A Five-Minute Video of SpaceX's Starship Mission to Mars
As of today, Elon Musk's SpaceX has scheduled the fourth flight test of its Starship rocket for launch on Thursday, June 6, at around 7:00 am central time. You can watch a live broadcast of the launch on the SpaceX website.
Musk has said that Starship could have an uncrewed test landing on Mars within three to four years. After that, Starship could begin taking human beings to Mars and establishing a human settlement on Mars that could reach a population of one million within ten to twenty years.
Previously, I have written about these plans for settling Mars, and I have raised the question of whether there could be Lockean liberty on Mars.
At the end of the video above, you will see an animation of a domed city on Mars. This is an awesome vision. But is it a realistic possibility as something that could happen within the next few decades? I am persuaded that the problems in rocket technology for an uncrewed Starship mission to Mars can probably be solved in the near future. But I am not persuaded that the biological and political problems in sustaining human life and liberty in space can be solved anytime soon.
The best study of those problems is the new book by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith--A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? (New York: Penguin Press, 2023). The Weinersmiths are a husband-and-wife team. Kelly is a biologist. Zach makes the profoundly witty webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Zach has drawn cartoons for their book, which is part of what makes this one of the funniest books I have ever read.
The Weinersmiths had previously written the popular science book Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything (Penguin Books, 2017). Section 1 of the book was entitled "The Universe, Soonish," and it had two chapters: "Cheap Access to Space" and "Asteroid Mining." Once that book was published, they decided that they should write a whole book on what the human settlement of space--particularly, the Moon and Mars--would look like. They were space nerds who were wildly enthusiastic about the future of humanity in space.
But as they spent four years reading thousands of books and articles and talking with hundreds of experts on the human exploration and settlement of space, they became increasingly pessimistic about the prospects for human beings surviving and thriving in space. They concluded that the space enthusiasts--people like Musk and Robert Zubrin--were underestimating the awfulness of space and overestimating the human ability to make space livable for human beings.
The Weinersmiths are optimistic about the long-term prospects for human civilization extending into space beyond the Earth. But "long-term" means not decades but centuries. There are no good reasons to believe that Musk will be the founder of a new nation on Mars--the Weinersmiths suggest the name "Muskow"--within Musk's lifetime. But after one or two centuries of space exploration and experimental studies of how space could become livable for human beings, it seems likely that human settlements on Mars could become possible.
That's why the Weinersmiths propose a "wait-and-go-big approach": don't expect to settle human beings in space anytime soon, but wait until we have a century or more of research on the necessary conditions for sustaining human life in space, and then go big by sending large human populations to Mars and elsewhere with all of the new technology for human life support. Moreover, that new technology will have to include not just biotechnology but also the knowledge of the psychological, sociological, legal, and political structures necessary to support human life and liberty in space.
The Weinersmiths identify the fundamental problem when they say that the whole Universe wants us dead, which means that space just sucks. That the Universe is fine-tuned for life, and particularly human life, has become the most common cosmological argument for the existence of God, because God must be the cosmic fine tuner. But actually the Universe seems to be fine-tuned for death. The search for extra-terrestrial life has so far failed to find any. And even if we do someday find evidence for life (perhaps in the water beneath the surface of one of the moons of Saturn), it will probably be only the simplest form of microbial life.
Even the Earth was originally devoid of life. The evolution of life on Earth took billions of years. And for over four billion years of Earth's history, there was no human-like life. When human life finally appeared, it was because the human species had evolved over millions of years in the Pleistocene geological epoch as the environment of evolutionary adaptation.
Because our evolved human nature is adapted only for the Earth's biosphere as it has existed only in the most recent epochs of the Earth's history, we cannot live beyond the Earth unless we somehow recreate artificially that Earthly biosphere in space. We don't know how to do that. And if we ever do learn how to do that, it will take a century or more of innovative research and technology.
In my next post, I will look at the many ways the Universe could kill us if we were to travel on SpaceX's Starship to settle Mars.
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