Why I Quit the Mars Society

Having fisked Bob Zubrin’s statement on the election, I think it’s relevant here to tell the story of why I quit the Mars Society: it’s because of the same kind of political B.S. I pointed out in that post.

I was one of the founding members of the Louisiana chapter of the Mars Society, and its president for a couple of years before I moved from NOLA to Denver in 2004. When I moved, I looked forward to getting more involved, given how close I would be to the Mars Society mothership. (As it happened, I lived about ten miles from Bob Zubrin himself, and used to see him at county Republican events.)

In July, about a month after moving, I finally had the time to contact the Colorado chapter and arrange to attend one of their meetings. On the day, I took off early from work and drove an hour up to CU Boulder – not then knowing the school’s reputation.

The meeting consisted of me, another new person, and 3-4 existing chapter members. Instead of discussions about advocating for manned missions to and settlement of Mars, the existing members spent the time ripping on George W. Bush and giggling about how stupid he was, as evidenced by whatever supposed solecism or blunder of his was then in the news.

On and on. With no recognition that the others in the room might have different opinions on the matter or might in fact have showed up expecting something other than shallow partisan political banter of no relevance to the purpose of the organization. The other new guy looked as annoyed as I felt.

A month later, I did it again. With the same result, but that the other new guy didn’t return. And after that, I didn’t return, either. Nor did I ever hear from anyone in the chapter. They didn’t seem any more interested in growing their organization than they did in serving the organization’s supposed purpose.

I attended two more conventions after that, but only because they were held in Boulder and I didn’t have to travel. None lived up to those I had attended in 2001 (which prompted me to start writing Mars fiction) and 2003 (which got me recruited by SpaceX). After 2008 or so, I just kinda forgot about the Mars Society. It seemed even then to be drifting into irrelevance.

When I point out the risk of a leader creating an unwelcoming environment in his organization by letting his personal political concerns intrude, I’m not doing so because I disagree with Mr. Zubrin’s particular political positions or his party affiliation, it’s because I’ve been on the receiving end of that unwelcoming environment – in his own organization.

Bob Zubrin on Trump and Mars – But Mostly Trump

Speaking of Bob Zubrin:  Statement of Mars Society President Dr. Robert Zubrin Concerning the Election of Donald Trump

Ooh. That’s grandiose. Sounds like an official communique from someone important. Let’s see what’s inside…

Donald Trump has been elected president of the United States. The Mars Society is non-partisan and does not endorse any candidate. Many of our members and other space advocates supported Mr. Trump’s election, while many others opposed him. For reasons I have amply explained elsewhere, I have always been a member of the latter group.

The first two lines are neutral statements of fact, but already in the third there is a problem: the simplistic and dishonest division of the Mars Society membership into those who supported Trump and those who opposed him, when those are not the only two possible alternatives. What about those who supported Harris on her own merits, for example, or those who opposed her for same, or those who voted third-party, or those who sat out for whatever reason?

Mr. Zubrin’s monochromatic monomania about Donald Trump excludes those possibilities. It’s black and white: the election was about Mr. Trump, and Mr. Trump alone, and either you voted against him, or you voted for him. Kamala Harris who?

The fourth line is what gets me. It’s wholly unprofessional for the head of an organization having nothing to do with politics to insert his own political opinions into the organization’s official communications (however cleverly oblique he imagined he was being when he did it). I suspect his intent here was simply to signal his membership among the righteous, as he sees it.

I get it – I’ve been there. It jumps out at me because I’ve had to edit personal editorial statements like this out of my own organizational PR. As the head of an organization, when you speak in that role you are speaking as the organization, ex cathedra, and so you never say things that show condescension towards the membership over matters unrelated to the organization’s mission.

And if you expect to keep your organization viable and recruit new members, you don’t make half of those who are or could become members feel unwelcome by signaling to them that you consider them inferior. (This signal is more apparent when one reads those ‘explanations elsewhere’.)

That said, whatever we think of the various policies that Mr. Trump has put on offer, there is one that I and the vast majority of Mars Society members certainly support: his promise to initiate a program to send humans to the Red Planet. We will therefore support that initiative, not because we agree with Mr. Trump, but because on this issue, he agrees with us.

Having made it clear over the past few weeks that he did not see a potential humans to Mars policy as anywhere close to being an acceptable reason to support a second Trump presidency, this is an interesting about-face. I suppose it’s pragmatic – making lemonade from the orange he’s been given, so to speak – but it’s an odd willingness to cooperate with a man who Mr. Zubrin has been demonizing as Hitlerian for the past several months.

One would expect someone with such self-regard as a man of principle would regard cooperating with Mr. Trump on sending humans to Mars as just as unjustifiable as he did voting for the man to achieve the same end. While the former, coming after the fact, doesn’t assist Mr. Trump in getting elected, how can it not connote support for the new Trump administration – regardless of pious, self-serving disclaimers to the contrary?

(And yet again, he can’t resist the urge to editorialize, in this instance couching this pragmatic direction in slanted language – a disingenuously “objective” framing that in fact reads as Even though all his other policies suck and it’s very important that you know that I don’t agree with any of them…)

But the cherry on top is the clichéd re-framing at the end. To the extent Mr. Trump is interested in sending humans to Mars, it’s a harmony of interests, a parallel, possibly indirectly influenced by the past quarter-century of advocacy by Mr. Zubrin and the Mars Society but not due to having been persuaded to accept his/their position, as implied. I’d be surprised if Mr. Trump even knows the Mars Society or Mr. Zubrin exist. (It’s far more likely that Elon Musk is the origin of any interest in Mars on the part of Mr. Trump.)

The point is significant. The age-old dream of endowing human minds and hands access to the cosmos does not belong to Donald Trump, nor should it be considered the exclusive possession of any particular political party. It belongs to humanity. It is essential that we make that clear, because the fortunes of political war are always changing. Should the Mars project come to be regarded as the mere hobby horse of a controversial politician, business leader, or partisan faction, it would surely face cancellation the next time the winds of power shift. We cannot let that happen. Precisely because we are not followers of Mr. Trump, we need to step up and help explain why all Americans, regardless of party, should support this initiative.

Yes, yes, okay, we get that you despise Donald Trump and Elon Musk, Mr. Zubrin. Everything in this paragraph could have been stated, and better, without scratching that insatiable itch to sneak in your disdain for them.

Indeed, the rest of the piece is decently written and free of this kind of editorializing. Unfortunately, the rah-rah effect of the statement is dampened by the preceding paragraphs…and the recognition that it was only written at all as a working out of the author’s disappointment at the election results.

We’ll See How Long That Lasts

"If Trump actually delivers a humans to #Mars program, the #MarsSociety, and I in my capacity as its president, will certainly support that initiative."

One lion on a hill applies as much to Bob and Elon as to Elon and the BOM.

One expects that his support for any manned Mars mission will be contingent on how closely the mission plan resembles his own, and that his politics will drive him to be even less tolerant of deviations from his own ideas than otherwise.

Silas Hudson on Independent Thinking

It’s a puzzling thing, how often those who claim to think for themselves – to consider the facts and weigh different perspectives and thereby come to their own conclusions – hold views which just happen to be in lockstep conformity with the dominant narrative.

When the outcome of their intellectual labors is indistinguishable from a lazy regurgitation of the ‘official version’, it makes me wonder why they bothered.

— Silas Hudson

Better the Second Time Around

Creating an entirely new Mars-focused fictional universe has not been quite as difficult as I expected it to be.

I’d been toying with a few concepts for the past several months, and really started getting good ideas while on vacation – primarily about a “noodle incident” that creates the setting for the future history, a number of consequences in the fictional “present day”, and a few of the principal characters. So much came to me while hiking that I had to buy another notebook at Tesco to keep up.

I spent a few days after I got home working out a modified three-act structure that I think will make constructing the plots of the new novels a little easier. But rather than jumping right in to building the plots for a new trilogy, I got distracted by fleshing out the fictional infrastructure. The two play off of each other in interesting ways – I have three documents open at the moment, in which I’m capturing and integrating elements of the future history’s timeline, a large number of characters central to the trilogy (primary, secondary, and tag characters alike), and technological, social, historical, and other developments that happen between “now” (the point of departure) and then. It’s quite entertaining to see how each builds off of the others and suggests new ideas that might not have occurred to me had I tried building the plots first.

While I have a lot of pieces of plot, they haven’t snapped together yet. I can see it coming, though, and it’s got to be more efficient than putting a plot together and then doing the worldbuilding around it to make it work. The latter led to a lot of dead ends with the novel plots in the old project, requiring in some places some contrivances that would have stretched credulity.

In contrast, I hit on the idea of the “Dispatches” as a way to use and extend the worldbuilding that had been done already for the old project, letting the elements of the fictional universe suggest the stories. This worked very well, I think, as most of the Dispatches I outlined had plots with solid, organic endings from the outset.

The one thing that does chap my ass about this is all the things that I predicted in the old project’s future history that then materialized in the real world (browse the entries under the “Life Imitates Art” category for a small taste of these). Maybe I’m good at projecting trends and foreseeing innovations and their consequences – but maybe I’m not, and just got lucky the first time around.

As more comes together, I’ll start laying out here what that future history looks like, the key events and technological developments that shape the next forty years. I’ll also change the site name and update the layout once I decide what I want to call the new project.

Back From Vacation

Sadly, not much of what I did was very relevant to writing, unlike previous big adventure trips – most of the trip had to do with medieval and pre-WWI history rather than exotic locations or futuristic (or futurizable) settings.

You never know, though. The rise and fall of the Habsburgs and the shifting borders and power politics in the Kingdom of Hungary back in the day may prove useful. Somehow. If I were to write a Dune-style epic on Mars, perhaps.

The one thing that I can see as useful is the visits to several skansens – the Slovak equivalent of Brigadoon (a living village minimally changed from 1800 due to its remoteness and inaccessibility), another Slovak village combined from elements saved from a nearby dam project and representing 1880-1900, and the Roman village of Carnuntum with a number of (meticulous but still somewhat speculative) reconstructions of Roman homes, shops, and public buildings from around 350.

Why I see these as useful is that they give a perspective on what a minimum village (or settlement, in the case of Mars) and its structure/infrastructure might look like. No, Martian colonists won’t be living in colorful log houses, but these houses give functional clues what accommodations could look like when a settlement is first constructed: quarters of 2-3 small rooms, with a portion of the living area dedicated to (hand) work, shared areas for larger tasks or common functions like cooking or hygiene, meeting spaces used for social, religious, and administrative matters, etc. Carnuntum provided examples of how this could progress with time and prosperity into larger quarters encompassing more of the colonists’ daily activities: individual living, cooking, leisure, and hygiene spaces, and larger, purpose-built, and public-facing working and business spaces.

The integration of work/business into the home was different in each of the three, but was a key element in each in a way we’ve generally moved away from over the past century or more. Yes, people still do “live above the store”, so to speak, but it’s nowhere near as common, nor integrated in quite the same way as in these old examples (particularly Carnuntum).

And no, your home office where you do Zoom calls doesn’t count.

Apart from that, I can see basing a scene on something I did while hiking in the Tatras (crossing Prielom, in the direction of Polsky Hreben, in the rain – ’nuff said), and how I handled it when I realized how dangerous and stupid it was. And basing settings on some of the landscapes I either saw for the first time or saw in a new way (due to observing mountain climbers on them, or actually having crystal-clear weather for most of the trip).

 

Journal Review Project Status

…continues, albeit slowly thanks to family visits and summer activities.

I started out by scanning and reviewing my collection of index card notes from about 2009 on, during which exercise I kept finding observations that worked as Silas Hudson quotes (indeed, I found the origin of a few of them that were ultimately used in Redlands). Amused by this, I worked backwards through the (then) five notebooks covering 2022 through 2024, then through the margin notes in several books I had read on topics relevant to the character. Those sources alone filled four books like these with fictional quotes from Silas Hudson:

Very nice, but not what I use for everyday notes

At some point, I decided to go back to the beginning of the journals (or at least to 2006, when I became a lot more diligent about writing down ideas) and work forward systematically. Which turned out to be interesting for several unexpected reasons.

First, a lot of the content from 2006-2013 related to the citizen journalism project (People’s Press Collective) that I was involved in at the time. Almost one entire 140-page notebook was nothing but descriptions of argumentative tactics I had encountered online, information I had intended to use in training classes for activists. (When we closed down PPC, I had already created over 600 charts worth of class material. There are probably a few hundred more in the notebooks waiting to be written up. Even after combining and culling duplicates, this would have been a somewhat long training class.)

Second, there was a major shift of content in 2014. From about 2011 to 2013, writing-related notes gradually increased from about 15% of each journal to about 30%, and general ideas and observations went from maybe 5% to about 20%. For some reason, this shifted to about 30-35% writing-related and 50% or more ideas and observations starting when I started a new notebook mid-July 2014. I don’t recall anything happening at that time to cause it, but it’s night and day different from the one notebook to the next.

Prior to this point there were maybe a dozen Silas Hudson-relevant notes (very different from the index cards). After this point, they started appearing regularly, albeit nowhere near as often in the 2022-2024 notebooks.

In contrast, there was a constant trickle of Jedediah Thoreson-relevant notes throughout. But these too became noticeably more frequent after July 2014, though not yet as common as those relevant to Silas Hudson.

Third, there are a lot of good notes originating ideas or scenes or details that ended up in various Dispatches and in the second book – and many that did not. Some of the latter are really interesting as different potential paths these stories could have taken, or which future stories may use. Documenting all of that is going to take a second pass through all of the material, however.

At December 2014, I’ve almost filled book #5 for Hudson, and about three-quarters of one book for Thoreson (who gets this journal). The latter character is a little more difficult, as I don’t (yet) hear his voice quite the way I do Hudson’s. Probably because I spent a lot of time fleshing out Hudson for Redlands, while Thoreson in his (incomplete) story is intentionally something of an enigma to the other characters.

 

“Believe the Science”

Can’t find it now, but earlier today I read a social media post somewhere to the effect of: “Believe the science” is not science, that’s not how science works. 

Social media being social media, this was followed by a hundred or more comments of varying degrees of conversational intensity, falling largely into the following categories:

  • Non-content-adding amens;
  • Non-content-adding dismissals;
  • Concurrence from those in scientific fields;
  • Demurral from others in scientific fields;
  • Huffy replies from those who wholly missed the point;
  • Sneering replies from those who willfully ignored the point;
  • Pedantic performatism from those harping on a tangential (but oh so smart!) point;
  • Reductionism from capital-A Atheists trampling the point astride their hobby horses.

None of which adequately addressed what I saw as the point of the original post: the phrase “believe the science” (and “trust the science”) in the context in which the public is familiar with it is in fact a method of social and political manipulation.

It’s little more than an Appeal to Authority in a lab coat.

The phrase is not infamous for its use by honest scientific professionals, after all (who might rightly refer to e.g. the provisional acceptance of research results), but as a rhetorical tactic by politicized scientists and the politicians and technocrats they serve. It uses the public prestige built up by real science* in order to imply a finality of knowledge about the subject in question, and a certainty of the practical (even moral) rightness of the approved narrative and the inescapable truth of specific policies and actions derived from it.

The tell is how it’s used not only against the uneducated hicks and faith-based hayseeds who lack the smarts to even begin to understand the Eternally True Science™ of the Moment, but against specialists in the same or adjacent fields, often those with equal or superior credentials, who dissent from an approved narrative.

When one must “believe the science”, those who perform real science are heathens and heretics.

* — I see this prestige as attributable less to abstract scientific research they probably never encounter and more to the practical applications of real science via engineering, since engineering is the “science” that the public interacts with daily. Being an engineer, I am of course biased in that regard, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.