In August 1998, 700 people came to Boulder, Colorado to attend the founding convention of the Mars Society. The group’s co-founder and president, Robert Zubrin, extolled the virtues of sending humans to Mars to terraform the planet and establish a human colony. The Mars Society’s founding declaration began, “The time has come for humanity to journey to the planet Mars,” and declared that “Given the will, we could have our first crews on Mars within a decade.” That was two and a half decades ago.
In their hilarious, highly informative and cheeky book, “A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?”, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith inventory the challenges standing in the way of Zubrin-like visions for Mars settlement. The wife-and-husband team serves a strong, but never stern, counterargument to the visionaries promising that we’ll put humans on Mars in the very near future. “Think of this book as the straight-talking homesteader’s guide to the rest of the solar system,” they write.
