256 | Kelly and Zach Weinersmith on Building Cities on the Moon and Mars

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 13 November 2023

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

There is an undeniable romance in the idea of traveling to, and even living in, outer space. In recent years, a pragmatic justification has become increasingly popular: the Earth is vulnerable to threats both natural and human-made, and it seems only prudent to spread life to other locations in case a disaster befalls our home planet. But how realistic is such a grand ambition? The wife-and-husband team of Kelly and Zack Weinersmith have tackled this question from a dizzying number of angles, from aeronautics and biology to law and psychology. The result is their new book, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? It provides an exceptionally clear-eyed view of the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/11/13/256-kelly-and-zach-weinersmith-on-building-cities-on-the-moon-and-mars/

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Kelly Weinersmith received a Ph.D. in ecology from the University of California, Davis. She is currently an adjunct professor in the department of biosciences at Rice University. Zack Weinersmith received a B.S. in English from Pfizer College. He is the creator of the popular webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, as well as the author and co-author of several books, including Bea Wolf, a retelling of Beowulf as a children's story, with illustrations by Boulet. Kelly and Zach are also co-authors of Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:04.0	Longtime listeners will probably have figured out that one of the things I try to do here on
0:09.1	Mindscape is to bring the world's experts to talk about the topic that we're going to talk about in that
0:14.8	episode. So in other words less of an emphasis on pundits or general purpose writers or dilitons or other podcasters things like that not
0:26.4	that there's anything wrong with that I'm a podcaster kind of a dilatant
0:29.1	myself but when I get into a topic I wanted to get into it with the people who have really spent a lot of time becoming professionals researching this kind of thing.
0:39.0	Today's podcast is an exception to that, but it is the best possible exception. I have zero qualms about this
0:45.8	one very happy that it worked out. Kelly and Zach Wienersmith are a wife and husband team and
0:52.3	Zach of course will be well known to many of you.
0:55.2	He is a web comic artist and writer.
0:59.1	He's the artist for Saturday Morning Breakfast Serial, SMBC, the very well-known web comic, right up there with
1:06.1	XK C.D. in terms of nerd credibility on the web, so I'm happy to have had both of those two
1:12.1	artists now on the show and Kelly is actually a PhD
1:15.8	ecologist and adjunct faculty at Rice University but we are not going to be talking for the most part about
1:22.3	either ecology or
1:23.8	cartooning. I should also mention to be fair that Zach and Kelly have written a
1:28.1	previous book that was a science book and Zach is the author of other things like a kids book version of Baylewolf called Baywolf that I can recommend very very highly.
1:39.0	But the topic today is space settlement. the idea of taking human beings, flying them to a space
1:47.3	station or the moon or Mars or wherever, and living there as a sustainable society for generations at a time. Is this possible? How would it happen? What are the
1:58.0	obstacles and so forth? And what I love about Kelly and Zach is, they just dive into it.
2:03.6	They're super smart people who take their job seriously.
2:07.4	They want to explain things in a way that everybody can understand,
	...

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