“The more capacity we have to do things in space, the more capacity we have for self-annihilation.”
This is a really excellent science book - it tackles a tightly defined subject (is space settlement viable soon) and matches that with tight organisation and a well-rounded set of topics. It is also funny, which is a big bonus, and comes with cartoons. The Weinersmiths are space enthusiasts, but of the sceptical sort. Here, they seek to move the discussion away from "can we build really good rockets to get to space and into the realms of biology, shelter, social organisation, conflict, waste disposal and resource sustainability.
What they find, and they tell us repeatedly they didn’t start out this pessimistic, is that we don’t know how humans who are not highly trained and extremely healthy would survive in space. We don’t know if fetuses and infants can survive in low gravity environments. We don’t have ways to support disability. And we have barely worked out how to deal with feces in ways that aren’t inefficient and unpleasant.
There is also, much to those who think Mars will provide refuge from climate change, no viable current way to have a settlement without draining enormous resources from Earth. There is no realistic prospect of a self-sustaining settlement. And there is also, for the record, no pathway where survival on either the Moon or Mars, or a custom-built space station (which still has unsurmountable physics problems in building) is easier than a severelly climate change impacted Earth.
But the frightening bit - why is there always a frightening bit - is that space does provide rich opportunities for warfare or terrorism. Turns out flinging large things around is both relatively easy to do and potentially extremely destructive. The Weinersmiths spend a lot of time discussing the social aspects of possible settlement, pointing out that an autocratic, undemocratic company town or government equivalent breeding anger and discontent could go very badly wrong. Combine that with a society which potentially can’t accommodate disability - and which may be inclined towards genetic manipulation in order to deal with the risks of a small population interbreeding - and, well they don’t the use the space facism phrase, but it does kind of hang in the air. They have a good third of the book looking at International Law, and what kind of Commons-based arrangements might work, even as those fall badly out of favour.
But the book itself is not upsetting. Somehow, the Weinersmiths combine their sceptism with such a passion for the science, and for exploration itself - for the act of trying to find out how things work - that they respect the scientists they are sometimes poking at, and they leave you with the feeling that this should be doable, and is worth doing right (and very, very slowly).