Zach Weinersmith on Space Settlement and A City on Mars

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2023

⏱️ 63 minutes

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Summary

Loss of taste for most foods, vision problems, loss of muscle mass and bone density. In light of these and the many unpleasant our outright dangerous effects of space travel on human physiology, science writer and cartoonist Zach Weinersmith wonders: When it comes to the dream of space expansion, what exactly do we hope to gain? Listen as he and EconTalk's Russ Roberts discuss his new book (co-authored with Kelly Weinersmith) A City on Mars, which offers a hard-nosed yet humorous look at the sobering and lesser-discussed challenges involved in building space settlements. Topics include the particular problems posed by the moon and Mars's atmospheres; the potential difficulty of reproducing in zero gravity; and the dangerous tendency to overlook a key factor in whether space settlement is a good idea: the fact that people are people, wherever they may be.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:08.0	I'm your host Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to Econ Talk. in to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done
0:24.5	going back to 2006. Our email address is mail at econ talk.org we'd love to hear from you. Today is October 18th, 2023,
0:40.0	and my guest is Zach Wienersmith.
0:43.0	This is Zach's third appearance on Econ Talk.
0:45.0	He was last year in March of 2023,
0:48.0	talking about his book Beowulf.
0:50.0	Our topic for day is his latest book co-authored with his wife Kelly, a city on Mars. Can we settle space? Should we settle space? And if we really thought this through.
1:01.0	Zach, welcome back to Econ Talk. Decided to be here. thought this
1:05.0	a crazy book uh... is a crazy book uh... it is at times wildly funny
1:11.0	but i learned many things that I knew nothing about covering a wide array of
1:15.8	topics and I think like most people I just sort of assume that sooner than later and probably sooner we're going of And it certainly prepared me to think about it in a much richer way. So why don't we
1:38.6	start off with how you got started on the book? What was your goal? What
1:41.4	you and Kelly trying to do and how did your
1:44.9	perception of space settlement change as you did the research in the writing?
1:48.7	Yeah, so excuse me. For our last book, we did a book that was on emerging technologies.
1:55.6	We had two chapters that were pertinent to space and one was on asteroid mining and
2:01.0	one was on cheap access to space.
2:04.0	Asteroid mining, we were, I think, appropriately skeptical
2:06.2	and have grown more skeptical of,
2:08.2	but cheap access to space actually happened,
2:11.4	basically due to SpaceX and, you know were other factors but the short version of
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