Review of a City on Mars (Part III)

International treaties and space law become tools for arguing against human expansion. Do these arguments hold together?

I am finally completing my in-depth review of A City On Mars this week. In the first part of this review, I covered the arguments this book makes against space settlement. In the second part I covered what it said about science. This third and final part covers what the book says about the legal and social aspects of space settlement.

I will say that I learned stuff from this part. However, like the rest of the book it has significant weaknesses, and is far too wedded to a particular vision of the future which - fortunately in the eyes of liberal-minded people - will not come to pass.

Space Law

This section has a few unexamined assumptions about how the world does, and should, work.

Is conflict always bad? The UK had a choice for peace with Hitler in 1940. We had actively sought to avoid war for years before that, with disastrous consequences. In 1861 the Union could have simply let the Confederacy go on its way, and let slavery continue. And the reason the Confederacy was the last bastion of slavery in North America was because the British Empire had banned slavery and used its Navy to forcibly suppress the trade, choosing conflict over peace.

Conflict doesn’t necessarily have to mean war either. The United States and China could be described in conflict over various issues right now, and there is no war between them. Nations have competing interests, and they will try to press them if they can - only the presence of a hegemon can stop that.

It is repeatedly asserted, without any evidence, that a scramble between great powers in space for limited territory would lead to conflict on Earth. The Weinersmiths are fond of historical allegory, but miss a highly relevant one that goes against their narrative - the scramble for Africa. Warlike European powers, even without the threat of nuclear war hanging over them, did not go to war with each other over it. When Europe did finally go to war with itself it was because Austria-Hungary (no African colonies) threatened Serbia (no African colonies) and Russia (no African colonies) intervened. The first player with colonies to get into the fray was Germany, and it would be a bizarre reading of history to claim that they did it to defend Namibia.

The scramble did involve international agreement at the Berlin Conference - but this was in response to the facts on the ground, not preceding them. Germany, who had arrived late to the game, chose to improve its position by negotiation rather than war with Britain or France. It is not clear why the Weinersmiths think that the presence of nuclear weapons would make modern powers more likely to choose war in this situation, and they never really elaborate. For instance, they say, regarding safety zones on the Moon:

But try to imagine a rival country, especially one like China, which already has a rocky relationship with the United States, telling them to leave. Again, that American safety zone isn’t a claim to sovereign territory; it’s not a claim that some lunar region is literally America. But it sure gets close. Throw in the limited quantity of good places on the Moon, add the lack of any limits on the total number of bases nations can place, add that the nation pushing the new interpretation is the one with the most space capability, and add that the two countries most interested in the best spots on the Moon are nuclear powers, and you have a recipe for danger.

A nuclear conflict between the US and China would end both as industrial societies, and likely kill part or all of their leadership. It isn’t explained what might cause leaders to be so fanatical about a patch on the Moon as to risk it, especially when the US and Soviets ended up in much more contentious stand-offs in the Cold War and never went nuclear. Here its all just hidden in the word ‘danger’ without any justification.

Collective Property

When the question of property rights in space arises, three potential frameworks are discussed:

1. Res nullius - things in space do not belong to anybody and can be claimed

2. Res communis - things belong a priori to a particular group of people

3. Common Heritage of Mankind - things belong a priori to the entire human race

The Weinersmiths strongly favour the third option, and consider the first option as dangerous and a source of potential conflict (and in their framing once you’ve said something causes conflict its essentially proven to be a bad idea).

There is no thought given to what collective ownership would actually mean, and how can the preferences of humanity be aggregated when deciding what to do with property. If the Weinersmiths are aware of things like Arrow’s theorem or public choice theory, they have chosen to ignore them. Suffice to say, the very notion of collective ownership as a concept is highly contentious and this deserves attention.

Such a collective property regime would give de jure ownership of the entire universe to a bureaucratic system, likely under the auspices of the UN. The authors openly state that this is their preference:

We believe humanity in general, and possibly the long-term project of space settlement in particular, would be better off with an internationally managed system that regulated both where people are allowed to set up shop and what they’re allowed to do with the local resources once they get there. It wouldn’t be dynamic, it wouldn’t be like a science fiction novel, and frankly it would be very slow and bureaucratic and boring. But it would keep the peace while humanity gets its political and technological act together enough to make space settlement possible.

To me, and anybody else I think with a liberal mindset, this is bleak and dystopian. Does the state not meddle in peoples lives enough without it spreading its tendrils throughout the cosmos? Are our national governments not remote enough from our needs as it is, without compounding that by some kind of world government? The system proposed here has literally no opt out. Every single human being in the universe is subject to its diktat from birth. Given the similarity of their vision (world government and central control of property) to the expressed aims of early 20th century communists, would it be uncharitable to describe their vision as communism also?

The Weinersmiths think the Moon treaty - which they openly describe as “Lunar Socialism” - is a good start towards their ideal, however in reality its on the way out. No spacefaring power has ever signed it, and Saudi Arabia recently exited the treaty. In contrast the Artemis Accords, which the book suspects of being a backdoor for the creation of property rights in space, is gaining new members.

Can International Law Be Enforced on Mars?

This question is given a very short dismissal, and clearly the authors are having too much fun churning through the legal documentation to worry about whether it all might be made swiftly irrelevant.

Even if nations don’t want to do this stuff, could we get dragged along by individuals? One of the most common arguments we hear is that all law is pointless because if Elon Musk has a Mars settlement, who’s going to stop him? One of your authors has a brother who makes this argument. His name is Marty and he is wrong. We call this sort of thing the “treehouse theory of space law.” Imagine this: a bunch of kids build a treehouse up a tall tree. The ladder is too light for an adult to climb, so once the kids are up there, they can’t be reached. Their father comes out and says, “Kids! I made dinner! Come inside!” The kids smirk confidently and reply, “Never! We do not obey your Dad Law in the treehouse! You will try to oppress us in vain!” In this scenario, what do you expect the dad to do? That’s right—stop supplying the kids with food and water, seize all of their stuff, and patiently await their change of heart.

As one of our readers pointed out, this assumes the kids aren’t getting fed on the sly by Mom. That is, even if the international community tries to cut Elon Musk off, he can get along fine in this scenario if he’s still trading with the United States. This is, of course, true, but under current space law, effectively the United States would just be asserting a bunch of illegal claims, at which point we’re in a proper crisis.

The fact that, even in the toy model they designed to dismiss the idea there is already a loophole - and that they had to have someone point this out to them - is concerning. They haven’t really given this much thought at all, just suggested it would lead to an unspecified “proper crisis”.

Would sanctions be really effective at controlling the internal politics of a Mars colony? The United States uses sanctions against nations like Russia, China and Iran to try and influence their large scale behaviour, but this does little to alter their domestic policies. The American government would prefer Iran not execute people for being gay, that Russia didn’t make domestic violence legal, and that China allowed people to talk about the Tienanmen Square massacre - but the simple lever of denying trade is apparently too crude to let them do that.

Presumably a straight up defiance of authority by a Mars colony could be punished by trying to starve the population to death - if the supplying nation(s) were entirely unconcerned for morality - but what if the Mars colony simply ignored one law they were not fond of? How would the terrestrial nation know? How would they enforce their will remotely? How would they stop their representatives on the planet going native?

Although they do consider that sanctions could be broken by another spacefaring nation taking up supply, and Martians playing the US, India and China off against each other may well be how they gain some level of autonomy. But what of multiple colonies on Mars, with only one breaking your laws enough to warrant sanction? Can you control the trade between well behaved Mars colonies and rebellious ones well enough to make the sanctions stick? Do you think its likely to make your loyal colonies stay loyal if you try to kill them in order to force their neighbour to stick to your particular reading of the Outer Space Treaty?

Even though its more speculative, this is much more important for discussing what Martian law might look like than parsing decades old treaties that aren’t likely to survive contact with reality in their present form. But the Weinersmiths treat it as irrelevant and easily dismissed, without seeing the huge flaws in their own argument against it.

Sociology in Space

The last chapter is about various sociological issues, and analogies that the authors find useful - such as company towns. I would question how relevant much of this is, but it is at least interest from the point of view of thinking about what colonies might look like.

They take things further than this though; they claim that because their analogies produce worrying conclusions, that it vindicates their “wait and go big” approach.

Wait until we can build a society that from the very start can supply the basic economic stuff that developed Earth states take for granted.

We cannot plan a society on Earth, let alone on Mars. This is either a pretext for endlessly delay to the project of colonisation, or it is a naive belief that an ideal society with ideal outcomes can be created if enough sociology papers are published.

To further prop up this idea of a strictly planned colonisation, the Weinersmiths do some maths on how many people a colony would need to be self sustaining. They are probably correct in requiring very large numbers for true economic self sufficiency, but that is far off and, provided we don’t fall for the trap of trying “wait and go big”, such numbers can be arrived at slowly so as not to cause any undue social problems on the way.

Conclusion

At the end of the book, the Weinersmiths complain about how critics are treated by space advocates

We believe a functioning scientific community should welcome dissent that shows up with citations, but in the space-settlement community, people with negative views about aspects of space settlement are sometimes called idiots or “anti-human” or worse.

Putting aside the fact that they themselves have not shown up with proper citations, perhaps they should reexamine their own style of discussion before questioning others in this regard? For instance, they suggest people might “hate” their conclusions, rather than disagree with them or find flaw in them - as if their critics must only be driven by emotion.

The subtitle of this book really does set the tone - the authors clearly come across as believing they are the first people to really think about these topics. Repeatedly it comes across that they simply haven’t read what people have already written on a topic. For instance, in their response to the first part of this review, they asserted that settlement of Low Earth Orbit couldn’t be done. There is an entire literature on this that they appear to have missed - notably The High Frontier: An Easier Way by Tom Marotta and Al Globus.

The future they advocate is a form of highly bureaucratic socialism across the entire solar system. A place where you must ask for permission to do anything of significance, rather than the state (or world government as the Weinersmiths prefer) needing a reason to stop you. All justified by an unreasonable fear that someone somewhere might turn evil and wipe out humanity if they are not continuously monitored and controlled - a sort of perversion of the harm principle where “your rights end where my neuroses begin”. Those offering alternate visions are dismissed as “libertarian” - used here as a slur, and referring to more or less anybody who believes in private property.

Overall, A City on Mars is a disappointment - its good for any advocacy group to have critics, in order to make sure they aren’t simply reinforcing their own errors and to sharpen their arguments, but I haven’t found good criticism here. The authors have obviously spent a lot of time researching things of interest to them (space toilet antics for instance) but skipped significant parts of the research, and have clearly not tested their own argumentation against critics.

I’ve not had much fun with this review (hence why I took so long to get the last part out). It is unfortunate that the controversy surrounding Elon Musk has given this sort of book fertile ground in the media, who don’t push back against it at all. Hopefully material progress in space will simply make it redundant in a few years.

If you want to hear me talk about some more fun topics about space exploration, please consider subscribing to the newsletter. Next week will be a new Mass Value Report covering the recent string of Falcon 9 scrubs and how they will or won’t impact SpaceX’s plans this year.