies grow their crops in had to be imported. The water and air had to come from somewhere