Within a few years, humans will be able to reach Mars — and the world’s leading expert on Martian settlement, Dr Robert Zubrin, is already asking: what kind of world will we build when we get there? In The New World on Mars, Zubrin sets out his vision in compelling detail. Companies including SpaceX are already building fleets of spacecraft designed to make interplanetary travel as affordable as passage to the New World once was. When we arrive, we will transform Mars’s raw materials into resources, tackling whatever challenges the planet presents. Populous Martian city-states will emerge, producing their own air, water, food and power. To attract settlers, they will need to be beautiful — Zubrin explains what that might look like. The planet’s primary exports will not be material goods but intellectual products: GMOs, robotics, AI, power production, all born from a technically adept population in a frontier environment that demands constant innovation. Zubrin even maps out the customs, social structures and government of the red planet — rooted in inalienable individual rights and built to resist the forms of oppression that drove people to seek new worlds before. In 1776, Thomas Paine declared ‘We have it in our power to begin the world over again’. Zubrin makes the case that we can do so today, and that a Mars built well will become a pressure cooker for invention benefiting every human being on both worlds. ‘A fascinating and enticing vision of the utopian New World that Robert Zubrin believes could and should be created on the Red Planet’ Martin Rees
ISBN 13: 9781802067002
Author: Robert Zubrin
