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On the same theme, A City On Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith (of SMBC fame) is a humorous yet an in-depth pragmatic look at why space colonization will suck.

Summarizing: space will kill you fast, moon will grind you down with the regolith, and Mars will poison you. There are some interesting bits about international/space laws and treaties too.

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Wasn’t that convincing for me. The hard science elements seemed a bit cherry-picked and the later sections on governance and laws seem to want almost a wide spread agreement across multiple countries on every detail before people are allowed to go.

A multi-part review [1] is available which detailed more aspects quite well.

In short, people will go for a multitude of reasons (whether it is sensible or not).

[1] https://planetocracy.org/p/review-of-a-city-on-mars-part-i

+1, great book. Their recommended strategy is to 1) wait until technology improves and we have a better understanding of how to solve the fundamental problems of Mars colonization, then 2) go big and build a large settlement that has the scale to actually succeed.

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