Zach Weinersmith joins EconTalk will welcome Russ Roberts for the third time to explain why space exploration ambitions are unrealistic and overly optimistic, the danger of widespread utopianism and why space colonization is not like buying a spa.
Weinersmith is a cartoonist and author/co-author of numerous books, including Béa Loup, Soonish: ten emerging technologies that will improve and/or ruin everything, and the subject of this podcast episode, A city on Mars: can we plan the space, should we plan the space and have we really thought about it? Weinersmith is also the author of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereala daily comic strip.
The podcast revolves around understanding space colonization as an ambition with obstacles. Weinersmith rules out the possibility of a colony on the Moon, for example, due to lack of water, difficulty in extracting resources, and lack of atmosphere. He says that while Mars is much more promising, it has its own drawbacks: It’s a six-month drive from Earth and experiences planet-wide dust storms. In general, humans do not have the technological capacity to settle in space in the long term. Despite this, Weinersmith considers the literature on space colonization to be biased toward promoting space exploration, regardless of resource constraints and trade-offs.
We tried to take an economist’s point of view, because you’ll often hear more physicists say, “well, we can have titanium on the moon.” But we never talk about Earth that way. I never say I can have a house because my garden has silicon for the windows and aluminum for the metal, and wood is of course made of carbon and hydrogen, so it’s all good for me. Yet somehow it is okay to talk about the Moon in this way, as if there is no compromise.
Negative trade-offs have always impacted space missions. Weinersmith’s example is the Apollo program, which he considers politically unpopular, a one-time project, and far too costly in terms of resources for a single trip to the Moon. But the most concerning downside comes from the question of whether space colonization is ethical given the negative effects of space on human biology, psychology, and development.
I’m going to tell you about a bunch of bad things space does to you soon. The longest an individual has ever spent consecutively in space is 437 days, so all of this bad stuff is happening in the context of a very short period of time. Space reliably degrades muscle density, especially in areas of your body that you simply don’t use in space, like your hips. You may get kidney stones because a lot of calcium is leaving your system. This is what your body does when you don’t use things, it goes away, and that with a huge amount of exercise and strength training. Jerry Lininger was an astronaut who boarded Mir, the great Soviet space station, he was very proud that he was able to walk after about four and a half months upon release.
Weinersmith explains how the political theatrics common in space exploration projects, as opposed to genuine scientific curiosity, means we know almost nothing about how space affects pregnant women and newborns. This would make all future children born in a space laboratory rats. To Weinersmith, all of these issues make things incredibly difficult and unethical, for very little benefit, prompting Roberts to respond, “What’s the appeal of this?”
Roberts asks Weinersmith if he is concerned that his assertion about the near-impossible difficulty of space colonization neglects technology. innovation. After all, there are many existing technologies that were once considered impossible, like the plane. Weinersmith rejects this argument as more of a hope than a legitimate rejoinder, and the need for remarkable innovation further underscores the infeasibility of space colonization.
When you talk to people about space, the classic example they bring up is aviation. Of course, you shouldn’t fall into the trap, but you have to be careful with this kind of reasoning. It is very telling that the comparison of aviation in space books about the imminent future of awesome space things was made in the 50s… The extent to which a particular scenario requires extraordinary developments kind of tells you about his nature. If it takes 100 butlers per person to get to Mars, then that’s not a libertarian frontier fantasy, it’s a Star Trek fantasy.
As Space X has shown, space travel can be privatized. Should the lack of technology for colonization prevent companies from attempting missions to space? Weinersmith calls this the hot tub argument, because space travel can be as private as the decision to buy a hot tub. But Weinersmith disagrees. He believes that space travel poses a risk to humanity, significant enough that some veto power should be granted to third parties.
You can imagine the spectrum from purchasing a spa, where no third party has the right to say no, to purchasing a nuclear weapon where virtually everyone should be able to say no. the question becomes: where is spatial colonization located on this axis? You might wonder why this isn’t a purely aesthetic choice. Well, try to imagine, as some people have proposed, putting a million tons of metal into orbit about 70 miles up. I think most of us think we should have a say in whether someone is allowed to do this. Because it creates an enormous risk, not unlike the detonation of nuclear weapons. Our final conclusion is that the spa argument is clearly not enough. It’s not just a personal choice. Even if you imagine fusion projects and the like, having a world where private actors can send huge amounts of metal at high speed into space is a world where humanity is in danger. It seems like we just need to put some sort of regulatory framework in place.
Although most of the podcast is devoted to explaining why a city on Mars or the Moon is an unthought-out fantasy, Weinersmith acknowledges that the desire to extend human civilization into space is an understandable application. of the explorer mentality of humans. He calls the questions raised by space advocates fascinating and intriguing. Weinersmith doesn’t tell his audience to stop exploring, innovating, or asking questions. Instead, he calls for a slowing down of the utopianism surrounding space exploration, a recognition of the high obstacles and serious risks.
I would say the other thing that should give you pause is that this particular fantasy tends to be more libertarian in the American sense of the word, a conservative Frontier fantasy. But I saw it as a left-wing fantasy, like we’re avoiding capitalism when we go to space. It should give you pause when space allows all utopias to exist.
Pretty consistently throughout the episode, Roberts says that Weinersmith’s ideas are somewhat daunting. But I don’t think so. Weinersmith’s work recognizes that there is no panacea and that attempting to create one can have disastrous consequences. Given the sometimes depressing state of the world, it’s tempting to be able to start from scratch. Weinersmith is asking the public to consider the costs associated with this. In my opinion, these costs start with climate change. Space exploration is an avoidance tactic, not a real solution, as is often the case with utopian ambitions. For example, socialism is not a solution to economic inequality, social alienation or worker abuse; it is a hypothetical rocket to a world where the defects of capitalism do not exist, without regard to the ethical or economic constraints of the new system. Utopianism has a strong opportunity cost, namely a counter-intuitive diversion of attention from contemporary problems. Resources that could be devoted to the innovation necessary for planetary population over an indefinite period could instead be devoted to reducing carbon emissions and developing green energy. Utopianism is not achievable, but neither is it preferable.
Related EconTalk Episodes
Zach Weinersmith on Beowulf and Bea Wolf
Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith on Soonish
