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#space colonization
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Kelly and Zach Weinersmith’s “A City On Mars”
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In A City On Mars, biologist Kelly Weinersmith and cartoonist Zach Weinersmith set out to investigate the governance challenges of the impending space settlements they were told were just over the horizon. Instead, they discovered that humans aren't going to be settling space for a very long time, and so they wrote a book about that instead:
https://www.acityonmars.com/
The Weinersmiths make the (convincing) case that ever aspect of space settlement is vastly beyond our current or reasonably foreseeable technical capability. What's more, every argument in favor of pursuing space settlement is errant nonsense. And finally: all the energy we are putting into space settlement actually holds back real space science, which offers numerous benefits to our species and planet (and is just darned cool).
Every place we might settle in space – giant rotating rings, the Moon, Mars – is vastly more hostile than Earth. Not just more hostile than Earth as it stands today – the most degraded, climate-wracked, nuke-blasted Earth you can imagine is a paradise of habitability compared to anything else. Mars is covered in poison and the sky disappears under planet-sized storms that go on and on. The Moon is covered in black-lung-causing, razor-sharp, electrostatically charged dust. Everything is radioactive. There's virtually no water. There are temperature swings of hundreds of degrees every couple of hours or weeks. You're completely out of range of resupply, emergency help, or, you know, air.
There's Helium 3 on the Moon, but not much of it, and there is no universe in which is it cheaper to mine for Helium 3 on the Moon than it is to mine for it on Earth. That's generally true of anything we might bring back from space, up to and including continent-sized chunks of asteroid platinum.
Going to space doesn't end war. The countries that have gone to space are among the most militarily belligerent in human history. The people who've been to space have come back perfectly prepared to wage war.
Going to space won't save us from the climate emergency. The unimaginably vast trove of material and the energy and advanced technology needed to lift it off Earth and get it to Mars is orders of magnitude more material and energy than we would need to resolve the actual climate emergency here.
We aren't anywhere near being a "multiplanetary species." The number of humans you need in a colony to establish a new population is hard to estimate, but it's very large. Larger than we can foreseeably establish on the Moon, on Mars, or on a space-station. But even if we could establish such a colony, there's little evidence that it could sustain itself – not only are we a very, very long way off from such a population being able to satisfy its material needs off-planet, but we have little reason to believe that children could gestate, be born, and grow to adulthood off-planet.
To top it all off, there's space law – the inciting subject matter for this excellent book. There's a lot of space law, and while there are some areas of ambiguity, the claims of would-be space entrepreneurs about how their plans are permissible under the settled parts of space law don't hold up. But those claims are robust compared to claims that space law will simply sublimate into its constituent molecules when exposed to the reality of space travel, space settlement, and (most importantly) space extraction.
Space law doesn't exist in a vacuum (rimshot). It is parallel to – and shares history with – laws regarding Antarctica, the ocean's surface, and the ocean's floor. These laws relate to territories that are both vastly easier to access and far more densely populated by valuable natural resources. The fact that they remain operative in the face of economic imperatives demands that space settlement advocates offer a more convincing account than "money talks, bullshit walks, space law is toast the minute we land on a $14 quadrillion platinum asteroid."
The Weinersmiths have such an account in defense of space law: namely, that space law, and its terrestrial analogs, constitute a durable means of resolving conflicts that would otherwise give rise to outcomes that are far worse for science, entrepreneurship, human thriving or nation-building than the impediments these laws represent.
What's more, space law is enforceable. Not only would any space settlement be terribly, urgently dependent on support from Earth for the long-foreseeable future, but every asteroid miner, Lunar He3 exporter and Martian potato-farmer hoping to monetize their products would have an enforcement nexus with a terrestrial nation and thus the courts of that nation.
But the Weinersmiths aren't anti-space. They aren't even anti-space-settlement. Rather, they argue that the path to space-based scientific breakthroughs, exploration of our solar system, and a deeper understanding of our moral standing in a vast universe cannot start with space settlements.
Landing people on the Moon or Mars any time soon is a stunt – a very, very expensive stunt. These boondoggles aren't just terribly risky (though they are – people who attempt space settlement are very likely to die horribly and after not very long), they come with price-tags that would pay for meaningful space science. For the price of a crewed return trip to Mars, you could put multiple robots onto every significant object in our solar system, and pilot an appreciable fleet of these robot explorers back to Earth with samples.
For the cost of a tiny, fraught, lethal Moon-base, we could create hundreds of experiments in creating efficient, long-term, closed biospheres for human life.
That's the crux of the Weinersmiths' argument: if you want to establish space settlements, you need to do a bunch of other stuff first, like figure out life-support, learn more about our celestial neighbors, and vastly improve our robotics. If you want to create stable space-settlements, you'll need to create robust governance systems – space law that you can count on, rather than space law that you plan on shoving out the airlock. If you want humans to reproduce in space – a necessary precondition for a space settlement that lasts more than a single human lifespan – then we need to do things like breed multiple generations of rodents and other animals, on space stations.
Space is amazing. Space science is amazing. Crewed scientific space missions are amazing. But space isn't amazing because it offers a "Plan B" for an Earth that is imperiled by humanity's recklessness. Space isn't amazing because it offers unparalleled material wealth, or unlimited energy, or a chance to live without laws or governance. It's not amazing because it will end war by mixing the sensawunda of the "Pale Blue Dot" with the lebensraum of an infinite universe.
A science-driven approach to space offers many dividends for our species and planet. If we can figure out how to extract resources as dispersed as Lunar He3 or asteroid ice, we'll have solved problems like extracting tons of gold from the ocean or conflict minerals from landfill sites, these being several orders of magnitude more resource-dense than space. If we can figure out how to create self-sustaining terraria for large human populations in the radiation-, heat- and cold-blasted environs of space, we will have learned vital things about our own planet's ecosystems. If we can build the robots that are necessary for supporting a space society, we will have learned how to build robots that take up the most dangerous and unpleasant tasks that human workers perform on Earth today.
In other words, it's not just that we should solve Earth's problems before attempting space settlement – it's that we can't settle space until we figure out the solutions to Earth's problems. Earth's problems are far simpler than the problems of space settlement.
As I read the Weinersmiths' critique of space settlement, I kept thinking of the pointless AI debates I keep getting dragged into. Arguments for space settlement that turn on existential risks (like humanity being wiped out by comets, sunspots, nuclear armageddon or climate collapse) sound an awful lot like the arguments about "AI safety" – the "risk" that the plausible sentence generator is on the verge of becoming conscious and turning us all into paperclips.
Both arguments are part of a sales-pitch for investment in commercial ventures that have no plausible commercial case, but whose backers are hoping to get rich anyway, and are (often) sincerely besotted with their own fantasies:
https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/
Both AI and space settlement pass over the real risks, such as the climate consequences of their deployment, or the labor conditions associated with their production. After all, when you're heading off existential risk, you don't stop to worry about some carbon emissions or wage theft.
And critically, both ignore the useful (but resolutely noncommercial) ways that AI or space science can benefit our species. AI radiology analysis might be useful as an adjunct to human radiological analysis, but that is more expensive, not less. Space science might help us learn to use our materials more efficiently on Earth, and that will come long before anyone makes rendezvous with a $14 quadrillion platinum asteroid.
There are beneficial uses for LLMs. When the Human Rights Data Analysis Group uses an LLM to help the Innocence Project New Orleans extract and categorize officer information from wrongful conviction records, they are doing something valuable and important:
https://hrdag.org/tech-notes/large-language-models-IPNO.html
It's socially important work, a form of automation that is an unalloyed good, but you won't hear about it from LLM advocates. No one is gonna get rich on improving the efficiency of overturning wrongful convictions with natural language processing. You can't inflate a stock bubble with the Innocence Project.
By the same token, learning about improving gestational health by breeding multigenerational mouse families in geosynchronous orbit is no way to get a billionaire tech baron to commit $250 billion to space science. But that's not an argument against emphasizing real science that really benefits our whole species. It's an argument for taking away capital allocation authority from tech billionaires.
I'm a science fiction writer. I love stories about space. But I can distinguish fantasy from reality and thought experiments from suggestions. Kim Stanley Robinson's 2015 novel Aurora – about failed space settlement – is every bit as fascinating and inspirational as "golden age" sf:
https://memex.craphound.com/2015/11/02/kim-stanley-robinsons-aurora-space-is-bigger-than-you-think/
But still, it inspired howls of outrage from would-be space colonists. So much so that Stan wrote a brilliant essay explaining what we were all missing about space settlement, which I published:
https://boingboing.net/2015/11/16/our-generation-ships-will-sink.html
With City on Mars, the Weinersmiths aren't making the case for giving up on space, nor are they trying to strip space of its romance and excitement. They're trying to get us to focus on the beneficial, exciting, serious space science we can do right now, not just because it's attainable and useful – but because it is a necessary precondition for any actual space settlement in the distant future.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead
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whereserpentswalk · 27 days
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You're a human colonist settling on an uninhabited world. It seems like the perfect place for humans to set up shop in a useally hostile universe.
When you actually get to the planet you realize the planet is covered in alien cities. Empty ones, but cities none the less. They look like they could easily be hundreds of thousands if not millions of years old, but they're made of such strong material that they kept all of these years. Even a lot of the wildlife looks like they're descended from domestic animals gone wild.
The cities feel so vast and mazelike. They're covered in ruins you could never hope to decipher, and statues whose names you'll never know. These massive towers of black stone whose meaning you could never hope to know. Things that have meaning, yet meaning you will never know. Occasionally you see hints of bones, you fear you know whose bones they are.
You live there, within the empty cities. They're the best shelter, the best place to set up a colony. You walk through the streets as if they were yourse, live in apartments people lived in countless lifetimes ago, you're the first people to enjoy these things as the people who built them once did in countless millenia.
You wonder how they would have felt to see you here? If they would have seen you as having desecrated what was their own. Or if they'd be happy, to see that their cities are still alive, that they're still here.
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rjalker · 10 months
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So you want to write scifi?
You have your characters bringing along some plants to an alien planet??
Please for the love of fuck join a gods damned online gardening group and ask questions about the plants you are writing about. Even if you're just writing about them in passing and don't think it's important.
Ask if any of the people in the gardening group would check over your writing.
You would not believe how many science fiction writers think "bringing mint to an alien planet" is a totally normal casual thing to do.
Or think that it's possible to "run out of" catnip, which is a type of mint, plants.
Literally a major point of tension in Plague Ship was the fact that they "ran out" of catnip plants to sell. When neither the characters nor the author were aware of let alone concerned about the concept of genetic diversity.
Do you understand how absurd this problem is? Running out of catnip plants??? When you have endless access to soil, water, and light???
If you don't, then that is exactly why you need to do proper reasearch before randomly writing about plants in scifi settings.
If you're planning to include any real actual plants in your setting and your intention is NOT to have your characters accidentally create an ecological disaster.....
please for the love of fuck just look up gardening groups on facebook and find a nerd and ask them to give you some tips and constructive criticism for how you plan to use plants in your scifi setting.
If your characters purposefully bring any type of mint at all to plant on an alien planet they should be considered interplanetary ecological terrorists. And I'm not even joking.
And that's just talking about mint. This isn't even getting into how horrifically literally any "lets bring crops/livestock from Earth to an alien planet" should be going.
Please actually research plants before you include them in your scifi setting. No matter how casual you think the statement is. Talk to people who grow the plants. Maybe fucking grow them yourself if you have the space and are in the right climate. Do real actual reasearch. Understand the plants you are talking about before you casually throw them into your setting.
If you don't understand why bringing mint to an alien planet means you should be considered an ecological terrorist you've got no business writing about plants in scifi. Just make your characters eat synthesized nutrition goo. Please.
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lydiardbell · 8 months
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I don't see any reason not to trust him with this
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Today is the day! My second novel is out in the world. I worked damn hard on this book and I'm so proud of how it has turned out. Now is the hardest part- it needs to find its way into the hands of the readers its destined for.
Bon voyage and best of luck, little book
STAR-SCORCHED FINGERTIPS OUT NOW!
A carnivorous vine on a planet infected with a human exodus cult, forges psychic connections with Earth, and bestows an unsuspecting group of women with the power to heal or destroy the remnants of humanity.
In a story that spans the galaxy, this ultimately hopeful, eco-punk adult science fantasy novel  explores the future of humanity and our obligations to our planet of origin through characters who wrestle with non-conforming desires, gender identities, and sexualities.
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bookmaven · 2 months
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UNDER THE TRIPLE SUNS by Stanton A. Coblentz (Reading, PA: Fantasy Press, 1955) Cover by Hannes Bok.
Published in an edition of 1,528 copies.
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The Lights of Home by Bryan Larsen
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nerds-yearbook · 2 months
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In 1962, The Man in the High Castle took place 15 years after Japan, Italy, and Germany won the world war. The victors ruled the world in a very totalitarian way. The Moon, Venus, and Mars were colonized. ("The Man in the High Castle", BK)
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shorthistorian · 2 years
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Elon Musk’s newest innovation: Jamestown... IN SPACE
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wiisagi-maiingan · 2 years
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There is something so unbelievably selfish and fucked up about people thinking we can destroy our planet, OUR HOME and the home of everything else that lives here, and then just fuck off to another planet to repeat the cycle.
Even just ignoring the fact that it's NOT POSSIBLE and will NEVER be possible unless we can magically create some bullshit scifi terraforming technology that lets us fundamentally alter entire planets not just on the surfaces but also at their cores and atmospheres, it's also such an irresponsible and frankly colonialist mindset. We can't just use up the "useful" things from a planet and then toss it in the garbage like it doesn't matter.
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hawkatana · 10 months
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Been working on a little something:
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neruomancer · 1 year
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Bro I can't wait for the tired and miserable masses to be shuttled off world to a hyper rich fail son's colony.
Bro I can't wait to absorb 10 times the lethal dose of radiation, boiling the water in my body like a egg.
Bro I can't wait for exploited labor forces to be fitted with cybernetic brain chips to ensure they don't wrong think.
Bro I can't wait to drink martian portal cap water that contains possible alien bacteria or micro organisms. Thus when I drink my body reacts to foreign elements and shuts my body down due to allergic reactions.
It's going to be so cool bro, just you wait bro, can't wait to be a petit bourgeois land owner on Mars and farm for solent green. It's going to be great bro!
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whereserpentswalk · 2 months
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You live on a planet where humans have been forced to have only one biological sex. You're at the edge of human space, and early in colonization you planet was under attack from an outside source, for survival you had to switch to artificial breeding, which is more effective in mammal species if there's only females, as male reproductive cells are easily synthesized.
You're the only humans in the region. Most alien species you interact with just think of humans as a single sexed species that has artifical reproduction. Though you understand that humans used to have two sexes you barely actually interact with that concept. You don't really think of yourself as having a gender identity or anything, you're kind of just a person. The last male human on your planet has been dead for generations.
You first saw a photo of human male in a history class when you were a teenager. He looked so odd to you. He was deep in the uncanny valley, something that felt very familiar to you, something you evolved to interact with, but something so unfamiliar. Illustrations of males, especially outside of academic sources, always play up unfamiliar features to make them into something almost like a fantasy race, but you find something almost charming about the one in the photo.
That photo sticks with you in a weird way. It's kind of scary. Especially the idea of living at a time with actual male female dynamics. The idea of a man being inside you, however that must work, seems so viscerally horrifying to you. You've known people who've had sex before, it's controversial in your society for people to have sex with eachother, but it's legal, but it seems so diffrent then whatever you'd be expected to do with a male human.
Time passes. You end up living your own life. You major in music once you get to college, and end up with a semi successful career as a guitarist in the capital of one of your planet's countries. Things go well for you. You live your life thinking slightly more about men then most people do, but it's never that important to you.
One day there's word that ambassadors from another human planet are visiting. They're from several systems away, and very culturally diffrent. And it's most likely that they'll have men with them. It's strange to think you might actually be able to see one. You think of them as this strange race of monsters, so clearly linked to you but unlike you. Everything people say about men, that they're violent and warlike, that they're superior yet evil, that they're weaker yet more honest and good natured, rushes through your head.
You sign up to be a musician in the welcoming band to the ambassadors. It's scary but you enter. You win, partly because you're local and talented, partly because most other musicians were too afraid.
When the ambassadors from another human planet show up its on one of your city's largest streets, with cheering crowds and flashing lights. You play a song you realize your entire planet is going to hear. Then for the first time in your life, after about two and a half decades of being alive, you see a male human.
The males in the ambassadorial mission are mixed together with normal people. But you can easily spot the males. They're strange looking to you, the way they walk, and speak and move. Though you realize their foreign way of dressing is honestly more alien then anything biological. Despite your expectations, the males look oddly human, they are human, they're just more like you then you'd expect, they look a bit diffrent, but they're honestly just normal people. It's almost anticlimactic.
When everyone is talking to eachother later you're meant to interact with the musicians of their world, most of whom seem to be male. It's so strange to think you're actually talking to someone whose male. You were kind of worried some sort of mating instincts would set in, but after a lifetime of being raised to never expect to have any sexual experiences that involve more then one person, your mind doesn't really go in that direction, even if you did have those instincts.
You end up talking for awhile in your only shared language (a long dead one) to another guitarist. He's male but it's weirdly not a big deal, he's less obviously male then some of the others, and he seems like a nice freindly person. You realize his voice is deep, but it's not distorted in monstrous like you expected it to be. You realize you shouldn't talk about his sex, so you talk about music. You end up really interested in his culture's musical traditions, and kind of ignore his sex. You almost forget he's a man. Since he'll probably have to stay on the planet for at least a few months he tells you he'd like to meet again mabye. He shakes your hand, his skin doesn't feel diffrent then anyone else's, you don't know why you'd expect it not to.
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rjalker · 4 months
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KK I can't remember if I read this on tumblr or in Astounding Stories of Super-Science (I cannot stress how much I doubt this option) or somewhere else entirely.
there is a short scifi story telling the story of how humans learned that hard way that colonizing alien planets is...a bad fucking idea.
Okay. they find a planet, they think it's empty. They start colonizing. Planting crops. I think there were ruins. Paintings or carvings of trees maybe.
They settle down.
And then it turns out that the native inhabitants are a species that go through different kinds of metamorphosies and go dormant for years at a time. And become part of the soil.
So by tilling the land, planting crops, building structures, they were massacreing entire generations of people.
where the fuck did I read this story and what is it called.
EDIT: ITS THE VELVET FIELDS BY ANNE MCCAFFREY
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shitistolefromyoutube · 6 months
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mihvoi · 6 months
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