#187 – Zach Weinersmith on how researching his book turned him from a space optimist into a "space bastard"

80,000 Hours Podcast

"Earth economists, when they measure how bad the potential for exploitation is, they look at things like, how is labour mobility? How much possibility do labourers have otherwise to go somewhere else? Well, if you are on the one company town on Mars, your labour mobility is zero, which has never existed on Earth. Even in your stereotypical West Virginian company town run by immigrant labour, there’s still, by definition, a train out. On Mars, you might not even be in the launch window. And even if there are five other company towns or five other settlements, they’re not necessarily rated to take more humans. They have their own oxygen budget, right?

"And so economists use numbers like these, like labour mobility, as a way to put an equation and estimate the ability of a company to set noncompetitive wages or to set noncompetitive work conditions. And essentially, on Mars you’re setting it to infinity." — Zach Weinersmith

In today’s episode, host Luisa Rodriguez speaks to Zach Weinersmith — the cartoonist behind Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal — about the latest book he wrote with his wife Kelly: A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?

Links to learn more, highlights, and full transcript.

They cover:

• Why space travel is suddenly getting a lot cheaper and re-igniting enthusiasm around space settlement.
• What Zach thinks are the best and worst arguments for settling space.
• Zach’s journey from optimistic about space settlement to a self-proclaimed “space bastard” (pessimist).
• How little we know about how microgravity and radiation affects even adults, much less the children potentially born in a space settlement.
• A rundown of where we could settle in the solar system, and the major drawbacks of even the most promising candidates.
• Why digging bunkers or underwater cities on Earth would beat fleeing to Mars in a catastrophe.
• How new space settlements could look a lot like old company towns — and whether or not that’s a bad thing.
• The current state of space law and how it might set us up for international conflict.
• How space cannibalism legal loopholes might work on the International Space Station.
• And much more.

Chapters:

• Space optimism and space bastards (00:03:04)
• Bad arguments for why we should settle space (00:14:01)
• Superficially plausible arguments for why we should settle space (00:28:54)
• Is settling space even biologically feasible? (00:32:43)
• Sex, pregnancy, and child development in space (00:41:41)
• Where’s the best space place to settle? (00:55:02)
• Creating self-sustaining habitats (01:15:32)
• What about AI advances? (01:26:23)
• A roadmap for settling space (01:33:45)
• Space law (01:37:22)
• Space signalling and propaganda (01:51:28)
• Space war (02:00:40)
• Mining asteroids (02:06:29)
• Company towns and communes in space (02:10:55)
• Sending digital minds into space (02:26:37)
• The most promising space governance models (02:29:07)
• The tragedy of the commons (02:35:02)
• The tampon bandolier and other bodily functions in space (02:40:14)
• Is space cannibalism legal? (02:47:09)
• The pregnadrome and other bizarre proposals (02:50:02)
• Space sexism (02:58:38)
• What excites Zach about the future (03:02:57)

Producer and editor: Keiran Harris
Audio engineering lead: Ben Cordell
Technical editing: Simon Monsour, Milo McGuire, and Dominic Armstrong
Additional content editing: Katy Moore and Luisa Rodriguez
Transcriptions: Katy Moore