/sci/ - Science & Math

Why We Should Settle Mars
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https://quillette.com/2023/12/04/why-we-should-go-to-mars/
> A review of A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith, 448 pages, Penguin (November 2023).
> Now however, as privately-funded space activities have become a reality, deeper thought has become requisite to develop a compelling argument for aborting the nascent project of human expansion into the solar system. One thesis, propounded at book length by Professor of Religion and Science Mary Jane Rubenstein, is that humans should not go to other worlds because we would harm them. According to Rubenstein, even extraterrestrial rocks have rights, and their lives and liberties could be severely impacted by the arrival of human pioneers.
> While of great interest as an example of antihumanism taken to its logical conclusion, the problem with this thesis is that most people don’t care about the rights of rocks.
> Clearly, the anti-space cause needs stronger advocacy. Kelly and Zach Weinersmith’s book A City on Mars seems at first like a promising candidate.
>But the Weinersmiths’ central thesis is inherently contradictory. Human settlement of space is pointless and impossible, they argue, but we also need laws to stop it, lest humanity destroy itself fighting over the unprecedented bonanza that space has to offer.
> In the more enjoyable first half of the book, the authors ridicule a number of silly and/or morally repugnant arguments that have been advanced in favor of space exploration. These include the ideas that by settling space we will be able to move all heavy industry off Earth—thereby ending pollution—and that by going into space, we will create a way for some of humanity to survive after we destroy the Earth and kill off the rest.