Kelly Weinersmith Books

When we trace the story of space colonization, we meet a timeline woven from imagination, ideology, and aspiration. The idea that humans would one day live beyond Earth predates rockets by centuries. It belongs not just to scientists, but to storytellers. From H.G. Wells and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky t...

From A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?

As a biologist, I couldn’t help starting with the human body, that fragile, gravity-trained system that evolved under one atmosphere and a magnetic shield. Space, to it, is poison. Microgravity weakens bones and muscles; it rewires the cardiovascular system; it alters gene expression in ways we are ...

From A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through?

We start with what is perhaps the grandest dream of all: escaping Earth’s gravity without blowing up metric tons of explosive fuel. A space elevator sounds like a fantasy of silver-age science fiction, but it’s actually an engineering problem we could, in principle, solve. The idea is simple: tether...

From Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything

Of all the technologies humanity has pursued, fusion—harnessing the process that powers the Sun—might be the purest expression of optimism. It offers essentially limitless clean energy, no greenhouse emissions, minimal waste, and a poetic symmetry: we would be bottling the fire that gives life to ev...

From Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything