Current estimates say that once you leave Earth’s protective atmosphere and magnetosphere, every single cell nucleus in your body will be struck by a proton every few days, and by a larger charged particle every few months.

In a room full of animals, the gorilla may not be the wisest, but you probably want to know what’s on its mind.

We understand it’s weird for a discussion on space settlements to ask what the cost of rent is going to be or whether the local store is charging too much for canned goods, but this is the stuff regular lives are made of. Space-settlement proposals tend to skip this, assuming that our awesome spacefarers will be focused on the task at hand and

You should also ask yourself why it is that so many innovations on Earth come not from anarchic wastelands but from cities where an engineer’s main hardship is eight-dollar espressos.

Going to the stars will not make us wise. We have to become wise if we want to go to the stars.

If you accept Daniel Deudney’s argument that a large human presence in space gives us a lot of power to destroy ourselves, you should think twice about creating settlements where you anticipate the culture will place a low value on human life.

An Earth with climate change and nuclear war and, like, zombies and werewolves is still a way better place than Mars. Staying alive on Earth requires fire and a pointy stick. Staying alive in space will require all sorts of high-tech gadgets we can barely manufacture on Earth.

A quotation used in 99.9999 percent of all books about space settlement comes from rocketry founding father Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who wrote in a 1911 article, “The earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot forever live in the cradle.” Perhaps. But we should remember that what emerges from a cradle is not a full-grown adult, but a