Let’s not send a few thousand people to Mars as a big experiment in survival.
The authors of the book in the article, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, were also on an episode of Factually. Between this article and that episode, I’m pretty down on any cool scifi future in space.
They’re not like, that pessimistic about it, but they raise extremely pressing questions that need to be investigated and understood for things to be successful.
Exactly. In the podcast episode I linked, the authors explain how they’re sci-fi nerds and fans of space exploration. They started out writing a book about how cool it would be, but started asking these questions and realized we don’t have the answers yet. That’s not pessimism, it’s practicality
Why bother terraforming planets, or settling them at all? With current tech we could capture an asteroid, throw it into an Aldrin Cycler orbit, and hollow it out into an O’Neil Cylinder. Boom, instant colony which can hold hundreds of millions of people and naturally cycles between near Earth and near Mars every couple years. Repeat as necessary.
Who moves the asteroid? Like literally, what nation or nation is moving a planet killer asteroid around near earth, and why are we doing this at all?
Nobody is doing it right now. Its a scifi concept, but the parent is saying that is an alternative to trying to colonize planetary bodies.
Part of the point they raise is exactly this problem, people like to say “someone” or “some company” etc but it’s literally a problem with the idea, who gets to do it? Who are we trusting with this life destroying capability? The reality of the idea demands we consider these questions.
I definitely think this is the cooler way to go. You could even put engines on them so that they could migrate around (slowly; I’m envisioning engines that modify their orbits, not allow for free motion). We could have space stations orbiting Mars and the Moon coordinating drones below for research and asteroid habs that can visit these stations for transfers.
But as the article/book points out, there are still a ton of questions we need to answer before that is possible.
