Facts I Learned From A City On Mars

Space bastardry!

A City On Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we thought this through? By Zach and Kelly Weinersmith.

The Moon is very small:

—

Space is full of very fast charged particles from exploded stars. A single iron atom can blast a tunnel through you the size of a hair.

Astronauts sometimes report “flashes of light” that only they can see, and this may be the result of their eyes being struck by these far-traveling bits of doomed stars.

—

In space, radiation shields can actually be more dangerous than not having shields, because:

When fast, heavy ions smack into your shielding and slow down, they can generate cascades of secondary and biologically dangerous particles, sometimes known as a “nuclear shower.”

—

50% of ISS astronauts who go on a long trip become far-sighted permanently. No one knows why.

—

Your legs pump away as if they’re still fighting the gravity humans evolved with. Fluid shifts upward, causing your legs’ fluid volume to decrease. The result is what one paper referred to as “Puffy-Face Bird-Leg” syndrome. Plus, with your body baffled by various fluids being up so high, you’ll make more frequent trips to the bathroom.

—

Everyone who has died in space died of loss of pressure.

—

Astronauts have to breathe pure oxygen for eight hours before they put on a spacesuit and leave the spaceship, or they’ll get the bends.

—

We've learned about space surgery via dead pigs, the vomit comet, and dedicated doctors.

if you’ve ever wondered “can we find out how to do a craniotomy in space?” the answer is yes. When pigs fly.

A problem with surgery in microgravity is that, if you don't have really good air filtration, food and feces just float in the air. Another problem is that blood “tends to pool and form domes that can fragment on disruption by instruments.” Other reported problems include “bowel floats in the operating field” and “the tendency of organs to eviscerate.”

—

Orbital velocity is about 8 kilometers per second. Around 3 kilometers per second, if an object smacks into your spaceship it delivers roughly the kinetic energy of its own weight in TNT.

—

On the early history of rocket science:

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you take liquid oxygen and pour gasoline on top, we can tell you that in at least this one case, you get exploded across a room, burst an eardrum, and have your left eye damaged. Then, if you’re enthusiastic enough about rockets, you get right back to work.

—

the optimal astronaut is a sort of hypercompetent Ned Flanders—reliable, even-tempered, a bit boring, and also the kind of person who could perform brain surgery in a flaming jet if called upon to do so.

—

Terry Virts described how the Russian psychology team sent up a set of recordings called “Sounds of Earth”—ambient noises such as ocean waves or the inside of a café. These recordings were beloved. For an entire month, Virts went to sleep to the sound of rainfall, and at one point the station crew agreed to play it simultaneously on the ship’s laptops for a whole weekend.

—

Astronauts want to go to space. But if they get sick, then they won’t be able to get to space! The solution? CONSTANT LYING.

Astronauts have lied to medical staff about "color blindness, height, chest pains, back pain, a suspected heart attack, suspected bone cancer, a severe inner-ear problem that resulted in disorientation and dizziness, one’s entire childhood, whether or not one had vomited in one’s own gloves during test pilot training, whether one had vomited upon docking with Skylab, and in at least one case a man physically removed pages from his own medical records to hide information from flight surgeons."

—

An astronaut once threatened to commit suicide in space. He described the experience:

“I was relieved, because I hadn’t really figured out how not to come back if they’d called my bluff. The Asian tradition of honorable suicide, seppuku, would have failed, since everything on the shuttle is designed for safety. The knife onboard can’t even cut the bread. You could put your head in the oven, but it’s really just a food warmer. You wouldn’t even burn yourself. And if you tried to hang yourself with no gravity, you’d just dangle there and look like an idiot.”

—

Taco sauce was the first space-specific currency.

—

The richest source of carbon on the Moon is astronaut poop, which you're not allowed to use because it is of of great historical, cultural, or scientific value and thus is part of the common heritage of humanity.

—

You can in fact see borders from space: both India/Pakistan and North Korea/South Korea are visible.

—

The Colombian constitution claims that it has territorial rights to geostationary orbit and people who use it ought to pay them rent. No one pays any attention to Colombia’s opinion though.

—

The Antarctic Treaty System resolves all questions of territorial sovereignity by ignoring them:

The claims just . . . sit there. That three-nation land claim between Chile, Argentina, and the UK? It remains a three-nation claim. That 15 percent unclaimed land? Still nobody’s.

Fortunately, since no one needs Antarctica for anything except science labs, and the Antarctic Treaty System lets people build science labs anywhere, this works fine. However, there is some very weird posturing about who owns Antarctica:

In 1953, Argentina built Esperanza Base, and in the ’70s converted it to a civilian-friendly facility. Since then, families have been regularly flown in, including in one case a seven-month-pregnant woman. Inside the Argentinian claim, she gave birth to Emilio Marcos Palma in 1978. Why? Presumably so at some future diplomatic meeting someone from Argentina can say, “You British say this is your peninsula, but what of little Emilio?” At least ten other births have happened since. However, the idea of priority via childbirth is somewhat vitiated by the fact that nobody wants to stay in Antarctica over the long term. The motto of Esperanza base—“Permanence, an act of sacrifice.”—makes it clear why.

In 1984, Chile constructed Villa Las Estrellas, which is bigger than Esperanza Base, including a gym, radio station, school, church, post office, and souvenir shop. That same year, in one of the weirder acts of international one-upmanship, Juan Pablo Camacho was conceived and born there, presumably so that at some future diplomatic meeting, well, you understand.

—

People speculating about space settlement make up the best dystopias. Have a few for your next YA novel:

• If partial gravity causes developmental problems in childhood, then people would need to have babies on space stations: “A kind of combination honeymoon suite, day care, and kindergarten in the sky.”

  • You can also use “a gigantic banked racetrack on the Martian surface… the Earth-gravity Tilt-A-Whirl.” The Weinersmiths suggest calling this the pregnodome.

  • “Or suppose humans need full Earth gravity until they’re eighteen. What’s your responsibility there as a parent? Do Earth and space stations become a kind of spawning ground humans return to for their entire reproductive lives?”

  • “Would it be appropriate [given the risks of radiation] to simply keep all developing humans underground, while the elders are allowed to explore the surface? If so, would there be sex differences in when you’re allowed to leave the base?”

• Martians might not be able to return to Earth: for example, their bones might be too weak for Earth gravity, or an immune system used to the germ-free Martian environment might be unable to cope with diseases.

• You could have a floating city on Venus, which uses atmospheric carbon dioxide to grow kombucha and bamboo to build your house out of. The Weinersmiths: “if you dream of a home constructed of bamboo and kombucha, surely someone in Northern California is prepared to accommodate you at a lower price.”

• Mercury’s twilight area is a livable temperature, while its night and day aren’t. Fortunately, Mercury is small and has very long days! “So all you have to do is move every bit of human civilization on the planet 86 kilometers every 24 hours forever, and you get to stay alive.”

• Mandatory abortion of disabled fetuses which might be detrimental to the colony, or children which don’t meet the criteria for suitable offspring.

• Sensors on astronauts that detect emotional disturbance so you can automatically lock the doors if they seem too upset.

• Automatically drugged food to promote harmonious interactions.

• Generation ship where a computer makes marriages to maximize genetic diversity (sorry, we don’t have enough slack to include ‘compatibility’ as a criterion) and mandates how many children each woman should have.

• Martians have to pay a tax to everyone on Earth because they’re using the common heritage of mankind (i.e. space).

• A Martian settlement is regulated under the Outer Space Treaty, and Martians can’t own land on Mars, have no right to keep their homes in place permanently, and have to let representatives of other states visit their home sometimes.

• Nuclear war between Mars and Earth because neither side cares about polluting the atmosphere with radioactive material.

• Space company towns in general:

  • On Mars, you may only be able to return home once every two years.

  • Your boss controls not just your housing and food but the actual biosphere.

  • If you get fired, get injured, or go on strike, you might get expelled from your home, which in space means the death penalty.

  • Your boss can control the oxygen/carbon dioxide ratio in the atmosphere depending on how energetic she wants you.

  • “When one company controls shopping, they set the prices and they know what you buy. When they control entertainment and worship, they have power over employee speech and behavior. When they control schools, they have power over what is taught. When they control the hospitals, they control who gets health care, and how much.”

  • The satellite links to Earth are few and limited, so the company town controls all the information that leaves the company town.

  • On the boss’s side of things: high-stakes conflict from the fact that every entity it is possible for the workers to be mad at (landlords, stores, the government, the hospital) is the same entity who is also their employer.

    • Similarly, strikes are very economically damaging—for a Mars settlement to be profitable, settlers’ time would have to be worth millions of dollars a day, so even a short strike could slash profits.

• Space company towns that implement the founders' weird utopian visions, possibly justifying this as "necessary for harmony in space."

• Martian company towns during a recession that are no longer profitable, but no one can leave because the launch window is once every two years.