A City on Mars

looks like I have another book to buy for my to-read pile, or I could do the sensible thing and borrow it

Some caveats first:

Having said all of that, I think that if we can settle space, we should settle space. However, we should not do so by settling on other planets. Instead, we should learn to build our own self-sustaining habitats in space. By doing so we are less likely to disturb life on other habitable planets or interfere with the cultural development of other intelligent species. First contact should be on somewhat equal terms between two spacefaring species, rather than between spacefarers and the planetbound. Besides, if we can’t build viable, self-sustaining habitats in orbit, how in Great Cthulhu’s unholy name are we going to terraform Mars?

Why do I hold this opinion? Here’s another opinion for you: I think we need a grand, unifying purpose that doesn’t involve warfare. We should find one before one of our geriatric ‘leaders’ mistakes the “call nurse” button for the one labelled “launch nukes”. In case you haven’t noticed, we also seem to have a shitload of maladjusted young men who have no higher aspirations than being influencers and no better prospects than a lifetime spent working to make rich assholes even richer. What the hell are we going to do, make them kill each other? We can’t even get them to fuck each other since no sensible woman will have them. Why not give them a chance to be heroes by paving our way to the stars?

Also, let’s be honest here: dear old Mother Earth has always wanted us dead. The history of the human race has been the history of humanity giving Gaea the finger and saying, “That all you got?” Nevertheless, as matters currently stand it would only take one good asteroid strike to do the job. Just ask the dinosaurs. We’ve been lucky so far, but on a sufficiently long timeline the house always wins and Death always gets her due. Death, like life, finds a way.

Besides, we could give the white supremacists their own ethnically and racially ‘pure’ habitat. Perhaps theirs could orbit Uranus since they’re all assholes. We could use them as test subjects, forget they exist, or place wagers on how long it takes for the colony to die out from inbreeding and cannibalism.

No, I’m not joking about any of this. If I wanted to be cute I’d suggest slipping radioisotopes into Vladimir Putin’s morning vodka. No, we haven’t thought this through. But since when have we thought anything through? If humanity was good at thinking shit through then capitalism as currently practiced in the US wouldn’t be a thing, the environment wouldn’t be fucked, and Greta Thunberg wouldn’t have spent the last five years or so cutting class and telling politicians to get their heads out of their asses.

If we go extinct and some successor species bothers to compose an epitaph for us, they might go with something like, homo sapiens: it seemed like a good idea at the time. Assuming we haven’t fucked over the planet so badly that it becomes uninhabitable for the next billion years or so.

update for 2024-03-23

Devastatia Del Gato was kind enough to remind me by email that we haven’t quite managed to build a long-term sustainable, self-contained habitat right here on Earth, given how Biosphere 2 worked out. They fixed the food production issues, but there’s no fixing human drama.