Off-world settlements are sometimes proposed as an insurance policy for Earthlings. Or as an escape for the super-rich. Is it actually either of those things? How should we be considering humanity's relationship to the cosmos and off-world civilization? And is the Overview Effect worth a damn?
On today's episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast, Nori carbon removal marketplace Cofounder Ross Kenyon is joined by Zach Weinersmith and Dr. Kelly Weinersmith, science educators and authors all. Zach is also the person behind the long-running internet comic SMBC (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal). They are the authors of the new book, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?
Zach and Kelly are both sympathetic to space exploration, being avowed geeks of the subject matter. And yet, the further they dug into basically every facet of life off-world, the less likely it seems our species is ready for the challenges.
Whether it be the ease of hurling celestial objects back at Earth, the collapsing bone density of space denizens, the uncertainty of reproduction in low-gravity environments and therefore the necessity of experimenting without consent upon children, the cost, the geopolitics, the near-term impossibility of independence from Earth, and an entire book's worth of other concerns, it just doesn't seem like becoming a trans-Earth civilization is the solution or problem that its supporters or critics, respectively, have believed it is.
These are all worthy areas of research. Tune in to learn more and why Zach & Kelly are still exuberant space nerds, and how to keep space in mind with regard to climate change.
More from the show
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Carbon Removal Newsroom, the news show that ran alongside this one, is over. Its episodes are still up, on the feed Climate Workers Anonymous now uses.
Carbon Removal Memes is still going.
Resources
Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything
David Grinspoon's Earth in Human Hands
David Grinspoon on Reversing Climate Change
Bryan Caplan on Reversing Climate Change talking about his book Open Borders, which Zach illustrated.
Full Transcript
Alexsandra Guerra: You’re listening to the Reversing Climate Change podcast by the team at Nori, the carbon removal marketplace. This is a show about the innovators and entrepreneurs developing solutions to climate change.
Zach Weinersmith: Is that what you’re doing? We bought a farm five years ago now, and I’m in the unheated... I’m actually getting an okay angle right now. You can’t see any black mold on anything, but it’s between rustic and dilapidated.
Ross Kenyon: Why did you get the nice space, Kelly? You’re in the library, the salon?
Kelly Weinersmith: I took a month... I took a month to turn the barn tack room for horse saddles into an office. And so my hard work pays off when we have to do these interviews.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s good. To the victor goes the spoils. That’s right. You’re hearing the Weinersmith right now. You may know Zach Weinersmith from SMBC, also known as Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, long running internet comic. For me, it’s synonymous with Reddit. I don’t know if that’s actually true or just in my mind, Zach, but I associate these things extremely closely. Maybe that’s true.
Zach Weinersmith: I think it’s a shared factor of like a certain type of person is interested in both.
Ross Kenyon: Yes.
Kelly Weinersmith: And you know, Zach’s brother was the chief technical officer at Reddit for a while. So it’s like a family thing, maybe.
Zach Weinersmith: I started getting accused of like nepotism. Like Marty was goosing the algorithm to like cheat my comic time. Yeah, like the most pathetic form of nepotism.
Ross Kenyon: Like I’m getting more karma. Well, I’m glad that you associate with a certain kind of person because I do too. And it’s the actually guy. And both of your books that you guys have written are both strong actually books where you’re trying to... A little cold water on things people are a little too exuberant about. And you’re also hearing Kelly Weinersmith there. You’re a professor, a science educator and an author. Are you a PhD too? Are you a doctor?
Kelly Weinersmith: Yep. Yeah. Not the kind that parents are proud of, but the doctor philosophy kind. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, yeah, they’re not. But it’s okay. We’re going to work with that today. It’s okay. You guys co-wrote Soonish, 10 Emerging Technologies That Will Improve and or Ruin Everything. And your latest, A City on Mars. Can we settle space? Should we settle space? And have we really thought this through? Welcome to the show.
Unknown speaker: Thanks for having us. It’s great to be here.
Ross Kenyon: How did you find yourself falling into this role? This doesn’t seem like the most fun role for you both because you seem kind of reserved, kind of understated, not like you want to be poking at people constantly, yet you choose topics that require you to do so. Why?
Kelly Weinersmith: It’s an accident. Wait, wait. So for the space book in particular, we thought that settlements were probably coming pretty soon, like in our lifetime, after generations of people saying it’ll happen in our lifetime and being wrong. We somehow thought we would be the generation where it was right. And just, I don’t know, we really like doing deep dives, and we think nuance is interesting, and by the end, we didn’t set out to be the cold water people, but research made us the cold water people, I guess.
Ross Kenyon: Spiritually, have you recovered from that? Are you okay with this identity now? Is it still scary?
Zach Weinersmith: Do people hate you? Yeah, I... That’s a tough question. The real thing we had to make peace with as researchers was that there are people who are really, really smart, definitely smarter than us in any kind of typical sense of smart, who just say stuff that’s totally wrong and often unmoored or opposite to. Like fact, or like, you know, the analysis of people who’s actually studied things. And so like, once you accept that, it’s a little easier to be like, I guess I can just say what seems to me to be obviously true.
But like, that was really anxious for us. I think it was only like two, two and a half years into research that we kind of felt like with the combination of fluency and just sort of concern about the quality of research in some directions that we were cool saying, maybe not.
Kelly Weinersmith: I remember when we were writing, there were so many times that we would spend all day writing and taking notes and then we’d go on a walk to sort of brain dump what we had learned to each other. And there were so many times in that walk where we’d be like, but what are we missing? Like, how are people... People keep saying this and they seem smarter than us. And so what do we not understand? And then so often I... We ended up deciding that they were the ones who were wrong or like, you know, why hasn’t anybody why isn’t anyone talking about how little carbon there is on the moon and how we’re carbon based life forms and we’re going to need that.
And I don’t know. So we had a lot of those moments.
Ross Kenyon: People in climate, they either like the idea of a backup plan for humanity or they hate it because it makes them think that people aren’t going to actually try on Earth. But it seems like maybe it doesn’t matter because it’s a worse plan than staying here basically by any metric. Can you steel man it and make the best case for why we should have a backup plan off Earth and then you can ruin it for everyone?
Zach Weinersmith: Yeah, let me ruin it. Okay, so if we’re gonna steal man it, I would say the least bad version of we should have an offerable presence goes something like this. If you look, so assumption one, you would like the human species to continue indefinitely, which most of us agree with. Humans are like on balance, okay. Then the second question is how do you do that? And so one thing you could point out, and space people I think correctly point this out, well, if you look at species that do pretty well on Earth, they tend to have a wide distribution, a lot of, you know, Genetic diversity.
And so, you know, plausibly spreading to other planets provides some of those things to the human species. The question, though, becomes, you know, one, does that process actually provide additional danger to the human species? And two, any time in the short or medium term, is a dollar better spent on that project or on something like an extra solar panel outside of Tucson? And, you know, if you just do the numbers, you don’t even have to be able to add to see that it’s clearly not the case. And because, as you described, space is basically worse than advertised.
And by which I mean, when you read about it in like pop articles or see a movie, it usually seems like it’s just kind of like going to the desert. Maybe there’s no air and that’s not great, but you just pop on your little bulb helmet. But actually just like it’s trying to kill you in many ways, seen and unseen, that are very hard to deal with.
Kelly Weinersmith: I mean, but, you know, so as you mentioned, we are the bucket of cold water people. So I’d also say that a lot of those people who are arguing we shouldn’t invest in space because we need to be thinking about the Earth are sort of are also wrong because they’re over time. They’re overestimating how much money we’re actually spending on this going to space stuff. And so in particular, so most of the money is being spent on things like sending satellites in orbit around Earth. And a lot of those satellites get information about what’s happening on Earth, which we then use to understand what’s happening on Earth and make decisions about it.
So I’d say that’s money that’s well spent. And then money going to settling space or going to get to Mars is very little. And these days, it’s a lot of private companies that are spending that money as opposed to the government. And NASA’s budget is very small, especially compared to things like the defense budget. And so I don’t really feel like there’s much tension between these two things because it’s not like that much money is going to space and certainly very little to settling Mars.
Ross Kenyon: Did you guys ever read David Grinspoon? Do you like his stuff?
Kelly Weinersmith: No, I haven’t.
Zach Weinersmith: What would be the book?
Ross Kenyon: Earth in Human Hands is the one that we haven’t talked about this in forever, but he’s an astrobiologist, I believe is his title. Really smart guy, but he talks about Fermi Paradox and why don’t we see aliens and reasons for that and great filter events. And basically, humanity needs to learn how to create a permanent civilization on Earth. And that’s sort of our job right now. And it’s unclear if we’re going to be able to do it at all. And one of the best arguments that I’ve heard in your book that I had put to me was it’s pretty easy to throw asteroids.
And so making it cheap to do so is adding a huge amount of risk to Earth. It’s not actually de-risking the process at all. Terrorists could pretty easily do that. Any sort of rogue faction could, given the will. So do we want to open up another vector like that when we can’t even determine basic things here? I think people don’t talk about that nearly enough.
Zach Weinersmith: Or an accident.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, or an accident.
Zach Weinersmith: Yeah, yeah. But so Carl Sagan and Ostro had a paper, I think in 1994, that was talking about this in particular. And the basic argument, it was like a short one, it was a monograph, but it was essentially saying, there’s this very frequent claim that we need to develop the ability to deflect an asteroid, but the ability... Deflect away implies the ability to deflect into. And so then the question becomes, well, what makes you safer gaining that ability or not? Especially when you consider that those like dinosaur annihilating asteroids are, you know, one in 50 million year events.
Like the odds are extremely low of that happening. And so what are you more scared of? Putting that power into the hands of private actors who use Twitter a lot? Or, I mean, X, I’m sorry. Or just going without and buying that like one at 50 million reverse lottery ticket year after year. It’s at least not obvious. I would say, again, to put the position of the other side that we’ve encountered, which I still don’t think is a very strong one, that will say things like, well, we’ve had nuclear weapons for a long time.
We haven’t blown each other up. I’ve encountered this argument for space and whatnot. A, there have been something like half dozen times when it almost happened. We’re just not living in the world where it did. But also, the way I think about it is if you have two guys pointing guns at each other, And they haven’t shot each other yet. It doesn’t imply adding 18 more guys makes everybody equally safe, right? And so like, you know, a big part of what governments do in international law is try to prevent more governments from getting these weapons because of the general agreement, which seems obvious to me that having more nuclear weapons spread to more players is more dangerous.
And so likewise, if you imagine a world where you can push million tonnes of objects around space, net powers in the hands of every nation on Earth and some large companies and like Elon, You know, that seems to be a pretty dangerous world. We haven’t, to my knowledge, gotten a good comeback from that.
Ross Kenyon: We’re not going to have the overview effect overpower our sensibilities here. We’re all going to learn to love one another and act as one. That’s not going to happen once we’re in the way.
Kelly Weinersmith: No, no. Does your audience know what the overview effect is? Some of them don’t.
Ross Kenyon: Why don’t you tell them?
Kelly Weinersmith: Sure. So this idea is mostly championed by a philosopher named Frank White. And the idea is that when you are up in space looking down at Earth, you can see many things, some of them including that, you know, the atmosphere is this thin blue ribbon and it’s very... And so we were able to interview a cosmonaut and asked him, Can you see borders up there? And he said, obviously, you can see South Korea and North Korea because North Korea has no lights at night. And what is it, India and Pakistan, they also have lights all along their borders, patrolling their borders.
And so you can, the problems on Earth are visible everywhere. In space as well. And also, what good does it do you to land on Earth and ignore the fact that we differ in like respect for human rights and things that really matter? And also there was a study that was done looking at Improvements in a variety of different like personality traits for people who had gone to space and they were comparing them to different groups who had also done the same survey. And they found that going to space has similar good effects on your outlook on life as does having a baby.
So new moms were very similar in their outlook to people who had gone to space. And that’s great. Having kids is a profound experience. But like there are plenty of moms who aren’t very nice. And like it doesn’t seem...
Ross Kenyon: Oh my god, the letters are going to come flowing in now. I know.
Kelly Weinersmith: Well, actually, there are some mobs who aren’t nice. But anyway, so basically, there have been a few studies that have tried to quantify it, the experimental design and the I love the right stuff. I think it’s a great book, but they also don’t seem Most spiritually enlightened of people.
Zach Weinersmith: Oh, my God. I can’t remember when we put this in the book. There’s a quote. Deke Sleighton, who was chief of the astronauts, who apparently not the nicest guy all the time, but he had this quote that was like, oh, we used to do so much drinking and flying back in the 50s. What is this?
Ross Kenyon: They were tough back then, you know? Yeah, I mean, they’re all just fighter jocks and experimental pilots and Chuck Yeager, and they’re just hard drinking. And yeah, there’s a lot of drunk bullying, I remember, in that book. It does not sound to be a very safe profession, probably alcohol-related, but also everything else in there.
Kelly Weinersmith: Well, and John Glenn came back from space and then was at a Senate committee meeting about whether or not women should be able to go. And he pretty much was like, I don’t know, I feel more comfortable with the women being at home. And so, you know, he... He had this amazing overview, but he was still comfortable saying, oh no, there are these divisions in life and women shouldn’t be up there.
Ross Kenyon: That’s probably the most succinct, because you would think that you would have a strongly universalistic ethos coming off of the overview. You don’t see women from up there.
Zach Weinersmith: Yeah, you can’t see men and women up there either. A very good claim. One broadly, there are a lot of claims that something about being in space does something for the people who go or like those of us who get to watch them. And there is a kind of trivially true version of this, which is like, it’s really cool to see a guy on the moon. And it’s no doubt amazing, like almost every astronaut memoir, probably literally all of them talk about just looking down at Earth for like hours as like one of the favorite leisure activities.
There’s no doubt, we don’t want to say there’s not a kind of transcendent magical, beautiful experience, but there’s not, you know, it doesn’t turn humans into, you know, stages or saints or any of these other things. Likewise, it doesn’t turn nations into the equivalent, right? So there’s a similar claim that, well, we’ll cooperate more if we do stuff in space and First of all, I don’t even think it passes the smell test given our relationship with Russia, you know, with whom we meaning we meaning the US and the West generally have been operating in a space station together for 20 years now.
And relationships have just deteriorated in that period. Maybe we had more astronauts would have been different, but it seems unlikely. And oh, go ahead.
Kelly Weinersmith: And the International Space Station is the most expensive human-made thing ever. So, like, the most expensive thing we’ve ever made and decades of working together didn’t buy us keeping Russia out of Ukraine. Like, so I don’t know what we’re supposed to be doing or what we’re doing wrong.
Ross Kenyon: Maybe it cut them out of Poland. You don’t know that. It wasn’t NATO. It was the Dutch.
Kelly Weinersmith: I guess we had seven astronauts. That’s right.
Zach Weinersmith: No, but it’s really, I had a guy who was like a, I don’t want to say hugely prominent, but a fairly well-followed space guy who right as Russia was on the cusp invading Ukraine was like, we’ve got to get more astronauts up there. So then something’s going to happen. You’re like, they’re literally like masked on the border. And the leader of these people has a theory It’s a theory of history that involves the need to take over Ukraine that has nothing to do with whether people are sharing some bread in space.
It’s just absurd the more you think about it. And there’s a great book called The Politics of Outer Space by Von Behnck. 1996, where he basically says the evidence up to that point, presumably it extends till now, is that nations cooperate in space when they’re cooperating on Earth, not the other way around. Right. So when we’re in detente, we did stuff together. Right. When things were nice again after the Soviet Union fell, we did things together. And that’s where we get the ISS. Right. So it’s just the other way around.
It’s reverse causality.
Ross Kenyon: Is that just because people are enamored with these? They’re like charismatic megafauna kind of things, but they’re for projects where people get so obsessed with the elephants, they forget that the small microbes make up a huge portion of biomass that is super important.
Zach Weinersmith: Yeah, there’s very good evidence that the public generally overestimates the importance of humans in space for just about anything. It’s very good PR stuff. I mean, if you look at the cases in particular when we cooperated in the 70s and then the 90s, there were good sort of mutual PR reasons to do it, which are probably too boring to get into. But it was like you could think of like 1975, we go up. Which is a bad time for both space programs because the U. S. doesn’t have its shuttle ready yet, won’t for a while, and Apollo was canceled.
Meanwhile, the Soviets kind of look like chumps because they lost the moon race. And so it’s this kind of mutual, actually, we’re both doing cool stuff in space. So when you get into sort of pedestrian details, the awe kind of melts away. I’m not opposed to awe or inspiration, but these bigger claims about national peace or whatever it’s supposed to produce are kind of absurd.
Ross Kenyon: So you’re not opposed to humanity going to space or even developing settlements on other planets. The term that you use for this is wait and go big. That’s ultimately the summation of your thinking here is that we just won’t have, I don’t know, I’m actually not even going to feed this to you. Why wait and go big? You did the hard work, damn it. I invited you onto this.
Kelly Weinersmith: Well, so, right. So there’s a whole 400-page argument for that. So wait and go big. So first of all, the waiting part is that there’s so much that we don’t know. And this really surprised us when we started the research for the book. So we had assumed, you know, we’ve had many space stations orbiting Earth for decades. We probably know all the medical stuff that we need to know by now. But it turns out we don’t because those space stations have been orbiting inside of the magnetosphere and space has different radiation than you get on Earth.
And the magnetosphere stops it mostly before it gets to the International Space Station. So we don’t know how space radiation impacts. And we definitely don’t know how space radiation would impact, you know, developing fetuses or something like that. And then we also don’t really understand if partial gravity is bad. So astronauts on these rotating, these orbiting space stations are essentially in free fall. So they’re experiencing something like zero G. We know that’s bad. For example, their hips degrade at about like 1% bone density per month. Which is pretty fast. And so, which is partly why they’re only up there usually for a couple months.
The longest stay has been 437 days by a cosmonaut. And we, you know, if you get to Mars, maybe that drops down to like 0. 1% or maybe it goes away entirely, but... Now, instead of months to like less than two years, you’ve got a lifetime. And so if it drops down to 0. 1%, but you’re talking about decades, what is that going to do? Like when it comes time to, you know, have your baby, are your hips going to hold up okay? Like I wouldn’t want to be the first woman keeping my fingers crossed, hoping that I’ve got enough like bone density to make this labor thing work.
That would be scary. And so, you know, we don’t understand partial gravity well because the experiments have mostly happened in this free fall environment. So the medical data is not there. We also don’t really have closed loop ecosystems figured out. So your audience might be familiar with Biosphere, which was this huge three plus acre experiment in the 90s in Arizona, which was like, What a mixed bag. I know a lot of people are like, oh, it was a total failure. Zach and I, well, actually that also, like it was meant to do a lot of two year runs.
And so the first two year runs had some problems. They needed to pipe in oxygen. They lost something like 10 to 16% of their body mass. They split into two hateful factions and were spitting on each other. The only kind of scorpion that kills people in the United States was accidentally introduced. These are all things you’d like to fix. But there were things that could have been fixable, like a bunch of their fruit trees hadn’t matured yet, but by the next two year run, they would have matured. But instead of getting to the next two year run, the experiment pretty much got shut down because of management problems and a bunch of other issues.
And so we never got this like... Replicated experiment that was the initial goal. And that data might have been helpful. But so we don’t know how to run these systems. And also on Mars, it’s going to be much smaller than three acres. And the smaller systems where they try to recycle things like the breathing gases and the waste, and they use that to grow plants and stuff like that. Those are pretty good. But like there was a situation or there was one of these things set up in China. And where they are right now is like they had three people in there.
And they were three like big guys and they were breathing too much air. So the carbon dioxide levels were getting high. So they had to swap out two big guys for two smaller women and then it worked. And that is just like not an option on Mars, right? And so we need to like get all of the equations figured out so that we know how to make these like recycling systems work well and work reliably. Because if you’re on Mars, only every two years does a launch window open. So if you leave for Mars and you get there, Probably help is at least two years away.
And it’s about six months to get there and six months to get back. So you’re really on your own. And it’s always going to be expensive to ship stuff out there. And it’s going to be hard to get those resources. So you’re going to need to recycle. Okay, so that’s the wait part is that we don’t know that stuff. The go big part has to do with things like, you know, having enough people for genetic diversity so that you don’t have inbreeding problems. And then also... Like this was probably the most unpleasant and uncomfortable thing that we read.
So people were arguing that like, you know, when you start these systems, there’s not going to be a lot of people there. It’s going to be small. And so everybody’s going to have to work really hard, like all hours, all hands on deck. And so one of the things we learned from Biosphere is that subsistence farming and keeping these sorts of systems going takes like something like 10 hours of work, almost seven days a week. And that’s just like to grow the food. And so people will argue like we’re just not going to be able to handle having anybody around who can’t pull their weight.
And so some people say that we’re just going to have to like let natural selection run its course. And this sort of intersects with the like we don’t really know about how space impacts the human body. So like if it looks like someone’s going to be born with a disability, we just let nature run its course, which is, of course. A euphemism for dead babies and letting babies die. And then another paper was saying that we have to change our threshold for what we consider valuable life. So if you can’t contribute to the farm, we can’t maybe support you.
We can’t have you around. And so our argument is if we can’t wait and have a big enough system with enough people and enough redundancies that if somebody comes and, you know, if somebody falls off of the ladder and breaks their back, That you can just say, that’s cool, Joe. We still love you. We’re going to feed you. It doesn’t matter that you can farm anymore. We’re not pushing you out the airlock. And so for this and for a bunch of economic reasons, also, we go into the many reasons in the book.
It just seems to us like there’s a lot of stuff we need to figure out. And we should wait till we can do this in a way that retains the progress we’ve made on human rights so far.
Ross Kenyon: Well, one solution to this, too, is you can do the Kurt Vonnegut. If you will have died on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.
Zach Weinersmith: So let people sign waivers.
Ross Kenyon: Do the Mars reality show that never was. What even happened with that, by the way? I remember when that happened. But why not just let me... Mars One?
Zach Weinersmith: Yeah, being a Mars pioneer.
Ross Kenyon: And if you die, you may be eugenic out of existence. And sorry, that’s... People will make that trade, and if it’s on TV, they’ll be immortal.
Zach Weinersmith: Yes, so you’re referring to Mars One, which was a proposal that got some funding out of the Netherlands, and the essential concept was we’ll start a Mars base as a reality show, which, just to be clear, was always ludicrous. There’s no way it was going to happen for a variety of reasons, like just basic tech stuff, never mind that everyone would definitely die. But the interesting fact to come out of that is, you know, we’re often asked, like, well, where would you get enough people to do this? And it turns out there are plenty of people willing to bid their families farewell to go die on Mars.
So that’s good data. That’s that’s in the bank. As to your question about the waiver, so where we disagree about that is essentially, you know, like if an adult who’s compus mentis wants to sign a waiver to go die somewhere on Mars, like to my mind, that’s their business. You know, you want to make sure they had full information about what they were up against and in their right mind, but you know, that’s their business. But when you talk about a settlement, that’s different from talking about just sending some tough guys to a base, right?
A settlement is a place where people raise families and have a permanent existence. So now you’re talking about children who didn’t volunteer to go, right? And so to my mind, it makes it something like if you have a couple and they want to hang out in Chernobyl, that’s kind of weird, but okay. But if they want to like dig a hole and have children in it, now there are world questions, you know? And so especially when prima facie, and so Kelly didn’t have time to get into this, but like there are lots of good reasons to believe there will be a higher than normal rate of problems for children born in this environment due to radiation and the weird atmosphere you’ll have to be in and a bunch of other stuff.
And so, you know, why would you purposefully create a world where people are likely to need more help and not be able to get it?
Kelly Weinersmith: And I’d argue that the premise that you’re going to be able to have a popular reality TV show for a very long time is a bit shaky, too. So, you know, when you had Boots on the Moon for the first time, everybody watched that. Right. That was like the most watched thing ever. But by Apollo 12, almost no one was watching. And when Apollo 13 took off, really, like, no one cared.
Zach Weinersmith: And this is months later. This is not like, yeah.
Kelly Weinersmith: It dropped off real fast because most of being in space is, like, fixing the toilet, cleaning the mold that’s growing behind the wall, like, just boring stuff. But, you know, on Apollo 13, when the oxygen canisters blew, then the whole world was paying attention. But it only took... Like, you know, we’re working on like what the third trip where we were going to have boots on the moon and already interest was waning. And so, you know, I’m sure that like season one of Mars One, the reality TV show would have had good, you know, good sales or whatever.
But unless it was like a lot of, I don’t know, cheating or, you know, it would have to go back. It wouldn’t be about Mars at that point because living in space is kind of boring.
Zach Weinersmith: The ultra-optimistic, zany, low-priced version of a Mars mission, not a settlement of mission, is easily in the tens of billions. So you’re going to have to get some good ad revenue for that Mars reality show.
Ross Kenyon: Sociologically, is there some understanding of how many people it would be necessary, not just for the genetic diversity component of it, But also for the getting along. I mean, do we ever get along? Bigger numbers has just meant more chaos in some ways, but there’s probably some sweet number, right?
Zach Weinersmith: You would think so. We actually tried really hard to find that case. I think if you go back a little in history, there are people who believe there’s a kind of linear, you know, when you have 10 people this and 100 people that and 1000 people that we like right up in group dynamics. And this sort of stuff. And we came to believe it’s just not predictive. There’s not a kind of neat relationship you can have. I mean, there’s obviously trivially going to be difference between two people and two million, of course.
But there’s not some kind of obvious lesson you can always draw. Some people want to talk about Dunbar’s number. My understanding is the science around that is not predictable. Perfect. There’s some interesting circumstantial stuff around that area. There are groups like the Hutterites, which we wrote a paper that talked about them a little. They’re a communal Anabaptist group, sometimes mistaken for the Amish, but they have a very different culture. And they do actually split off into groups around 150, which is very sort of beguiling. But we weren’t able to find a kind of neat, clean line that’s sort of predictive in that way.
So basically, we don’t believe there is one.
Kelly Weinersmith: But we did end up thinking that it would be nice if you had more than just one community, because very often, when we were reading about the Kibbutzim and the Hutterites and a bunch of other different communes, and then when we were reading about company towns, a thing that makes all of those communities work better is the ability to leave. So if the workers can leave and go somewhere else, they’ve got a little bit of leverage against their boss. And if your company has a situation where there’s some tension between the people, Having some of them being able to leave makes it easier to make decisions in the commune.
And so, you know, if you could start a bunch of different communities at once, then people would have some options and that might reduce some stress and some tension and make things work a little bit better because you’re probably not getting back to Earth easily.
Zach Weinersmith: So this is so, yeah, so to our way of thinking, like that sort of thing is the more interesting question than some kind of exact number, because so, for example, in the case of company towns, what economists really talk about is How much monopsony power a company has. I don’t need to get into detail, but essentially when people are trying to capture how much companies might have power to set conditions and employees they wouldn’t be able to set in competitive environments. One question they asked is labor mobility, which is essentially like, can you go elsewhere and get some other job?
And, you know, it’s not an easy thing to measure, but there are ways to measure it. But if you look at Mars, right, so it’s like there’s clearly a limit on labor in the sense that it’s very hard to get back to Earth. There are times when you simply can’t go because it’s not good for orbital mechanics reasons. The launch window is not open. But also, even if you are on Mars, even if you’re like in Kelly and my ideal scenario where there are multiple options for places you can go, it’s not obvious they could take you because these are settlements that have to be rated for a certain amount of oxygen, food, water production, right?
So it’s not like if you’re like, I’m going to Texas, you don’t have to say, I hope they have enough air for me in Austin, right? But if you’re talking about an A company town, or I’m sorry, a Mars-based scenario, that is something you have to ask. And so this goes back to the go big aspect. There are just a bunch of problems that get ameliorated by scale. The healthcare stuff we were talking about earlier is ameliorated because you can have more division of labor. But then there is this kind of surprising other thing where there are reasons to believe you might have a reduced plausibility of worker exploitation if you had enough people that workers could have options.
Ross Kenyon: I was so surprised that y’all were remarkably fair to company towns as a concept because they have such a poor reputation. Everyone thinks of the I sold my soul to the company store and that’s sort of like the end of the conversation.
Zach Weinersmith: I do think that’s, yeah, in my experience, that was actually like a very nervous part for us. We did talk to experts on this stuff to sort of cool our nerves, but it’s like anything. It’s like once you dig in, it’s much more complicated. I think the deal is when people hit your company town, they tend to think of the very worst excesses of company town labor exploitation as in like the Cold Wars in Appalachia. Yeah. And it just turns out if you read like some of the data, narrative oral history, like most places and most times aren’t like that.
And it’s also worth remembering that just like 1920s labor relations compared to now are just much worse in general. It’s not a company town thing. It’s an America thing where many parts of the world. Right. And the other thing, though, is like it’s really valuable to say to yourself not was it good or bad, but when did it go bad? And when did it go good? And it turns out like, you know, the Cold War’s Battle of Blair Mountain, maybe people have heard about. You’re talking about, you know, very particular conditions, right?
Two things were happening then. One was that the price of coal was way down. So when there are problems for the company, you’re much more likely to get labor strike. That’s worth remembering for any proposal for a space station, right? So if you’re relying on the reality show to keep all the workers happy with all that cashola, but it turns out there’s a better reality show like in Baja, you’ve got a problem. But the other thing is, it was also, and I believe I have this right, the Battle of Blair Mountain occurred during an attempt to unionize.
And unionization attempts were also notoriously dangerous for labor relations. That’s not to say they’re good or bad. I’m pretty in favor of union formation. The switch from non-union to union labor was when you tended to get this really dangerous strife. And so that is good data to have if you are on purpose or for structural reasons going to create a company town on Mars. And what we really want to stream when we talk about this is you can think about these things. You can answer questions. You don’t just have to speculate about how it might go.
And yeah, so unfortunately that makes us like... I remember when we were writing that chapter, I was like, we’re going to have no friends left when this is gone.
Kelly Weinersmith: We’re going to make no one be like, oh, guys, company towns weren’t as bad as everybody thinks they are. And I’m like, no one’s going to want to be friends with us anymore. But anyway.
Ross Kenyon: I respect it. I respect looking at the data here, which I think my attitude as I’ve read more of your work has softened because I’m optimistic dispositionally. So reading your work in some ways is bringing me back to earth. And you need that. You need it done in the right kind of way where I think you agree that you would like these things to work out. You have a lot of sympathy for them. You want to make sure they’re done well and at least don’t make things worse. And therefore you need Right.
Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
Kelly Weinersmith: That’s what we’re trying to do, I think. Yeah, it’s a hard thing to do, and it’s not necessarily always something that people want to hear, which is part of why we want to do the humor as much as possible. Sort of, you know, to make the pill a little easier to swallow. But yeah, I mean, I think for so many things in life, it’s not black or white, it’s gray. And we, you know, try to explain the sort of complicated in-between things.
Zach Weinersmith: I think there are structural things about that. Notoriously, algorithms tend to favor people saying stupid stuff. There’s also a more subtle thing, which is... So we’re people who have our own careers. And so that means we were able to go to a publisher and say, give us three years, which if you don’t know this, but most pop science authors can’t do that. And so if you’ve ever read a book that felt a little recycled or was too much relying on interviews with experts, it’s partially because that’s just what you have to do.
You’re generally not allowed to get the kind of depth we were able to get because we’re in a position to ask for it. So some of that lack of nuance maybe just like people don’t have the time to like spend years torturing themselves over the data like we were quote unquote lucky to be able to do.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, so space is also inhospitable as you’ve alluded to. But people think that Earth is dying and we should start over somewhere else. You also challenge this idea. Why is this wrong?
Kelly Weinersmith: Like the worst version of Earth that you could imagine, like climate change, maxing out the predictions, that planet is so much better than anywhere else in space. You know, like maybe even if you drop some nuclear bombs, Earth is still better than Mars. You could still go outside in most places and take a breath of air and it wouldn’t kill you, you know, like. So the idea that, you know, like billionaires are going to escape to Mars while Earth dies, if you don’t like billionaires, you should let them go. Like Mars has 1% of Earth’s atmosphere.
That’s it. And that atmosphere is made of carbon dioxide, not entirely, but mostly. And so if you’re going to go outside, you have to like put on a spacesuit. But first you have to pre-breathe oxygen for like at least 30 minutes, because if you go outside without doing that, the nitrogen in your blood is going to bubble out and kill you. You’re going to end up, you know, dying with big hemorrhages in your brain. Also, the soil out there, it’s actually just these like sharp little tiny little specks that are sort of like little knives.
And maybe they’re going to like if they get in your lungs, maybe they’re going to give us something like stone grinder’s disease where your lungs get scarred and then it’s hard to breathe. Uh, also that soil is 1% perchlorate and there’s geologists out there who are like clutching their chest as I keep calling it soil. I know soil is maybe not the right, it’s regolith. Um, but anyway, so that regolith is 1% perchlorate, which is a chemical that binds to your thyroid and messes up your thyroid hormones, which are important for things like, uh, Blood pressure and heart rate and stuff like that.
So you’re going to have to worry about that constantly. There’s the radiation you have to worry about and the solution to the radiation usually involves burying your habitat under meters of that regolith. And that also helps you with temperature swings and concerns about things like debris from space coming in and puncturing your habitat and killing everybody inside quickly. So it’s just it’s just not going to be pleasant. It’s going to be tough. And it’s hard for Zach and I to imagine any scenario on Earth making Earth less pleasant than anywhere else in space.
Zach Weinersmith: The one thing I would add to that, too, is it’s like if your goal is strictly to kind of start over and not be doing our stuff and be safe from whatever awful thing you imagine we did to the surface of the planet, just go to the bottom of the ocean. Right. Dig down for like two miles. Right. I mean, because if it’s as bad as Mars, you’re already on the hook for your own air supply. You’re going to have to have like fission reactors to run the lights to grow the plants.
It’s going to be much easier to just go down a cave on Earth to spare yourself than to go, you know, 20 million miles to another planet.
Ross Kenyon: Well, that’s one of the questions I wrote. Does it make sense for us to, if we wanted a backup plan, should we do like in, I don’t know if you saw that downsizing film, the Alexsandra Payne one, should we burrow inside the earth? Is that a possible solution here? Should we be exploring the other extreme environments on earth better first? Does that help us? Or is that just also boondoggle-ish?
Zach Weinersmith: I mean, that’s not a question we get into. We’re not experts on, you know, I would say if you said yourself or if like a government said, hey, we’re going to spend 20 billion a year on creating a little backup reserve of humans because the odds aren’t so great up here on the surface, then a decent bet might be digging underground or finding a very deep underground cave that could be sealed off. Wouldn’t be a wonderful way to survive, but maybe. Of course, even if you do that, the goal would be to come back up to the surface when things have blown over a little.
And, or likewise, you could do pretty deep under the ocean. I think it’d be fairly hard to cause, you know, damage to a sealed ecosystem under the ocean. As complicated as that would be.
Ross Kenyon: We think both of those things would definitely be easier than doing Mars.
Zach Weinersmith: If you’re on the bottom of the ocean, there are problems. Salt water is very corrosive. But on the other hand, like, there’s fish and stuff. Or you could eat some angler fish. I don’t know how tasty it is. But like, you know, you compare it to Mars, which is just like made of poison. It’s not a bad bet. You know, I would say probably, if the goal was to have a Mars base, it would totally be reasonable to set up facilities in these places or on Antarctica to work out how to do it.
We talk about that kind of thing a little bit toward the end of the book. But whether that’s, going back to the beginning of our conversation, whether that’s the best thing to do with the dollar, if your goal is to spare the species, I think is quite questionable.
Kelly Weinersmith: And I think you need to keep in mind the question of timescales, too. So, like, if you are anticipating that the surface of Earth is not going to be habitable for humans in, like, 20 years, forget it. Don’t try Mars. There’s no way you’re going to make Mars self-sustaining. And, like, so, you know, Mars for generations is going to require things like computer chips to be shipped from Earth. There’s just no way we’re going to be making stuff like that in the near term. And so, you know, a lot of if Earth died in 20 years and you had some people on Mars, there’d just be a bit of a delay before they died, too.
And so you just you need to think about how long it would take to make Mars self-sustaining. And to us, we think that would take generations.
Ross Kenyon: What if I said a convoluted sentence that name checked the blockchain enabled AI called. And we ship that out there.
Kelly Weinersmith: But then you could publish that anywhere because we’ve seen tonnes of that.
Zach Weinersmith: You can get it said, look, it would be great. No, funny thing, there’s actually a book, one of the books we read, I think the Mars Society put it out. It was like, you know, and I don’t think they were ruling on whether these were good ideas. I don’t want to like impute in the society, but they put out like a sort of collection of proposals for Like a thousand person settlements on Mars. I think the game was assume these really low prices for getting stuff to Mars compared to today.
How would you set it up? And one of the shocking things is blockchain is all over the place. As I recall, and don’t quote me on this, but it was very present in a way proposals for how to run the municipal government were not. We’ll run everything on blockchain because it’ll just finally a chance to run public utilities on blockchain so people can’t cheat.
Ross Kenyon: Somehow by the magic of blockchain.
Zach Weinersmith: And so, yeah, I would say the more plausible bit of the thing you said, which I know was a joke, was about AI because we do, you know, one of the books we looked into was a proposal by Casey Hanmer, who’s an aerospace guy who I think disagrees with a lot of what we say, but he did a kind of everything, most things, 98% of what we say. He did a write-up on trying to estimate how many people you’d need for autarky, meaning like economic self-reliance, no need for Earth on Mars.
And he came in with what we would call pretty low numbers compared to other estimates. The numbers, especially the very low end ones, which I think were like in the hundreds of thousands range, assumed pretty big advancements in robotics. So what I guess I’d want to say is, you know, there is some plausible world in which, you know, we all have 80 robot servants all the time that certainly was going to make Mars a lot easier.
Ross Kenyon: But I don’t know, it’s very speculative and it’s such a different world.
Zach Weinersmith: What I want to say is at that point, Mars becomes a cool thing to do because we’re such an advanced, ultra-rich civilization. It’s certainly not a sort of thing that will perfect us. It’s not a thing we need to do urgently to save ourselves. We’re already in paradise at that point.
Ross Kenyon: I also think... Oh, sorry. What?
Kelly Weinersmith: I wasn’t sure that’s, I’m not sure that’s paradise, but sorry, what were you saying?
Zach Weinersmith: That’s great. I’m going to have my 80 robots carrying me around all day and serving me snacks.
Ross Kenyon: No, that’s fine. I’d be worried about some sort of moon is a harsh mistress thing with AI then. I mean, I could also throw asteroids and decide humanity is a bad influence on the universe and should be exterminated. That’s a good point.
Zach Weinersmith: By the time we have that, I think we’ve just lost. In that sense, it’s not worth worrying about.
Ross Kenyon: We just wave the white flag. And then we’re talking about mineshaft gaps, like in Dr. Strangelove, and we’re burrowing into the Earth’s crust.
Zach Weinersmith: God, where do we go from here?
Ross Kenyon: Where does one go after that? Podcast-wise, humanity-wise.
Zach Weinersmith: Oh, podcast-wise. Yeah. I don’t know how close we are to the end, but we did partially with the insistence of our editor have a kind of uplifting odage of the book.
Ross Kenyon: Take us there. I think that’s a good place to start.
Zach Weinersmith: Kelly, do you want to take it since I’ve been talking too much?
Kelly Weinersmith: We’ve been talking plenty, too. So we end the book on, like, here are some directions for future research. But we really hit hard on the point that, like, all of this research is awesome. Like, trying to solve these problems is super cool. Like, a lot of these health problems would probably best be solved by setting up a research station on the moon and, like, running rodent colonies out there for generations and seeing what happens. That would be a super fun experiment to be part of. Figuring out the equations. And so the work that remains to be done is all super interesting, fascinating, fun work.
We also point out that we are not powerful people. So just us saying no doesn’t stop anybody from going. We think the technology will stop people from going. We didn’t get into international law, but there’s a lot of interesting international law problems that could be addressed. And so the work that remains to be done is fun, if we can figure out how to get it funded. And we don’t think that we will never have a Mars settlement. We think humans will always think this is an awesome idea. And we just hope that we wait until we’ve answered enough of these scientific and technological questions before we do it, and that hopefully we can find a peaceful way to do it so we don’t increase strife back here on Earth.
That’s as positive as the Weinersmith usually get.
Zach Weinersmith: Absolutely. I was going to say we often have people who like lump us in with this idea of like so they’re saying we shouldn’t go until their laundry list of everything ever that they want out of the world is done. But it’s actually a fairly specific list, which seems to us to be sort of ethically mandatory, like no experimenting on babies. So and as I said, it’s all cool stuff.
Ross Kenyon: So spend your career on it. I think it’s fine to push the pause button on that and to say we’ve got other things to worry on. Or maybe when there’s mutually reinforcing research interest, I’m sure some of the stuff that we’re working on for climate change will clearly have an impact on how to terraform other celestial objects, right? Like that will have an impact probably.
Kelly Weinersmith: And we’re not proposing that we stop exploration, you know, like keep sending rovers to Mars and maybe put boots on Mars if you think you can get people there safely and back. But, you know, don’t let them have babies out there.
Zach Weinersmith: Yeah, and I also think, you know, the increase we’re having now in space spending, both by governments and corporations, is probably overall a net good for environmental causes. I mean, obviously there’s, you know, rocket launchers aren’t environmentally great, not yet. They could be made that way, but they’re not now. But, you know, like NOAA uses a lot of satellite data. Satellite lets us, you know, monitor things going wrong, make sure people are abiding by, like... Environmental law. It like helps, you know, find reserves of species that we didn’t know were there.
And so, you know, it’s lots of value. In addition, it also, you know, probably makes our economies more efficient. So there really is, you know, it’s not like it’s space versus the environment. It’s just the opposite. Space is very beneficial, I think, overall for the environment. There are particular things you can complain about. But there’s so much, you know, Cool stuff that’s being brought to the table for both these causes right now. So I don’t see the antagonism. I think that’s like, I think people can bring up as a discussion and it’s kind of an in-group identifier, but I don’t think it’s seriously there.
Ross Kenyon: Well, the fastest way to solve the environmental cost of rocketry is a space elevator, right? And that tech is freely available at this time.
Zach Weinersmith: Yeah, I think we read about it in our last book, and the estimate, which even this would probably not work, is like you need 100,000 kilometer long individual carbon nanotubes with no imperfections. I think at the time it was up to a foot and a half was the record, and I don’t think that’s been beaten since, because there’s no reason, right?
Kelly Weinersmith: So buy both of our books. That’s right, that’s right.
Ross Kenyon: Kelly, your voice is just, I listen to both of them in addition to having a hard copy, and so your voice is just For some of the podcasts, I’m like, why does she sound so familiar? I was like, because I’ve spent 20-something hours listening to her speak. That’s why. People do that to me sometimes, too. They’re like, I’ve been listening to this show for a long time, and that’s really surreal. So, wow.
Zach Weinersmith: Have you ever had a couple of times done live radio with an NPR person or something who I’d listen to a lot, and it’s just so weird because it’s live, so you’re just listening to the radio, and then all of a sudden they’re like, and now I’m talking to Zach, and you’re like, oh my god, I’ve just lost my mind. Like the radio is calling me out and wants to talk to me.
Ross Kenyon: Pretty fun. But yeah, I also, I don’t, and that’s one of the reasons why I think what you’re doing is important. I think popular science work and science education is important because even I’m fairly well informed. I’m not a dullard and yet sorting through what is boosterism and what is actually real. It’s so hard for all of these.
Zach Weinersmith: It’s really hard. You know, one of the things with that, I mean, I felt like we were reading in space intensely to people for two years before we felt fluid. Like you could talk about an epoch in space and we could have footing and opinion. And most people don’t get to do that kind of like that level of work for a book like this.
Kelly Weinersmith: And I’d say with Soonish, every single chapter we had picked it because we felt like we knew something about it and we knew what the chapter was going to be about. And after like a month of both of us reading heavily on it, we almost always agreed the problem is not at all what we thought it was. Or, you know, the hurdle is not at all what we thought it was. And each technology changed our minds quite a bit.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I mean, that’s what makes the work respectable and why it’s enjoyable. It just seems like you follow the data and it doesn’t seem like you have a preordained conclusion that you’re trying to reach. And I think it reads that way, which feels more honest than average, I think, for people trying to read and understand this stuff. So I don’t know. Well done.
Kelly Weinersmith: One of my favorite compliments I think I’ve ever received right there. Thank you.
Zach Weinersmith: That’s great. That’s what we aspire to. I’m sure we don’t quite hit it, but we are very, very nervous, very scared people. And the thing that really scares us is someone saying, you were wrong.
Kelly Weinersmith: And that gets us to dig deeper. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Is there a next project coming or are you taking a break? Something else?
Unknown speaker: We’re still breathing. We need a break. Yes. Yes.
Kelly Weinersmith: Yeah, we’re catching. I mean, between COVID and the book, we’re behind on so many other things. We both have other jobs. And so we’re just trying to catch up on life for a while.
Zach Weinersmith: Well, this book has been there’s been a really long tale of like interviews like this one, which which so we’re also still trying to do that. Like we also we came out with like A paper published in Space Policy about communes as a model for space. And we had a big article in Foreign Policy about how the old West frontier is a really bad model for thinking about how space might go. So we are still doing bits and pieces, most of which are incomplete or dump chapters from a larger draft of the book.
Ross Kenyon: I need to read that. That sounds pretty interesting. Well, thank you both for being here. Looking forward to whenever this next book, if it ever comes to be, if there ever is one, if it hasn’t killed your writing enthusiasm. But thanks for your work and hanging out with me. I appreciate it.
Kelly Weinersmith: Thanks. This was a ton of fun. We appreciate the invitation.
Ross Kenyon: Thank you so much for listening. If you could please subscribe and give us a great rating and review on Apple Podcasts or a rating on Spotify, that’d be much appreciated. It helps us get our content out to more people. You can sign up for our newsletter at nori.com. Follow us on social media. We will catch you next time.
