The Cosmic Wet Blanket
By Darrell Lee
For the better part of a century, humanity's dream of settling space has been fueled by a potent cocktail of science fiction optimism and billionaire bravado. We envision gleaming biodomes on the rust-colored plains of Mars, bustling asteroid mines, and moon bases humming with commerce. It is a grand, romantic vision of manifest destiny written across the cosmos. Into this starry-eyed saloon of space-age dreams stride Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, the authors of A City on Mars, not to order a round for the house, but to play the role of the designated driver, here to jangle the keys and gently inform everyone that it's time to face reality. Their book is a brilliant, meticulously researched, and hilariously blunt rebuttal to the easy optimism of space settlement. It serves as a cosmic wet blanket, smothering the more fanciful flames of our extraterrestrial ambitions with the cold, hard, and often bizarre facts. The Weinersmiths argue that before we can build a city on Mars, we must first confront an Everest of biological, legal, and logistical problems that our space-faring heroes have conveniently glossed over.
The book's central project is to take the glorious, abstract dream of "settling space" and drag it down to the messy, granular reality of the human condition. The Weinersmiths start by mercilessly dismantling the most common justifications for leaving Earth. The popular idea of Mars as a "backup planet" in case we ruin this one is dispatched with brutal efficiency. As they illustrate, trying to escape a climate-changed Earth by moving to Mars is like trying to save yourself from a house fire by moving into an active volcano that is also irradiated and has no breathable air. Any technology that could make Mars habitable, they argue, could make Earth a paradise a thousand times over with a fraction of the effort.
With the "why" sufficiently problematized, they dedicate the bulk of the book to the "how," which, it turns out, is a parade of horrors. The physical realities of living off-world are staggering. The Weinersmiths walk us through the sheer, soul-crushing expense and difficulty of just getting stuff into orbit, let alone to another planet. Every kilogram is a king's ransom. Then there are the planets themselves. The Moon is covered in regolith, a dust so fine and sharp it's like microscopic asbestos, designed to shred astronaut lungs and grind machinery to a halt. Mars, our great red hope, has soil laced with perchlorates, a toxic salt that would make growing crops a chemical engineering nightmare. And everywhere, there is radiation, a constant, invisible storm of galactic cosmic rays ready to slice through DNA and turn our bold pioneers into cancer patients.
Yet, the physical environment is almost a benign paradise compared to what space does to the human body. This is where the book truly shines, as biologist Kelly Weinersmith's expertise comes to the fore, presented with Zach Weinersmith's (of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal) signature humor. Our bodies are exquisitely, ridiculously fine-tuned for Earth's gravity, atmosphere, and magnetic field. Take them away, and things get weird fast. Bones lose density at an alarming rate. Eyeballs get squished by shifting fluid pressure, impairing vision. And then there's the big one: making more humans.
The Weinersmiths dedicate a chapter to space babies that should be required reading for any aspiring space cadet. The process of conception, gestation, and birth is a delicate biological ballet choreographed by gravity. Without it, we have no idea what would happen. Would a fetus develop properly? Could a human even give birth in zero-G without specialized, probably terrifying, machinery? They interview experts who offer grim assessments, painting a picture of a biological minefield. The dream of a self-sustaining off-world population runs headfirst into the squishy, inconvenient reality of our own biology. We are creatures of Earth, and space is actively trying to take us apart.
If the science doesn't kill you, the lawyers might. The most original and insightful part of A City on Mars is its chapters into the legal and governmental vacuum of space. Most books about space focus on the rockets and the habitats; the Weinersmiths dedicate just as much energy to the painfully unsexy but utterly critical field of space law. They introduce us to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, the foundational document of space governance. It's a beautiful, idealistic treaty from the height of the Cold War, declaring space the "province of all mankind" and prohibiting any nation from claiming sovereignty over a celestial body. It was designed to prevent the Moon from becoming a Soviet missile base, and for that, it was perfect.
For building a city, however, it's a disaster. As the authors point out, if no one can own anything, how do you run a mine? How do you sell a lunar real estate plot? Who enforces contracts? Who is the landlord of the solar system? The treaty creates a legal quagmire that makes starting a society nearly impossible. The alternative, a free-for-all where corporations or nations can claim whatever they want, is a recipe for conflict. This section reveals the naivete of simply assuming we can export our existing social structures into orbit. We don't even have a workable theory for property rights, let alone a criminal justice system or a functioning government.
This leads to the book's final and most unsettling act: the human social experiment. What happens when you seal a small group of highly intelligent, highly stressed people in a glorified porta-potty millions of miles from home and tell them they can never leave? It is an HR nightmare at zero-G. The Weinersmiths explore the psychology of isolation and confinement, drawing on analogies from Antarctic research stations and early colonial misadventures. A space settlement wouldn't just be a technological challenge; it would be the most intense social pressure cooker ever conceived. Every personal dispute, every cultural misunderstanding, is magnified. There is no escape. There is no "going for a walk to clear your head" unless you want to spend thirty minutes putting on a suit to stroll through a lifeless, irradiated wasteland.
The success of A City on Mars lies in the perfect marriage of its authors' talents. Kelly Weinersmith provides the scientific rigor, her research evident in the extensive citations and expert interviews. Zach Weinersmith provides the genius-level science communication, translating complex topics into digestible, hilarious prose and punctuating them with his iconic cartoons. The humor is not a gimmick; it is an essential tool. It makes learning about the legal nuances of the Moon Treaty or the biological mechanisms of bone atrophy not just tolerable, but genuinely entertaining. The book is a masterclass in how to present hard science to a popular audience without dumbing it down.
In the end, A City on Mars is not a pessimistic book. It is a realistic one. The Weinersmiths are not saying we should never go to space. They are saying that we should go with our eyes wide open, fully aware of the monumental challenges that lie ahead. They are calling for a more thoughtful, more prepared, and less cavalier approach to our cosmic ambitions. The book is a necessary antidote to the Silicon Valley ethos of "move fast and break things." In space, when you move fast and break things, those things are human lives and the future of our species off-world.
By meticulously cataloging all the ways space can kill us, bankrupt us, and drive us insane, the Weinersmiths perform an ironic service. They bring the focus back to Earth. Their book is an implicit argument for planetary stewardship. It reminds us that we evolved on a perfect, jewel-like world with a breathable atmosphere, abundant water, a protective magnetic field, and a gravity that holds our eyeballs in their proper shape. Leaving it will be the hardest thing we have ever done. Before we can truly build a city on Mars, A City on Mars reminds us, we must first get our heads out of the clouds and grapple with the monumental task at hand.
Darrell Lee is the founder and editor of The Long Views, he has written two science fiction novels exploring themes of technological influence, science and religion, historical patterns, and the future of society. His essays draw on these long-standing interests and apply a similar analytical lens to politics, literature, artistic, societal, and historical events. He splits his time between rural east Texas and Florida’s west coast, where he spends his days performing variable star photometry, dabbling in astrophotography, thinking, napping, scuba diving, fishing, and writing, not necessarily in that order.