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 bastio…
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