Название: Lunacy: Ten False Promises of the New Space Age
Автор: Ben Bramble
Издательство: Princeton University Press
Год: 2026
Страниц: 201
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true), epub
Размер: 10.1 MB

Why we shouldn’t colonize Mars or the Moon, or even vacation there.

If certain business titans, corporations, and governments have their way, humans will someday be living, working, and vacationing in space. This is the much-vaunted New Space Age, and in Lunacy, philosopher Ben Bramble explains why it is a giant mistake. Bramble systematically refutes each of the ten most influential reasons given for this new generation of space exploration (and habitation), from the idea of Mars as a backup plan in case Earth meets an untimely end to the charms of friendship with extraterrestrials. Doing so, he reflects on deeper issues, exploring such questions as what the point of the human story is and what a good future for humanity would truly involve. (Spoiler alert: it includes solving problems on Earth.)

Why is Mars specifically the target of these efforts? Why not somewhere closer to home, like the Moon? Mars’s distance from Earth is actually part of its appeal. The Moon is so close to Earth that many of the threats we face here on Earth could threaten us on the Moon as well—say, a killer comet that dramatically altered Earth’s gravitational balance or ejected significant debris into space, or a powerful gamma-ray burst. Mars, by contrast, is so far away that a colony there might have a greater chance of surviving such things.

Another reason is that Mars is far more hospitable to life than the Moon. Unlike the Moon, Mars contains both carbon and nitrogen, essential elements for sustaining human life and agriculture, as well as much more water than the Moon. Mars also has a day/night cycle very like Earth’s (24 hours and 39 minutes long, as opposed to the Moon’s 29.5 Earth days). It also has more Earthlike gravity (about 38 percent of Earth’s gravity, as opposed to the Moon’s 16 percent). For humans, living in low gravity environments causes muscle atrophy, bone density loss, and cardiovascular changes, among other terrible things. Mars’s similarities to Earth also give us a better chance of one day terraforming it—that is, engineering its environment to become more habitable. As Musk memorably put it, Mars is a “fixer-upper of a planet.”5 The Moon, by contrast, lacks the basic ingredients needed to become significantly Earthlike.

Bramble does not think we should get out of space entirely. On the contrary, he thinks that there is an important and exciting future in space science. Our activities in space, he tells us, should be animated by a curiosity about space itself rather than narrow economic or military interests.