Before anyone seriously thinks about building a city on Mars – and Elon Musk has already stated that we’ll see a settlement of a million people there by 2050 – there are two competing ideas to address. First, is simply that we can’t do it. It’s tens of millions of miles away. The Red Planet has less than half of Earth’s gravity and the same amount of sunlight. The only building materials are sand and rock. There’s no atmosphere to speak of and what water there is comes in the form of ice.
So, if you want to grow your own food, you’d have to melt that first using small nuclear reactors. Talking of radiation, there will be plenty of it, so you’ll need decent shielding.
The second idea, which is what ‘The First City on Mars: An Urban Planner’s Guide to Settling the Red Planet’ (Springer, £24.99, ISBN 9783031075285) takes as axiomatic, is that we can do it. After all, crossing the Atlantic to the New World seemed impossible until we did, for better or worse...