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1/ 🚀A THREAD ABOUT LIVING IN SPACE 🚀
We absolutely will do it. Not because it’s comfortable, or logical, or safe, but because humans live and die for the sake of an imagined frontier
We absolutely will do it. Not because it’s comfortable, or logical, or safe, but because humans live and die for the sake of an imagined frontier
2/ Imagine standing on Mars at the top of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system, looking down 10k foot cliffs into a chaldera the size of Luxembourg
3/ Imagine standing on Mercury, the blinding light of the terminator racing toward you across the surface, as your habitat stays always on the border between searing heat and frigid cold
4/ Imagine standing on the vast ice fields of Europa, 20 km of ice encasing a liquid ocean below you, looking up at the vast expanse of Jupiter’s reddish orange bands like a canopy
5/ Imagine wind surfing the Chasmas of Mars, the katabatic winds funneling thousands of miles across the face of the planet through the walls of cliffs thousands of feet high
6/ Imagine walking along the edge of the great chasm of Miranda, circling Uranus, seeing how two planetoids collided and cooled before they could completely merge, looking 20 km straight down to the heart of the moon
7/ Imagine walking along the surface of Phobos and Charon, Mars’ moons, as they raced around the planet, the gravity so low you could reach escape velocity with a running start
8/ Imagine walking along the bottom of Hellas Basin, a canyon so wide that its edges are not even visible below Mars’ horizon 4 km away, but the cliffs at its edges are
9/ Imagine walking across a Martian plain that hadn’t changed in 3.5 billion years, free of tectonic and volcanic activity for all the time that life has been evolving on Earth, with only the winds carving shapes in the regolith
10/ Now imagine beginning to change this world. Walking on the north polar ice cap of Mars, with more water than we’ll ever need, figuring out how to mine it, how to store it, how to get it south
11/ Imagine learning to walk at gravity a fraction of Earth’s, a skipping and gliding maneuver only possible when you weigh 1/3 what you weigh on Earth
12/ Imagine beginning to terraform Mars, like a twin planet in size and shape and distance from the sun, finding ways to add heat, air pressure, oxygen, & nitrogen to the atmosphere to make it survivable and, one day, breathable
13/ Imagine what we’ll have to learn about life: how resistant it is, how much more resistant we can make it, splicing in genes from Himalayan animals or Antarctic plants to make them more resistant to cold, to CO2, to low air pressure, to radiation
14/ Imagine selecting the first colonists, how much we’ll learn about human psychology in isolation, about intragroup dynamics, about the balance of skills and knowledge needed to make an interplanetary colony work
15/ Imagine drilling into the vast aquifers of Mars, piping the ancient water onto the surface, seeing it freeze instantly at first but slowly, over the years, as atmospheric pressure increases, slowly filling the northern hemisphere of the planet with a world-wrapping sea
16/ Imagine watching every natural process unfold differently under Mars’ lower gravity, the trees higher, the waves bigger, sports more extreme, people taller, and a vertical landscape that dwarfs Earth’s
17/ Imagine filling the Helas crater with water, making it into Helas Sea, it’s rims spotted with seaside settlements around a body of water the size of the Mediterranean, all within a single crater
18/ Imagine the Martian constitutional convention, which might one day take place, with representatives taking all the best parts of Earth’s countless political experiments and fusing them into a new kind of government, a new way of living
19/ Imagine how we might eventually genetically engineer ourselves, or our children, to breathe freely in high CO2 environments, to see in the dim light of the outer solar system, and one day maybe to live underwater or in zero g or flying through orbital clouds
20/ Imagine colonizing the asteroid belt, thousands of human experiments, each one living on the inside of a hollowed our asteroid, the whole thing set to spinning to create artificial gravity against the inside of the rock
21/ Imagine the profusion of belief systems, worldviews (worldsviews?), philosophies that will sprout as the number of literal ways of living explodes in number and diversity, the discoveries in what it means to be human, what it could mean to be human
22/ And even if you don’t care about all this, think about what it will mean for Earth. An escape valve, a lifeboat, a new frontier, an epic adventure, an infinite game to occupy every scientific and political and philosophical discipline forever
23/ Mars especially will be a mirror to Earth, allowing it to see itself for the first time from an external vantage point. Given another option, the preciousness of Earth will be revealed as if for the first time
24/ Maybe one of the deepest underlying causes of the world’s malaise is that we’ve lost a frontier, a next step as a civilization, a horizon to walk toward that doesn’t reign us in. Space could give us that back, which is more valuable than any material comfort
25/ It doesn’t make sense to colonize space, but since when do humans make sense? We live for meaning, and space for all its harshness and barrenness has an unlimited supply of meaning for a curious species
26/ Most of the facts and anecdotes in this thread come from Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, the most hopeful and scientifically grounded sci-fi story I’ve ever read. More below
