And so the idea that we're going to have a million people on Mars in 20, 30 years, as Elon Musk says, is either just bogus, which I think it probably is, or just like an ethical calamity in waiting.

And notably, none of the people making these claims are spending the kind of vast money you would need to get like a kind of handbook on orbital obstetrics, probably because there is no return on investment.

So, you know, yikes.

Yeah. I will because there is no return on investment. So, you know, yikes. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us Made in Partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Zach Weenersmith.

Zach, along with Kelly Weenersmith, are the co-authors of a city on Mars.

Can we settle space?

Should we settle space?

And have we really thought this through?

Questions that we ask relatively often on this show.

Zach is also a cartoonist who makes the Saturday morning breakfast serial comic. So you can

certainly find a link to that in the show notes if you want to check it out. When I saw the

title for Kelly and Zach's book, I immediately said, okay, this sounds like exactly the type of

conversation that I want to have on the show. Because we hear so

much from these tech billionaires that one of the things we absolutely must do is settle space

and especially settle space in the near future. And this book sounded like, and of course,

after reading it now, it certainly does tell us, hold on a second. It gets into the scientific, but also the legal and

kind of sociological, like personal questions that come along with actually trying to move

our society that has evolved to live here on Earth onto the moon or another planet like Mars.

And what they find, of course, no surprise

is that this would be much more difficult

than the Elon Musks of the world

...