Can We Settle Off Earth?

            One of my most valued possessions has become my library card. I love going to the library every week now to get books for my kids at school and for myself. The Liverpool Library has a great display of new books, and they also curate non-fiction books based on different themes. Recently, they had some space books up at the front maybe due to the release of Project Hail Mary and maybe due to the launch of Artemis II. I got a book called A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? As the title alludes to, it discusses the viability of settling off Earth, and what it would take to do so.

            Movies make it seem like it would be so easy to make a colony in space. I think of giant sprawling mall-like structures with lots of windows that look out onto a beautiful space scape. This simply would not be the case. When it comes to Mars and the Moon, the most viable options revolve around building underground structures. On Mars, there are very strong dust storms, that can last days to weeks, so having a living structure above ground would be incredibly risky. Then on the moon due to their lack of atmosphere, they have serious temperature swings. They have temperatures well below Earth’s temperature and well above the hottest spots on Earth.

            The big temperature differences and the dirt that covers the Moon and Mars make it hard for machines to work in these places in general. Both are covered in something called regolith. It is dust like soil, and apparently, it covers the machines when they are out working making it harder for them to function, and massive temperature swings also makes it hard, because then the machines must be able to work in extreme heat and cold. The amount of daylight in these places is also different from Earth. On the moon, unless you are situated close to a pole, they go through two-week swings of total darkness to total sunlight. At the poles, there is the chance to be in sunlight all the time.

            The self-sustainability of these places can also be rough. On top of the Mars soil being very dusty, it is also toxic. So being able to use this soil to grow plants is probably not viable. They tried to replicate it on Earth, and the plants that grew were under extreme stress. So then there is a high need of being able to deliver food, and a trip to Mars takes months, and on top of that, there are specific windows  when it is feasible to be able to fly to Mars, and these windows only occur every couple of years, and that is assuming that Mars is not having a dust storm.

            Their best suggestion for food, specifically protein, was bugs. If you have ever seen Snow Piercer, this was their choice for food as well, but they shredded them and turned them into a gelatinous glob. The reason why bugs work so well for protein in space compared to chickens and cows is their size and their reproductive abilities. It is way easier to maintain bugs than cows and chickens, and bugs help to reduce waste. They can help to consume old foods that were not eaten. Apparently, people are usually okay with eating bugs as long as they do not know they are eating bugs.

            One aspect of space settlement that I never thought about was babies. They brought up the fact that we do not know what happens to a pregnancy in space. Does not having thaffectsal amount of gravity affect how the baby develops? As I read, I kept thinking about a blob forming instead of a baby, because there is no gravity to shape it. This probably is not what would happen, but there is no scientific research being done on this. It kind of seems unethical, because they could intentionally be setting someone up for something horrific. Also there is the whole birthing process. I cannot imagine getting a c-section in zero gravity. The woman’s insides could just be floating through the air. There was a theoretical machine that would spin the woman like a centrifuge so that she would receive the same amount of gravity as there is on earth, so the woman could have earth’s gravity for birth, it looked like a bad ride at the fair.

            These worries go beyond just giving birth, there is also the inevitability of extreme injuries in general. Zero gravity or much lower gravity than Earth can lead to problems with operating on a serious injury. Again, like giving birth, there has not been a chance to test how surgery would work in low gravity. Apparently, the closest proximity that people have been able to approach for this is a small group of doctors performing surgery on an already deceased pig in an airplane. The airplane would climb, and then free fall to simulate zero gravity, and that is when they would try to operate. This is one of the wildest anecdotes that I have ever read.

            As far as the economics of this whole space endeavor goes, the possibility for mass economic gain is minimal. From what scientists know, there are minimal valuable natural resources to mine on places like Mars and the Moon. The one resource that they mentioned was a specific type of Carbon, and it is present on Earth as well, so it would not be worth the economic distress of traveling to space, extracting the materials, and then sending the materials back to Earth. The cost of space travel currently is just so great that there would have to be a serious wealth of resources somewhere to make it all worth it.

An interesting comparison that they made was space to Antarctica and the bottom of the ocean. These were places that were uninhabited with potential wealth awaiting. In both cases, international treaties had to be created to generate ground rules on how these areas were going to be governed and conserved. The thing is, that currently for places like the moon and Mars, there are no firm agreements in place, so if there were something of value to be found in one of these places, it could lead to a conflict, and this conflict could occur not only in space, but also down on Earth. So it is important to make sure that there are rules put into place for the colonization of space.

            So overall, it seems like we are a long way off from being able to create a space colony. Currently the people that are most invested in this are not nations, but private businesses like SpaceX. There are a multitude of issues that make it unreasonable and hard to invest in such a program, so if it comes down to it, the best use of resources is to continue to protect the Earth to limit any sort of mass extinction event or overwhelming problem that would make it so we need to leave. The Earth is our home, and it is the place that our bodies evolved to thrive in, to try and live somewhere else could be a disastrous idea for prolonging humanity, the opposite of its intention.