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.”