A new book, "A City on Mars” is getting a lot of attention, describing the less-considered downside of colonizing other planets.
I debunked living on Mars last year with my posting "Mars Sucks". And while it's hard to tell for sure from reviews, it doesn't seem like the authors have keyed in on the fundamental human comfort issues I noted.
But, regardless, it's good that humanity is starting to view this from a more realistic viewpoint than the cartoonish Buck Rogers SPACE EXPLORATION take. That's fine for highly trained astronauts for a limited amount of time, but you can't possibly support such a colony unless conditions on Earth are so unbearable that we're willing to grimly torture ourselves to survive as a species.
How do we fail to register the obvious here? It's a framing issue. We are so used to visualizing Mars as "cool" that we don't see how that's completely a head fake. We don't live in a cartoon - in an overarching dramatic arc. We live in our bodies, in an immediate place. Under certain circumstances, we can, via obsessive self-hypnosis, persist in peeering up at ourselves on an internal movie screen, basking in the "meaning" and the "glory" of our trajectory - i.e. inhabit the head fake. But that's for comfortable wealthy people (everyone in America is wealthy), and there would not be a nano-second of comfort on Mars or the Moon, ever. EVER! And there's nothing like egregious discomfort to bring one's framing back down to...well, back down to the relevant planetary body!
Showing posts with label Space. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Space. Show all posts
Sunday, December 3, 2023
Monday, May 2, 2022
Astronauts are Full of Crap
In my recent posting, Mars Sucks, I contested the assumption that people could thrive living cooped up in sealed buildings on Mars, breathing horrible canned air, eating food made from severely constrained ingredients and methods, and observing tight military-type protocols into perpetuity - for the rest of their lives and the entirety of their descendents' lives, ad infinitum.
I can anticipate the response of an Elon Musk to most of my points (and, fwiw, he's wrong!). But until I find the energy to type out that imaginary debate, let's consider just one possible response:
1. Obviously, a few months isn't forever. There's a big difference knowing you'll return to Earth in X days.
2. Astronauts are carefully chosen and relentlessly trained. It's nothing like bringing a typical suburban family up to space.
Also: I don't buy the whole astronaut thing.
I'm not saying NASA faked the moon landings. I believe we went there (though, duh, JFK Jr. was the pilot). But I don't buy that astronauts are unrelentingly affable, steel-nerved, can-do supermen. Or at least, that they're always those things.
A story:
There was a hit TV series, "The Good Wife" whose cast members, late in the run, began leaving in droves, refusing the buckets of money stars get paid late in the run on hit TV shows. The two leads, whose characters were in-show best friends, went several seasons without sharing a scene together. Finally, the plot compelled them to interact, and the scene was obviously shot with a green screen so the actors weren't anywhere near each other.
Media reporters scrambled for The Story on this, but to this day, nobody - nobody! - will blab. They're just a happy corp of creative people so very proud to offer televised entertainment for the delight of Mr. and Mrs. America! No problem at all! All those actors who turned down millions to get away? They wanted more time with their families! And as for the green screen, what green screen?
Right at this time I found myself in a craft beer bar in Long Island City, quite close to Kaufman Astoria Studios where the show was being filmed. Three crew guys sat near me, wearing shiny "The Good Wife" jackets. Cheeky from my fourth beer, I grinned widely and asked them, "So what's the deal with that weird feud between Julianna Margulies and Archie Panjabi?"
They froze. I could see them mentally replaying the previous hour of conversation, panicked that they might have revealed something. Also, these were enormous Teamsters, and I certainly didn't want to upset them, so I nodded affably and got the hell out when it became abundantly clear that they very much preferred not to chat about the issue.
Even eight years later...nothing. If this is how people close ranks re: bad behavior on some stupid TV show, you can imagine how tightly NASA manages the illusion that astronauts spend months in, say, the International Space Station feeling fit as a fiddle and affably rarin' to go.
The truth, I bet, would be astonishing. Depression, anxiety, brawls, theft, attempted homicide (heck, perhaps actual homicide). Psycho commanders demanding absolute fealty because what are you gonna do, call the cops? I'm not a rabid feminist who imagines sexual abuse around every corner, but I'll bet female astronauts keep a tightly buttoned lip re: some awfully bad behavior.
The artificial unfamiliarity, the lack of fresh air and other deprivations, the procedural formalities...none of that could be overcome by asking people to behave like astronauts. Again, I'm not sure even astronauts behave like astronauts. But, even if they do, how does that apply to you, your asshole spouse, and your entitled teenaged children living like atrophied koalas, breathing scuba air in a sealed Martian base till the end of your days?
I can anticipate the response of an Elon Musk to most of my points (and, fwiw, he's wrong!). But until I find the energy to type out that imaginary debate, let's consider just one possible response:
Astronauts can remain in space for months or years - in more cramped and artificial circumstances than a Martian base colony - with no problem at all. We're surprisingly resilient as a species!Two huge problems:
1. Obviously, a few months isn't forever. There's a big difference knowing you'll return to Earth in X days.
2. Astronauts are carefully chosen and relentlessly trained. It's nothing like bringing a typical suburban family up to space.
Also: I don't buy the whole astronaut thing.
I'm not saying NASA faked the moon landings. I believe we went there (though, duh, JFK Jr. was the pilot). But I don't buy that astronauts are unrelentingly affable, steel-nerved, can-do supermen. Or at least, that they're always those things.
A story:
There was a hit TV series, "The Good Wife" whose cast members, late in the run, began leaving in droves, refusing the buckets of money stars get paid late in the run on hit TV shows. The two leads, whose characters were in-show best friends, went several seasons without sharing a scene together. Finally, the plot compelled them to interact, and the scene was obviously shot with a green screen so the actors weren't anywhere near each other.
Media reporters scrambled for The Story on this, but to this day, nobody - nobody! - will blab. They're just a happy corp of creative people so very proud to offer televised entertainment for the delight of Mr. and Mrs. America! No problem at all! All those actors who turned down millions to get away? They wanted more time with their families! And as for the green screen, what green screen?
Right at this time I found myself in a craft beer bar in Long Island City, quite close to Kaufman Astoria Studios where the show was being filmed. Three crew guys sat near me, wearing shiny "The Good Wife" jackets. Cheeky from my fourth beer, I grinned widely and asked them, "So what's the deal with that weird feud between Julianna Margulies and Archie Panjabi?"
They froze. I could see them mentally replaying the previous hour of conversation, panicked that they might have revealed something. Also, these were enormous Teamsters, and I certainly didn't want to upset them, so I nodded affably and got the hell out when it became abundantly clear that they very much preferred not to chat about the issue.
Even eight years later...nothing. If this is how people close ranks re: bad behavior on some stupid TV show, you can imagine how tightly NASA manages the illusion that astronauts spend months in, say, the International Space Station feeling fit as a fiddle and affably rarin' to go.
The truth, I bet, would be astonishing. Depression, anxiety, brawls, theft, attempted homicide (heck, perhaps actual homicide). Psycho commanders demanding absolute fealty because what are you gonna do, call the cops? I'm not a rabid feminist who imagines sexual abuse around every corner, but I'll bet female astronauts keep a tightly buttoned lip re: some awfully bad behavior.
Every once in a while some tiny dab of image-cracking info ekes out. For example, I once read that return landings (especially the dry land ones of Sovet spacecraft in Kazakhstan) are not minor bumps. They're akin to a major car crash, and astronauts spend much of their mission dreading them.Maybe my skepticism is exaggerated. Perhaps human behavior really can be optimized for limited periods of time by carefully selected and rigorously trained individuals. But none of that pertains to bringing boatloads of the general public up to live in an artificial bubble on an exoplanet without a return date.
The artificial unfamiliarity, the lack of fresh air and other deprivations, the procedural formalities...none of that could be overcome by asking people to behave like astronauts. Again, I'm not sure even astronauts behave like astronauts. But, even if they do, how does that apply to you, your asshole spouse, and your entitled teenaged children living like atrophied koalas, breathing scuba air in a sealed Martian base till the end of your days?
Saturday, April 30, 2022
Mars Sucks
We are not going to colonize other planets. Here's why: they suck.
Mars sucks. The Moon sucks. There's nothing there. Not "nothing" like Elizabeth, NJ is nothing. Really nothing.
This is ridiculously obvious, yet space nerd tech billionaires - mired in the petty business decisions of daily life and yearning for outlets for grandiose broad-strokes rumination - don't seem to grok the fact that other planets totally suck.
You know what a drag it is to spend time at the DMV? Uncomfortable chairs, harsh lighting, stale vending machine candy? Everything run via strict protocol with no consideration whatsoever for "chill"? Life on other planets would be like that, only 10,000 times worse.
It's not just the lack of breathable air or soil or whatever. If, after 5000 years, we managed to introduce a layer of top soil and a ribbon of oxygen on Mars, it would still suck. Earth's air isn't nourishing and salubrious because we're so into a certain oxygen/nitrogen ratio. It's because of the subtleties.
Mars sucks. The Moon sucks. Even Ganymede, with its familiar-seeming reserves of liquid water, would suck even in the unlikely event we could manage to shield people from its frigid temperatures and deadly radiation. Ganymede water is not going to be "nice" water, because our notion of "nice" is unimaginably narrow; specifically locked to the stuff flowing out of your sink (which many of us spurn, up-paying for Poland Spring).
You know how animals wither in zoos, even if they're carefully catered to? It's not because they yearn for an abstract notion of "freedom". Animals don't do abstract notions. It's because while a koala may be happy to be given eucalyptus leaves to munch, and be protected from predators, and have the temperature in his habitat adjusted to the ideal koalic range, those are all coarse adjustments, and it's the fine-tunings and subtly aggregated factors that make a koala feel at home. And a koala locked in a cage in Cleveland feels vastly more at home than you would in a base on Mars or the Moon.
Fast-forward 10,000 years through a series of terra-forming miracles, and we still wouldn't be close to a confined Koala scenario. We might (might!) be able to walk outside without dying, that's all.
We'd still be considerably less comfortable than at a DMV. It took eons for the Earth to produce a DMV office. It's sensationally hard to match the heady comforts of a DMV. That would be the impossible aspiration of millennia of Martian terraforming.
Even with deforestation and global warming and mass extinctions and air pollution and light pollution and acid rain, when you step outside in Queens or Akron (let alone some sweeping Colorado ranch), that merely "normal" feeling is something you'll never experience on the Moon or Mars. Never!
"We'll adapt!" you say. And yes, we will. Just like the captive koala, who loses weight and suffers high stress levels ("Something's just, Idunno, off!") for its entire unnaturally shortened life, we won't PERISH. And, if we're lucky, our females will, with some frequency, manage to carry a baby to term. That's what adaptation looks like. 1. Not dying and 2. Not completely failing to reproduce. Low bar!
So, yeah, it'll suck. It'll suck worse than the DMV, and worse than a caged koala. Way, way, way worse than both.
I say all this as a person in the top percentile of space nuts. I actually would volunteer to sail on a generational ship to a distant star. I'd join a first-wave Mars colony. Shoot, I saw "Encounters at the Edge of the World", Herzog's film about McMurdo Station in Antarctica, and thought it might be cool to spend a dark winter there. I often remain indoors on sunny days and would likely do ok in a Supermax solitary block (I'd eagerly teach the other prisoners to meditate).
Mars would still suck for me, but I'd be excited, because I'm excited about such things and have an unusual level of chipper resilience that doesn't evaporate after twelve seconds. And, frankly, I'm not particularly well-adapted to the daily grind and self-generated tedium and phony drama most of my friends and neighbors deem "normalcy". So I'm an edge case; precisely the sort of guy who should be pushing for space colonization.
But I see what my fellow geeks somehow miss: humanity would not enjoy space colonization. Our experience would be far worse than mere unease or displeasure. We would yearn for an Earthly DMV or jail cell. Day to day life would be tantamount to torture.
And "adaptation", again, is not what people think it is. Eskimos, after millennia of adaptation, can be happy at twenty below. But the most savage white-out wintertime Alaska moment still feels like home in a way that the lethal blank vacuum of another planet (or even the canned environment of highly functional sealed buildings thereupon) absolutely would not.
Visualize the short-lived, fraught, atrophied koala in its cage, and know that you'd never come anywhere close to its wellness level. As you hear talk of space colonization, never lose sight of the koala.
Why is it so hard to anticipate the awfulness of life in an off-planet environment? It's because we're so jaded; so loathe to appreciate our on-planet environment. We feel entitled to luxurious perfection as a baseline, and have lost all gratitude for the love implicit in the perfect match of our exceedingly narrow comfort requirements with precisely what we've been given right here/right now.
It's part of a greater jadedness. Our lives feel like turds as we enjoy vastly greater comfort, security, health, and general coddling than any previous generation. We pray that each coming new year will be better than the excruciating suboptimality of the previous one. Optimality is a human right!
As I wrote here:
Follow-up posting
Mars sucks. The Moon sucks. There's nothing there. Not "nothing" like Elizabeth, NJ is nothing. Really nothing.
This is ridiculously obvious, yet space nerd tech billionaires - mired in the petty business decisions of daily life and yearning for outlets for grandiose broad-strokes rumination - don't seem to grok the fact that other planets totally suck.
You know what a drag it is to spend time at the DMV? Uncomfortable chairs, harsh lighting, stale vending machine candy? Everything run via strict protocol with no consideration whatsoever for "chill"? Life on other planets would be like that, only 10,000 times worse.
It's not just the lack of breathable air or soil or whatever. If, after 5000 years, we managed to introduce a layer of top soil and a ribbon of oxygen on Mars, it would still suck. Earth's air isn't nourishing and salubrious because we're so into a certain oxygen/nitrogen ratio. It's because of the subtleties.
If subtleties could be formulated, McDonald's would offer the scrumptuousness of a four-star Michelin meal.The stale shitty dry air on your airplane flight is far more delicious than what you'd breathe indoors on Mars. And if centuries of miraculous tech advancement allow us to imbue outdoor Mars with a breathable atmosphere, it will still be much less enjoyable to breathe than the air on a jumbo jet you can't wait to exit. It took a billion years for Earth to co-evolve the myriad subtle factors that let us inhale without our amygdalae firing off dire warnings. It ain't gonna happen on another planet. Ever.
Mars sucks. The Moon sucks. Even Ganymede, with its familiar-seeming reserves of liquid water, would suck even in the unlikely event we could manage to shield people from its frigid temperatures and deadly radiation. Ganymede water is not going to be "nice" water, because our notion of "nice" is unimaginably narrow; specifically locked to the stuff flowing out of your sink (which many of us spurn, up-paying for Poland Spring).
You know how animals wither in zoos, even if they're carefully catered to? It's not because they yearn for an abstract notion of "freedom". Animals don't do abstract notions. It's because while a koala may be happy to be given eucalyptus leaves to munch, and be protected from predators, and have the temperature in his habitat adjusted to the ideal koalic range, those are all coarse adjustments, and it's the fine-tunings and subtly aggregated factors that make a koala feel at home. And a koala locked in a cage in Cleveland feels vastly more at home than you would in a base on Mars or the Moon.
Fast-forward 10,000 years through a series of terra-forming miracles, and we still wouldn't be close to a confined Koala scenario. We might (might!) be able to walk outside without dying, that's all.
We'd still be considerably less comfortable than at a DMV. It took eons for the Earth to produce a DMV office. It's sensationally hard to match the heady comforts of a DMV. That would be the impossible aspiration of millennia of Martian terraforming.
Even with deforestation and global warming and mass extinctions and air pollution and light pollution and acid rain, when you step outside in Queens or Akron (let alone some sweeping Colorado ranch), that merely "normal" feeling is something you'll never experience on the Moon or Mars. Never!
"We'll adapt!" you say. And yes, we will. Just like the captive koala, who loses weight and suffers high stress levels ("Something's just, Idunno, off!") for its entire unnaturally shortened life, we won't PERISH. And, if we're lucky, our females will, with some frequency, manage to carry a baby to term. That's what adaptation looks like. 1. Not dying and 2. Not completely failing to reproduce. Low bar!
So, yeah, it'll suck. It'll suck worse than the DMV, and worse than a caged koala. Way, way, way worse than both.
I say all this as a person in the top percentile of space nuts. I actually would volunteer to sail on a generational ship to a distant star. I'd join a first-wave Mars colony. Shoot, I saw "Encounters at the Edge of the World", Herzog's film about McMurdo Station in Antarctica, and thought it might be cool to spend a dark winter there. I often remain indoors on sunny days and would likely do ok in a Supermax solitary block (I'd eagerly teach the other prisoners to meditate).
Mars would still suck for me, but I'd be excited, because I'm excited about such things and have an unusual level of chipper resilience that doesn't evaporate after twelve seconds. And, frankly, I'm not particularly well-adapted to the daily grind and self-generated tedium and phony drama most of my friends and neighbors deem "normalcy". So I'm an edge case; precisely the sort of guy who should be pushing for space colonization.
But I see what my fellow geeks somehow miss: humanity would not enjoy space colonization. Our experience would be far worse than mere unease or displeasure. We would yearn for an Earthly DMV or jail cell. Day to day life would be tantamount to torture.
And "adaptation", again, is not what people think it is. Eskimos, after millennia of adaptation, can be happy at twenty below. But the most savage white-out wintertime Alaska moment still feels like home in a way that the lethal blank vacuum of another planet (or even the canned environment of highly functional sealed buildings thereupon) absolutely would not.
Visualize the short-lived, fraught, atrophied koala in its cage, and know that you'd never come anywhere close to its wellness level. As you hear talk of space colonization, never lose sight of the koala.
Why is it so hard to anticipate the awfulness of life in an off-planet environment? It's because we're so jaded; so loathe to appreciate our on-planet environment. We feel entitled to luxurious perfection as a baseline, and have lost all gratitude for the love implicit in the perfect match of our exceedingly narrow comfort requirements with precisely what we've been given right here/right now.
It's part of a greater jadedness. Our lives feel like turds as we enjoy vastly greater comfort, security, health, and general coddling than any previous generation. We pray that each coming new year will be better than the excruciating suboptimality of the previous one. Optimality is a human right!
As I wrote here:
We humans shuffle through our blinkered existence, lost in mental drama, amid this gorgeous paradise planet, a miraculously lush sanctuary in a coldly inhospitable universe, blessed with trees (if trees had never existed and sprung up overnight, people would be driven insane by the beauty) and life-giving oxygen and sunshine and delicious food and refreshing water and all the immersive storylines we could dream of, all of it tailored to our every need (including our need for challenge, violence, and heartbreak) and permeated with heartbreaking love. Yet we scarcely notice. We're jaded, bored, and impatiently awaiting Something Better. We live in eternal anticipation - of our next big win, of momentary gratification, and of the arrival, finally, of "The Answer". We pray for help and then spurn the responders. We even actually have the gall to demand a messiah.We can't grasp how bad Mars would be because we can't grasp how fantastic this is.
Follow-up posting
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