We’re not ready to live in space yet

I finished the book A City on Mars; Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? By Kelly and Zach Weinersmith a husband and wife team. With Elon Musk wearing an “Occupy Mars” shirt this is a timely look at how feasible putting humans on the moon, in a space habitat, or on Mars really is. From the title one could easily guess that the authors don’t agree with Musk. They tackle all the reasons why people say we should put people in habitats. Here’s some of their responses: The belief is that giving humanity a home off earth will allow the species to continue in case we destroy our current home. But earth at its global warming worst is still a zillion times better than life on the moon or Mars. Also, we’re not ready for life in space so let’s keep working to save earth. Putting industry in orbit to protect earth’s environment is too expensive. Consider cement – yeah, there is enough material in space for all the cement we use, but space is too cold for making it and getting all that mass back to earth is expensive. Space resources won’t make us all rich because mining what little there is would be too costly. Sending humans to space won’t end or reduce war and property disputes in space may get fought on earth. When astronauts come back to earth they frequently talk of the new feeling of how fragile earth is and we’re all in this together. But that hasn’t gone much past the wonderful sounding slogans. The authors talk about the things we don’t yet know about living off earth. Does a fetus need gravity to develop properly? Do children need gravity to grow properly? Is moon or Mars gravity enough? What does a livable biome require? No research has been done on the first few questions, not nearly enough on the last. The moon is not a great place to live and would require living underground. Do we really want that? There aren’t enough resources in the regolith to support trade with earth. Mars is not better, partly because there is a poisonous chemical in the soil. Space habitats are better but would take such a huge effort they aren’t feasible, especially at the scale needed for a viable population. The authors spend a quarter of the book discussing current space law and why it matters. The space treaty that exists was created in the 1960s when there were two space-faring nations. Now there are six plus a couple corporations. Things have been fine so far, but what if one of those corporations sets up a mining operation somewhere that is illegal under the current treaty? The authors explain what a company town is and why they have such a bad reputation. What if the company town is on Mars where the employee can’t simply leave and the boss can coerce the worker by reducing the amount of oxygen? We’re not ready to live in space yet. The benefits aren’t as great as is claimed. The size of a viable population is much bigger than most theorist suggests. But if we still want to go to space, there are important things to research. The biggest is in addition to creating a rocket that can go to Mars, Musk should also be putting billions into biome research and space pregnancy. And that space treaty needs a serious update. I enjoyed the book, though my interest flagged towards the end of the discussion on why space law matters. The authors explain their positions well to the non-science reader, using slang and humor. Author Zach is a cartoonist and has lots of drawings to illustrate the points. I recommend the book to science fiction fans and space nerds. I would enjoy reading science fiction stories based on the ideas in this book. I get emails from March for Our Lives, the group founded by survivors of the school shooting in Parkland Florida. Yeah, they include requests for money. They also explain what they’re doing, both the gains and losses. The email I got a few days ago essentially says discussing the emotional and psychological damage of gun violence hasn’t made any difference in lawmaker actions. Instead, this email talks about the economic cost, Lawmakers want to talk about economic things a lot.

Gun violence costs the United States an estimated $557 billion every year, equating to roughly 2.6% of the entire U.S. economy, or more than $1,600 per person annually. To put that into perspective, these costs exceed what the federal government spends on education each year. And yet this burden is rarely part of the national conversation about guns.

The costs show up in medical costs and higher insurance premiums. Survivors face chronic pain and disabilities affecting their ability to work. Their family’s finances become more unstable through the loss of an income and future earnings. The losses hit the communities already facing economic hardship. In this way gun violence is a hidden tax on the country. Lisa Needham of Daily Kos wrote:

President Donald Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission had its final meeting on Monday, and you’ll be hyped to find out that everything you ever learned about the Founding Fathers and religion is incorrect, you fools. Trump’s handpicked selection of zealots on the commission want you to know that the separation of church and state is a lie and has been all along.

Needham then quoted a few of those founding fathers to contradict that commission (whose name actually means Religious Liberty for me which includes permission to oppress you). First is Roger Williams, who founded Providence in what became Rhode Island: civic life must be separate from spiritual life with a “high wall” between them. Thomas Jefferson in a letter he wrote to Baptists:

I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

James Madison noted that if a government can establish Christianity over other religions it can also establish one Christian sect over others. Needham also noted that of the 12 members of the Commission all are members of Judeo-Christian religions. We know “exactly what church Trump doesn’t want separated from the state.” So the nasty guy having a spat with Pope Leo is rather curious. A lot of nasty guys supporters delight in claims and images that show him as a Christ figure. One of those images made the rounds recently. If not a Christ figure, the nasty guy is at least God’s Chosen President, as is preached to many Evangelical congregations. StanleyYelnats dotcom of the Kos community noted that some supporters have switched from calling him the Christ, to calling him the anti-Christ.

According to biblical prophecy and tradition, the Antichrist is a future, charismatic, and deceptive world leader who opposes Jesus Christ, sets himself up as God, and brings about a, “man of lawlessness” persona characterized by immense power, blasphemy, and the persecution of believers. He is empowered by Satan to perform fake wonders and establish a totalitarian global system.

Some characteristics of the anti-Christ are: He appears peaceful but is cunning. He opposes all things related to God (well, the nasty guy seems to bask in being compared to Jesus). He will control the world’s economic system. He will persecute followers of God (depends on whether one thinks Evangelicals actually follow God). He is focused on power. I will make no claim that the nasty guy is (or isn’t) the anti-Christ. Part of that requires the belief that the End Times are about to start and some Christians have been expecting the End Times for two thousand years. Instead, I will note some of the nasty guy’s Christian followers are turning on him and seeing him for who he is and as the opposite of what they had wanted. Oliver Willis, in his series of Explaining the Right column for Kos wonders, “Why conservatives think they own religion.” I can’t say he gets any closer to the answer than usual, which is not close. He does document Evangelicals think that. Willis goes all the way back to the rise of the Moral Majority and Jerry Falwell, who rose to national attention when Ronald Reagan was president. Much of that political energy was put to use in opposition to abortion that came along with the rise of feminism and women asserting bodily autonomy. But all that loud noise convinced the media and too many Democrats that only the right is the true religion. Willis then gives several examples of the left using religion to make its point. The prime example is Martin Luther King and his work in the Civil Rights movement. Currently, James Talarico is using religion in his campaign to be the Democratic senator from Texas.

But conservatives continue to suffer the mass delusion that only their brand of faith is legitimate, falsely arguing that the more inclusive liberal tradition—where other religions and nonbelievers are on equal footing with Christians—is somehow hostile. It wasn’t Biden, Obama, Clinton, or any other Democrats who picked a childish fight with the pope—or who sold personally branded Bibles to their supporters. And Democrats certainly haven’t openly blasphemed against Christianity by posting images depicting themselves as Jesus Christ. That has been the domain of the so-called “religious” right. But they don’t own religion—not at all.

In Thursday’s pundit roundup for Kos Chitown Kev quoted Mike Brock of the Notes From the Circus Substack.

You do not need intelligence services or insider access or political analysis to figure out what is going on in Donald Trump’s mind at any given moment. He is thinking zero steps ahead. As the philosopher Vlad Vexler has observed, Trump is floating through dispositional states inside very malignant pathologies. There is no strategy to decode. There is no chess game to map. There is a man moving from one psychological state to the next, driven by the same neurological machinery as any other organism in the grip of a compulsive disorder — seeking the next hit, escalating when the last one wore off, displaying dominance when the hierarchy feels threatened. That is all that is happening. That is all that has ever been happening. […] The commentariat keeps attributing chess to someone playing slot machines. I want to give credit to George Conway, and to the other clinicians and public intellectuals who have spent years trying to bring the public’s attention to this fact. Conway has been consistent and precise and largely ignored by the very establishment press that prefers the “distraction strategy” frame because that frame preserves the comforting fiction that someone competent is in control. The Duty to Warn coalition. The sixty thousand signatories. The people who were called alarmist and hysterical and politically motivated for saying, in clinical terms, what is plainly visible to anyone willing to look.

Daily Kos has upgraded to a new platform. Because of something between the new comment system and the browser I’m using, which is Vivaldi, I don’t have access to comments. And that means no access to the cartoons usually posted there. In Friday’s roundup Greg Dworkin included a tweet by Christopher Hale:

Speaker Mike Johnson, an evangelical with no theological training, says Pope Leo XIV doesn’t understand Catholic just war doctrine. Pope Leo XIV’s patron, St. Augustine, invented the Catholic just war doctrine.

Tennis player Martina Navratilova added:

Pretty soon Mike will start telling me how to hit a serve or something….

James Patterson of Providence Magazine

When Vice President JD Vance was campaigning for Viktor Orbán earlier this month, he was also campaigning to preserve the Hungarian funding for the New Right organizations that would support his own future political ambitions. With Orbán defeated, that money is gone. The Hungarians, in their own way, helped decide the future of American conservatism. How is that possible? How did this happen? The answer is the ‘Grand Budapest Cartel.’ Orbán has spent the past decade engaging in a concerted influence campaign on American conservatism. The purpose of his efforts is not merely to familiarize conservative policymakers and think-tankers with Hungarian interests. Orbán wanted to remake American conservatism from the top down into an ideological movement that moves it away from limited government, religious pluralism, and a robust foreign presence, and toward right-wing social engineering, postliberalism, and an American retreat from foreign affairs. Orbán’s ambition is not his alone but also that of Orbán’s close friends in Russia and China. In short, the meaning of the future of American conservatism was also on the ballot in the recent Hungarian elections.

A tweet by Mike Levin

It should be a much bigger story that JD Vance flew to Hungary, stood on a campaign stage, and told voters to return a head of government widely documented for human rights abuses and democratic backsliding. Then, after his candidate lost, Vance said what had happened during the Hungarian campaign was “one of the worst examples of foreign election interference that I’ve ever seen or ever even read about.” Was he describing himself? The Hungarian people rejected it all. Democracy held, despite America’s intervention, not because of American leadership. The United States has long argued that elections should be free from outside influence. That standard should apply to everyone, including us.

In the roundup from Saturday a week ago Dworkin quoted Lauren Egan of The Bulwark:

However understandable the downward trend in campus protests might be, the dynamic has become a point of frustration for some parts of the Democratic coalition who feel that anti-war and pro-Palestinian activists are tougher on Democratic officials than on Republicans. They note that even though Harris is out of office, she still gets interrupted at public events by pro-Palestinian protesters. “Every single speech that Kamala Harris gave in those 107 days, they found a way to protest her and call her a proponent of genocide. But they never did that throughout the campaign for Donald Trump, and then they never did it in 2025 when he was giving Benjamin Netanyahu a blank check to annihilate Gaza,” said a former Harris campaign official. “Now, when Donald Trump is threatening to do the thing that they accused Kamala Harris and Joe Biden of being complicit of, they’re silent.”

America loves to get to reconciliation without truth

In this episode of Gaslit Nation, host Andrea Chalupa interviewed Wajahat Ali, who is the author of the book Go Back to Where You Came From, which recommends how to become American. The episode is 40 minutes. I worked from the transcript. Chalupa posed the basic question of the interview. With America losing patience with the nasty guy, Republicans, and the MAGA movement so much that the Senate might be in play, how might Democrats screw it up? Ali said:

I've always said the three major sins in America are sins that we refuse to confront. Our white supremacy, greed and misogyny. And Donald Trump is the inevitable end result of us unwilling to confront this truth about ourselves.

Ali then listed some contradictory aspects of America. An example is the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants, including Ali’s parents. Then people like the nasty guy tell them to go away. A rage is building and Democrats don’t understand its cause. Democrats think restoring them to power is the answer. But Democrats and Republicans have the same donors. They go to the same golf clubs. Both are still wedded to the rich. Democrats are acting like the nasty guy is so corrosive we’ll gain power without having to promise anything. Have you seen a Project 2028? They intend business as usual. But the AI bubble will burst and the AI and crypto people will say their company is too big to fail. Things can change quickly. Eric Swalwell is suddenly out. Orbán is out. Zohran Mamdani, now mayor of NYC, seemed to come from nowhere.

I'm seeing like this is a massive populist vibe. People want accountability. They want fighters and they want change. And if you don't give it to them, my fear is, okay, Democrats win. You give them same old, same old. 2032, you get your first America First Nazi president.

Chalupa discussed the swamp of Washington DC. The nasty guys says he is cleaning it up, but he is actually at its center.

I want to point out, because my sister was in DC for many years, and word on the street is a lot of those partners, a lot of those wives are on the payroll of foreign governments like Saudi Arabia to further their interests. There was a social club of elite political women and media wives that Ivanka Trump was welcomed into during the first Trump term. And that is an underground, under the radar form of lobbying. Everybody is paid off in DC. And that's why we have the swamp in the first place. That's what the swamp is.

Ali said:

I could close my eyes and throw a pebble in DC and I'll hit someone being paid by UAE, Quatar, Saudi Arabia, or Israel. Notice I didn't say Democrat or Republican.

Ali told the story of working as a reporter at the White House. Sean Spicer, the nasty guy’s first press secretary, gave his first press conference. He lied to and mocked the press. And then the press people invited him to their party where he seemed to be pals with everyone.

For the average Jose who sees that, they're like, "Oh, you're actually friends with the guy who mocked you, ridiculed you, called you enemy of the people and is having the best time at your party."

Ali said that America loves to get to reconciliation without truth. We have monuments to Confederates. Nixon was pardoned. Financial criminals were declared too big to fail. Even though Joe Biden did great things, Ketanji Jackson being one of them, there are three major sins of his presidency that will harm his legacy. The biggest is Merrick Garland, who slow walked the investigations into the nasty guy. The Attorney General should have had brass knuckles. The second sin is his blindness of what was going on in Gaza. Biden’s base stayed home because they could see genocide unfolding. The third sin is he tried to run for a second term. That left Kamala Harris – or any other Democrat – insufficient time to effectively campaign. The blindness includes the Democratic Party. They still refuse to tax the rich. They still give unwavering support to Israel. If we vote for them things will be different? Ali said:

And folks, anyone who's waiting for the DNC to change, Andrea, it's been 10 years, 10 years. This is who they are. They won't change. They can't change. They're not made for this moment. They're not built for this fight. Thank you for your service. We appreciate you. It's time for you to either evolve or we have to cull you in the next six months and replace you with fighters. Too much is at stake.

Chalupa said that Democrats experienced the Capitol attack, an insurrection, and they did very little in response. They had Constitutional powers they didn’t use, powers that would have kept the traitors out of power. Yeah, the went after the foot soldiers, but not the coup plotters. Ali said:

That's what the lesson that Republicans learned was, "Wow, you're weak. You're pathetic. You guys don't know how to flex power. You didn't stop us. Awesome. That was a dress rehearsal. We'll do it again." And the one credit I'll give Republicans, I don't want to give them credit, but I have to, is when they get in power, Andrea, they flex. They don't give an F. They don't look at the polls. They're like, "We'll do whatever the hell we want. Stop us.”

That’s why most of the Democrats must be replaced. Another example. Randy Fine, Andy Ogles, and Tommy Tuberville say the worst genocidal and anti-Muslim stuff, and Rashida Tlaib, who has Palestinian ancestry, is the one Democrats censure. Democrats are overperforming in elections yet the Democratic brand is worse than that of the nasty guy. How does that make sense? Ali said,

People do not trust these institutions anymore. People are not voting for Democrats. They're voting against Trump. ... So Democrats are misreading this and saying, "Aha. People love the Democratic Party,” but then I give you the poll that the Democrats are ranked lower than Donald Trump, who has the lowest favorability rating.

Ali’s fear is Democrats end up back in office, perhaps even win the presidency in 2028, then proceed with business as usual. They won’t go after the infrastructure that made the nasty guy possible. And a fascist wins in 2032. The people are rising up. And the Democratic leadership remains tone deaf, to be Republican light. One key aspect of fighting this is to hold fast to our own humanity. They discussed Eric Swalwell. His team knew about his sexual harassment and still tried to get him to be the governor of California. Swalwell’s survivors held onto their humanity and declared they would not tolerate the hiding. And now he’s out. Republicans might worship a rapist. But people knew about Swalwell long before he was taken down. Swalwell was part of the Epstein class (and this identification does not rely on being an Epstein client). Chalupa said,

Ukraine is a laboratory of Kremlin aggression and Ukrainian civil society, the independent journalists, the activists, the anti-corruption reformers, they are the reason why Ukraine still exists as a country, as a democracy, and they hold Zelensky accountable. Their grassroots engine is extraordinary. It's historic. And we're seeing resistance here in America on the same level of Ukraine.

To overthrow the guy before Zelenskyy Ukrainians ran towards danger. We’re seeing the same thing in the US in Renee Good and Alex Pretti running towards danger. That’s what gives Chalupa hope. We’re not just fighting fascism. We’re fighting corruption generally. We’re fighting on two fronts. We’re fighting MAGA and fascism. We’re also fighting Democrats who are part of the system, who are complicit in genocide, who take money from AI and crypto and help them with “deregulation,” who think billionaires are part of the party’s Big Tent (a line Gavin Newsom has used), who are unwilling to hold the criminals accountable. Me talking: Not long ago I wrote that we should not blame Democrats for not acting now, because they don’t hold the levers of power and there isn’t much they can do. After working through this interview I see we can blame them for not loudly proclaiming all the things they will do to protect the country and democracy once they are back in power. They’ve been way too silent, which implies they don’t intend to protect democracy. I’ve got a few letters from various Democratic organizations, including from Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. In the recent past I’ve sent a few back, not with checks, but with writing on the donation form that says that I won’t send a check as long as they keep accepting checks from billionaires. I think I now need to change the message to be: If you accept donations from billionaires you’re not enough different from Republicans. That’s a project for tomorrow.

Do your fellow citizens act morally?

A while back I wrote that the nasty guy and his military had allowed Iranian and friendly ships to go through the Strait of Hormuz while the Iranians blocked all other traffic from passing through the Strait. That such a detail had not been thought of seemed strange. That has changed. The nasty guy’s military now has a blockade of the Strait. If a ship is friendly to the US Iran won’t let it through. If it is friendly to Iran the US won’t let it through. Thom Hartmann of the Daily Kos community and an independent pundit wrote that this reminds him of Sarajevo – in 1914 when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot. Interlocking European alliances mobilized on the side of Serbia or Austria-Hungary starting WWI. As I mentioned before Hartmann wrote Israel’s Netanyahu has a reason for his attacks on Iran – he can claim emergency status to pause court proceedings in his fraud and bribery trial. Hartmann looked at the command authorizing the blockade. It is a global directive, meaning he says the US Navy may board Iran friendly ships anywhere in the world, not just near the Strait. Under international maritime law, that is piracy. China gets about 80% of its oil through the Strait. They will be desperate for it soon. China also has military ships in the region. China, along with Russia, has been providing targeting intelligence to Iran. So what happens if a Chinese ship challenges the nasty guy’s blockade? Does the nasty guy pull his famous TACO, collapsing the blockade? Or does the war escalate? Also Russia’s Putin, no matter how deep he is in Ukraine does not respond with moderation when cornered. He cannot be seen accepting defeat. He would love to see China humiliate the nasty guy.

When great powers are simultaneously cornered along with a smaller ally, when their leaders face domestic crises that demand the appearance of strength, when interlocking military commitments are already active and drawing them toward conflict, that’s when the world has historically stumbled into catastrophes that nobody wanted and nobody planned. ... The lesson of WWI is that leaders who think they can manage escalation usually can’t.

Hartmann ended the piece calling on us to call our senators to support another Democrat-led War Powers Resolution. I heard on today’s news it failed. Emily Singer of Kos wrote that Republicans know that they will lose the House and likely also the Senate in the midterm elections. One bit of evidence they know this: Republicans are suggesting that Justice Samuel Alito, now 76 and recently hospitalized with an unspecified illness, retire from the Supreme Court this summer so there is time to nominate and confirm his replacement before they lose that ability. They don’t want what happened to Ruth Bader Ginsberg to happen to Alito. Some are even suggesting Clarence Thomas, now 77, also retire. A month ago Andrew Mangan of Kos discussed a study from the Pew Research Center. It asked adults to rate the ethics and morality of the people of their nation. The US was worst with 47% rating their fellow citizens as ethical and moral and 53% rating them as unethical and immoral. The average of 25 countries matched Germany where 72% rated fellow citizens as ethical and moral. At the top of the list is Canada, where 92% rated their fellow citizens as ethical and moral. Pew hasn’t asked this question before, so they can’t offer a trend or speculate how long Americans have viewed each other this way. There are polls that have shows that over the last 20 years the intensity in which we view the other political party negatively has increased. These feelings have been made worse by the nasty guy, someone who relishes cruelty. And that explains why Democrats (at 60%) are more likely than Republicans (at 46%) to say their fellow citizens are immoral. But maybe he is a symptom of an already cantankerous citizenry. Those countries with better views of each other “don’t have such malicious, divisive heads of state, or their right-wing populist parties hold less power.” Kos community member cinepost discussed modern American composers that invested in society. These composers were the elites of their day. As society became more egalitarian, the elite composers did too. Aaron Copland incorporated American idioms into Appalachian Spring and Billy the Kid and he wrote an opera to be performed by high school kids (this one I didn’t know about and I’m a Copland fan). Leonard Bernstein wrote Candide in response to the McCarthy hearings and gave the Young People’s Concert to bring in a new generation of listeners. Michael Tillson-Thomas composed From the Diary of Anne Frank in response to the Holocaust, created Keeping Score, a series of documentaries on how music gets to performance, and established the New World Symphony to train young musicians for professional careers. Turning to the Information Age elites, cinepost says they have done the opposite.

Rather than seeking to preserve their elite status by insuring strong societal support for that which made their position possible, the Information Age elites have decided that they will instead defend their position by eliminating any “threat” to their status. Bezos seeks to dispense with those “pesky workers” and their unionizing ideas by replacing industrial workers with robots. Musk, Thiel, Altman, Zuckerberg, et. al., want to “scrape” up the accumulated knowledge of mankind so as to hold title to it and sell it back to individuals “by the byte.”

But if they defend their position by destroying the working class, who will purchase their goods and services?

The lesson to be taken from the classical music “elites” is this: to maintain your position in society, you have to use your position to maintain the society in which you live, for without that society, you have no position at all. If they do not invest their time and resources in maintaining our society, they will find themselves lording over an impoverished land where even if the people might have the desire, no one will have the means to pay tribute to the Information Age elites. But if they do invest in society wisely so that it grows and strengthens, they will do more than simply maintain their position.