Zach Weinersmith
Autore di Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything
Sull'Autore
Zach Weinersmith is the cartoonist behind the popular geek webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. His work has been featured in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Slate, Forbes, Science Friday, Boingboing, the Freakonomics Blog, the RadioLab blog, Entertainment Weekly, Mother Jones, CNN, mostra altro Discovery Magazine, and more. mostra meno
Fonte dell'immagine: by Christina Xu
Serie
Opere di Zach Weinersmith
A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? (2023) 234 copie
Pour La Science 2 copie
Science 1 copia
Opere correlate
La particella alla fine dell'universo. La caccia al bosone di Higgs e le nuove frontiere della fisica (2012) — Illustratore — 590 copie
Flash Forward: An Illustrated Guide to Possible (and Not So Possible) Tomorrows (2021) — Collaboratore — 44 copie
The Paulandstormonomicon — Illustratore — 2 copie
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Altri nomi
- Weiner, Zach
Weinersmith, Zach
Weinersmith, Zachary Alexander (birth name) - Data di nascita
- 1982-03-05
- Sesso
- male
- Nazionalità
- USA
- Attività lavorative
- cartoonist
- Relazioni
- Weinersmith, Kelly (wife)
Utenti
Recensioni
Liste
Premi e riconoscimenti
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 22
- Opere correlate
- 9
- Utenti
- 2,184
- Popolarità
- #11,734
- Voto
- 4.0
- Recensioni
- 107
- ISBN
- 37
- Lingue
- 6
- Preferito da
- 1
In particular, they focus on a lot of issues that advocates of space settlement tend to gloss over or ignore while they're busy thinking about rocket schedules and mineral abundances. Like, for instance, the fact that the longest anyone has ever been in space is about a year and a half and no one's ever lived in Moon gravity for more than a few days or Mars gravity at all. So we have zero data on what it would mean, physiologically, to spend a lifetime somewhere other than Earth, or whether we can reproduce there without problems. Indeed, there hasn't even been much in the way of good animal experiments on any of that yet. Then there are issues of psychology and government, because no matter what the most idealistic of space dreamers might want to believe, humans do inevitably take our own flawed humanity with us wherever we go. And what about legal barriers? Does current space law even permit this sort of thing? Do we need to have clearer and more useful international law on the subject first to prevent problems down the road? And is expanding into space going to usher in a new era of cosmic harmony, or is it likely to actually be a new source of conflict?
On top of which, the simple fact is that space is a terrible place. As is the moon, as is Mars. It is profoundly difficult to overestimate just how hard it will be to keep human beings alive there, never mind thriving, or how much of what we take absolutely for granted on Earth will have to be struggled for there. Antarctica is a garden spot by comparison.
None of which is probably anything space enthusiasts (of which I do count myself one, although never one who thought Elon Musk-style near-term Mars settlement was anything but a pipe dream) are likely to want to hear. But whether or not you're convinced by their arguments, they are very much worth listening to, and the authors are certainly right that not enough attention is paid to these topics.
I should say that, while this sounds like a massive downer, it is written in a pleasant, humorous style (even if it is sometimes a stretch to keep that up during long chapters about international law), and also that the authors don't think that cities on Mars don't sound awesome, or even that they're not a good long-term goal for humanity. Ultimately, their argument is for doing it when we're actually truly capable of doing it right... and that that is really not today.… (altro)