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In A City On Mars, biologist #KellyWeinersmith and cartoonist @[email protected] set out to investigate the governance challenges of the impending space settlements they were told were just over the horizon. Instead, they discovered that humans aren't going to be settling space for a very long time, and so they wrote a book about that instead:
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For the cost of a tiny, fraught, lethal Moon-base, we could create *hundreds* of experiments in creating efficient, long-term, closed biospheres for human life.
That's the crux of the Weinersmiths' argument: if you want to establish space settlements, you need to do a bunch of other stuff first, like figure out life-support, learn more about our celestial neighbors, and vastly improve our robotics.
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If you want to create stable space-settlements, you'll need to create robust governance systems - space law that you can count on, rather than space law that you plan on shoving out the airlock. If you want humans to reproduce in space - a necessary precondition for a space settlement that lasts more than a single human lifespan - then we need to do things like breed multiple generations of rodents and other animals, on space stations.
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Space is amazing. Space science is amazing. Crewed scientific space missions are amazing. But space isn't amazing because it offers a "Plan B" for an Earth that is imperiled by humanity's recklessness. Space isn't amazing because it offers unparalleled material wealth, or unlimited energy, or a chance to live without laws or governance. It's not amazing because it will end war by mixing the #sensawunda of the "Pale Blue Dot" with the lebensraum of an infinite universe.
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@[email protected]
So disappointed to check and learn that "sensawunda" is not a Belter Creole word...