SPACE — Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos may have a billion-dollar dream of sending millions of people to live on the moon, Mars and in free-flying space habitats. But a newly published book offers sage advice: Don’t be too bold.
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith didn’t expect to give that advice when they started working on their book ‘A City on Mars.’ Initially, they thought they would write a guide to the golden age of space settlement that Musk and Bezos promised.
“We ended up doing a lot of research on space settlements from every angle you can imagine,” Zach Weinersmith was reported as saying Universe Today from the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Tuesday, October 7 2023.
“This is a four-year research project. And about two and a half years later, we’ve gone from being fairly optimistic as a likely and likely possibility in the short term [menjadi] may not happen in the short term, and may not be desirable in the short term. So that’s a pretty big change. It’s a bit traumatic, I think.”
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Weinersmiths found that there is little research into the potential long-term health impacts of living on the moon or Mars. Then, there is no research regarding the potential for collisions with space objects on human reproduction and development there.
Additionally, legal uncertainty surrounding property rights in space will lead to disputes that will bind diplomats and military planners. “In our efforts to create Mars settlements in Plan B, to make ourselves safer as a species, are we really lowering the existential risk?” Zach said.
“I think it’s still unclear, and there’s a good argument that we might increase it.”
The idea of creating settlements in space dates back decades: Lunar cities were the setting for Robert Heinlein’s 1966 film “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress,” and for Andy Weir’s 2018 film “Artemis.” Cities on Mars were featured in Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1990s “Mars Trilogy” as well as in “2312,” published in 2012.
In 1976, “The High Frontier,” written by physicist Gerard K O’Neill, provided an in-depth look at life inside the habitat of a past space giant. Space settlements have also starred in TV shows ranging from the 1970s prime-time series “Space: 1999” to “The Expanse,” “Mars” and “For All Mankind.”
The interest in building cities on Mars is not entirely fictional. Elon Musk hopes there will be a self-sustaining city on Mars within 20 years, and he’s pledging his fortune to make it happen. Meanwhile, Bezos said he looks forward to the day when there are millions of people living and working in space, even if it takes hundreds of years to get there.
For your information, thousands of people are interested in going and living in space. When a Dutch company called Mars One called for registration for a one-way trip to the Red Planet, more than 200,000 people expressed interest. More than 2,700 of them were interested in paying the registration fee.
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The attempt failed, but proponents of space settlement, including Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin, kept the dream alive. In September, Zubrin announced a Mars Technology Institute would be created to develop the tools and processes settlers need. “Hope, not greed, will take us to Mars,” he said.
2023-11-07 11:07:00
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