Review of The New World on Mars

Robert Zubrin returns to the Red Planet, and this time he means business!

Copies of The New World on Mars by Robert Zubrin have started to arrive in the UK, and on receiving mine I quickly finished it and thought I ought to provide a review. There is a UK specific edition from Penguin being released soon and available for pre-order but I got my copy imported.

Zubrin became famous for developing the Mars Direct mission concept in the early 1990s and then popularising it with his first book The Case for Mars. In some parts, The New World on Mars reads like an updated version of that book. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing - a lot has changed since 1996 in terms of our knowledge of the planet and the technology we have to get there. A revised edition of The Case for Mars came out in 2011, but even in the past 13 years a huge amount of progress has been made, especially in reusable rockets.

There is more to it than that as well; The New World on Mars serves as sort of an introductory textbook or manual for colonists, entrepreneurs and Martian city planners. Much of it is divided into brief technical primers for various topics - propellant manufacture, dome construction, intercity transportation etc. - that give enough information to start thinking of more concrete designs.

Credit: SpaceX

The book starts out with a history of Mars exploration and a description of the geography of the planet. I would happily read a lot more of this, but here it is kept as brief background. Then it is straight into how to build a city. Much of the technological detail will be familiar to many readers - as before, the first job after landing is to make propellant from the atmosphere with the Sabatier process, then hunt for water sources to make that process independent of hydrogen transported from Earth, and then on work up a sort of tech tree of increasingly complex systems to enable survival and flourishing on Mars. But its worth emphasising the greater level of detail than most popular science books - Zubrin doesn’t just say “there is ice on Mars and we can get it” for instance, he gives details of the kinds of deposits available, the extraction methods proposed and tested on Earth, and the amount of water yielded per kWh of input.

Topics such as asteroid mining routes, nuclear fusion and terraforming are introduced in similar ways. But Zubrin is not just writing as an engineer, and he delves into the philosophical, economic and ethical arguments as well.

The Philosophy of Mars

There is no section on why we should go - he has covered this in previous works, most recently The Case For Space. It is assumed the reader is on board with the basic mission and the focus is then on how to make it work.

The book takes inspiration from the economist Julian Simon, in making the distinction between resources and raw materials. In this view, the former only exist as a result of human action - for example, aluminium ore is just uninteresting rock until you have the knowledge to extract the metal via electrolysis. I tend to treat the terms as synonymous myself, but the distinction does serve a useful point. Simon was engaged in an intellectual battle (and a famous bet) with the influential Malthusian Paul Ehrlich, and Zubrin continues this here as he attacks zero-sum worldviews on this basis. Given the worrying trend of “degrowth” gaining influence in the environmental movement, which goes even further and actively aims for a negative sum world, its not an unreasonable fight to pick today.

But I think his argument is slightly overstated. Humans are constrained by raw materials and energy, and can end up in competition with each other for finite supplies of both without succumbing to some brutal dog-eat-dog Malthusian ideology. This is tacitly acknowledged all throughout the book when discussing technical matters of supplying a city on Mars, but explicitly denied in the general case. Human ingenuity can and does make the same materials go further every year - and denial of this is indeed a dangerous thing - but the process isn’t unconstrained or limitless. Typically, whenever we have surmounted material barriers through human genius such as in the Green Revolution, we have then spawned new problems to be solved - in this case, nitrogen pollution and fossil fuel dependence. The answer to this is obviously not to give up - as David Deutsch says, “Solutions create new problems, which must be solved in their turn” - but to acknowledge that its always an imperfect world with costs, trade-offs, and competing interests.

This would be relieved to a great extent in an early Mars settlement, due to a planets worth of raw material divided among a tiny initial population. But accessing that material would take time and effort, and thus still impose some physical constraint. Where I do think the book makes a good point is that current society poses far too many unnecessary restraints on our ability to forge raw materials into resources - and the prospect of creative people being liberated from such constraints is a key reason for colonising space.

Mostly, the parts of the book that deal with the philosophy, economics and culture of a Mars city are opinion pieces rather than being strictly factual. Zubrin admits the Martians may not accept his proposals, and cites principle that good societies will flourish and bad ones will fade away due to not being able to attract migrants, so we will find out in good time which opinions are correct. I agree with this principle - its actually the origin of the name of this newsletter - but on some topics, such as the issue of maintaining fertility rates for instance, it would have been nice to have more discussion about what has been found to work and not work on Earth and reference to academic studies.

Although I preferred the technical content, these issues are things that Martian colonists will have to think about, and The New World on Mars is a valuable addition to the discussion. On the virtues of Western style democracy and English common law, I agree to a large extent with Zubrin - but I differ from him on the inevitability of the society he wants on Mars. The Chinese system is for instance presented here as only being able to produce a colony of miserable slaves waiting for liberation by free colonists. I don’t think its a good idea to underestimate the autocratic approach, as it can compensate for its deficiencies in innovation by its capacity to shift large amounts of resources by decree and by stealing or copying the ideas produced by freer societies. China isn’t North Korea, and it has produced a far more resilient and adaptable form of one party rule than has been seen elsewhere.

Building the City

Zubrin does not believe Elon Musk’s target of a million people by 2050, thinking that a city of 50,000 on this timescale is more reasonable. It has always seemed to me that the million people figure is a motivational target more than anything, although not strictly impossible it is unlikely. But I also think 50,000 is a little too conservative.

One reason for the caution is a supposed limit on Starship flights to Mars to about 100/year. Consider that Elon Musk owns 13% of Tesla’s roughly $560 billion value - if he liquidated his share over 10 years (likely any downward pressure on share price would be more than offset by the growth of the company) and spend that money on $10 million Starship flights, because as the private owner of SpaceX he can buy them at cost, he would be able to launch 700 Starships per year. This does require a prodigious manufacturing ramp for these vehicles, but Musk has experience of scaling manufacture rapidly. This cadence is also a lower limit, not considering any money he wishes to take out of his other companies and any money put in by the colonists themselves. What Zubrin describes as the “Normandy Landing” model is I think more viable for the short term than he believes: for many problems on the surface it may be simpler, quicker and cheaper just to throw more Starships at them for the first few years. Quantity has a quality all of its own.

I also believe that, if and when a Mars city is shown to be viable by the first settlement, it will spark a rush. When the new big thing takes off, Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) is a huge driver of human behaviour. Such manias tend to feature a lot of irrationality, but they do bring a lot of resources to bear on the problem. If it happens, I don’t think SpaceX will have difficultly financing 1000 ships to Mars per window.

A 50,000 person settlement is a reasonable snapshot though - there is a good chance that even if many more people than that turn up they won’t all congregate together. Zubrin paints a compelling picture of such settlements - gigantic vaults under ice or regolith, containing walkable cities with Mediterranean architecture - and once again has the numbers to show the feasibility of it. These sections are in part informed by the Mars Society city state competition held a few years ago - and this book will serve as a good reference for competitors if one is held again.

Talking Money

Starting from a projected ticket price of $300,000, Zubrin discusses some ways to finance the settlement, and also to get rich on Mars.

His main one that Mars will be an engine of invention - a variant of the “Frontier Thesis”. This idea got me into a bit of trouble when I reviewed A City on Mars because in that book it is dismissed as wrong largely by waving in the general direction of an academic consensus without explaining why academics think this, and I said so in my review. The authors were unhappy with that and proceeded to falsely accuse me of attacking the people instead of attacking the argument, when no argument was offered!

In The New World on Mars the subject is covered in more depth and the argument presented. I am still somewhat on the fence as to whether I agree with all the case Zubrin makes, but it is made well. I am not American and as such the mythology of the American frontier has much less cultural salience for me so perhaps that makes me less receptive to the idea.

Mars probably will drive inventions due to its harshness, but its not the primary reason in my mind to go and its not clear to me how many of them will be exportable patents. That said, an innovative frontier will likely become a self-fulfilling prophecy. We know in advance that Mars will require a great deal of inventiveness to transform it into a livable planet, and as such colonists will self select for people of high intelligence and high agency keen to do just that.

The second main reason offered is the development of real estate, and I think this is going to be the one that does most of the heavy lifting. The planet will be a blank canvas to build not just new houses, but new cities, transportation networks, cultures and civilisations. Terrestrial real estate simply cannot offer this and for a certain type of person the chance to be one of the first on a new world will more than offset the material hardships.

There are some other more marginal business plans offered - I’m skeptical about asteroid miners bringing valuable minerals back to Earth but willing to be proven wrong. I also can’t see how deuterium export from Mars won’t be crushed by competitors on Earth, even if the isotope is less concentrated in our water. In general, I don’t think Mars needs to offer any more than itself in order to pay the colony’s way. The freedom of the frontier is the core product.

Summary

If you are interested in space settlement in general or Mars in particular you should read this book. It is still worthwhile even if you have read The Case for Mars

The New World on Mars is not an especially long book, coming in at under 300 pages, but accomplishes what it sets out to do in that space. Its a useful jumping off point for mission and base design studies, and I’d recommend it for someone from a STEM background or an entrepreneur wanting an introduction to Mars technology - or for a skeptic who believes they have found a technical showstopper that would derail the whole enterprise.

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