I thought of you, dear social media, when I read this quote from “A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?” by Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith –
“Staying alive on Earth requires fire and a pointy stick. Staying alive in space will require all sorts of high-tech gadgets we can barely manufacture on Earth.”
Start reading this book for free: https://a.co/2VFDa0v
(I’ve started a new book. Without, of course, finishing any of the others I’m reading.)
«consider an idea we call the “Necrosphere,” in contrast with the Biosphere. The Necrosphere is a built structure on Earth. Inside it, the ground is poison, there is no air, and cascades of radiation are fired at the inhabitants on a perpetual basis.
Why did we build it? In the sure knowledge that we can stick engineers inside who, due to the harsh environment combined with their need not to die, will spew forth valuable ideas like a spigot spews forth pressurized water. If this sort of thing seems implausible to you, you should ask yourself why anyone would expect a Mars base to generate all these supposed benefits. You should also ask yourself why it is that so many innovations on Earth come not from anarchic wastelands but from cities where an engineer’s main hardship is eight-dollar espressos.»
Here, Read This 
@herereadthis.blog The preview makes the book look more promising than I had feared; I was expecting a combination of Earth First eco-hippy-ism and “capitalism is the eevuls”. Instead the authors make several valid points, namely arguing against utopianism in space (because this is humanity we’re talking about), and just how complex the bioenvironment we take for granted is.
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@60sRefugee @herereadthis.blog
Yeah, it's definitely not what you had feared. They're more "let's go to Mars but when the time is right and a lot of questions have been answered." They seem to have a pretty good list of unanswered questions so far.
Plus, there's pretty much a chuckle every page or two, if not a guffaw.
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