Crazy People Among Us

Just like the poor, the mad have always been with us. They only present differently in society at each stage because we keep evolving our labels, diagnoses, solutions, and attitudes for dealing with brains and personalities that do not function within the societal parameters set by the rest of us “normies.”¹

This is one reason you don’t see references to “schizophrenia,” “bipolar disorder,” or other psychological conditions in ancient or even near-modern literature. The first concepts of psychology as a science really came about in the late 19th century with practitioners like neurologist Sigmund Freud in Vienna and pure scientists like Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig. Terms, diagnoses, and approaches have been evolving ever since and are still being continually re-examined and refined today. The science, such as it is, moves back and forth between seeing psychological conditions as issues originating in the realm of ideas (e.g., bad thinking, childhood mistreatment, mistaken perceptions of reality, or spiritual or moral dysfunction) and in the realm of brain structure and biology (e.g., physical trauma, inherited or acquired disease, and maladjustment of the brain’s neurotransmitters). Or some of both, I would think.²

In ancient times, in the surviving literature, you seldom saw outright references to madness. This is not because madness and insanity did not exist, but because people who were either born with faulty neural wiring or became ill through mistreatment and cumulative trauma died at a young age through starvation or misadventure, or were kept as a shameful secret in a back room of the castle or by the hearth in the family hut, or found some niche in society where a loose attention to reality was either no hindrance or an actual boon. Such a person might become a shaman, or an oracle such as the priestesses at Delphi, a spiritual leader, or if the person had a knack for jokes and storytelling, a king’s fool. Many positions in society benefit from a loose association with reality, an unusual or altered viewpoint or perspective, or the flights of fancy that others can interpret as being in touch with the gods, the future, or the forces that drive fate.

Certainly, it has been suspected that Joan of Arc was an undiagnosed schizophrenic, and the religious orientation of her voices and delusions fit in well with the needs of her king and her society during the Hundred Years’ War. And certain forms of autism and some personality disorders can be useful in giving a religious figure, a politician or war leader, or any kind of craftsman the fixity of purpose, the literal interpretation of facts and intentions, and the firm resolve needed for success. Such people are not usually easygoing or pleasant to be around, but in the right situation they can get the job done.

There are also degrees and variations of psychological conditions. A person may be “high functioning,” meaning that he or she can get along in society and manage not to be ostracized or killed while still dealing with a diagnosable condition. This realization comes under the heading of “Some people are just odd.” And again, some personality conditions, in the right niche, can prosper where the rest of us with conventionally “normal” viewpoints would flounder or suffer from distraction or terminal boredom.

When societies, particularly in Western Europe, became more crowded, urbanized, “civilized,” and socially conscious, the “crazy” people—perhaps pushed out of their comfort zone by the stresses of urban living—could neither find an acceptable niche in society nor survive with their diminished wits and skills. Then the concerned citizens wanted some decent provision to be made for their welfare if not for their declining mental health. So medieval hospitals like Saint Mary Bethlehem in London soon were repurposed as refuges or asylums for the insane and the incapacitated, usually under dispensation or with support from the crown. They were an unhealthy cross between hospitals with no positive medical regimen and debtors’ prisons from which there is no escape. The inmates were allowed to sit in their current condition, sometimes in their own filth, muttering or raving to themselves, with minimal care. Or they would be given over to experts and reformers who would attempt cures based on the latest moral or religious philosophies. “Bethlehem” became “Bedlam.”

The practicalities of warehousing the insane—out of sight of society and out of both its and the patient’s mind—developed along with science and medicine. Patients were eventually put in padded rooms and under restraint, and sometimes lobotomized, shocked, or otherwise physically altered, until the 1950s. Then the drug generically known as chlorpromazine, or Thorazine, was developed as an antipsychotic, an anxiolytic, and—well, actually, it’s a form of sedative. It is hard for a patient to “act out” and become a nuisance to the staff when his or her mind is in a deep fog. We have since developed other and better medications to specifically treat psychosis, depression, mania, anxiety, and the other specific symptoms of recognized diseases. These drugs—often prescribed in “cocktails” of two or three at once—mostly work on imbalances in the brain’s various neurotransmitters, which regulate communication across the synapses between nerve cells. All of these medications have some measurable side effects, although the newer versions are often less intrusive than the older models.

With proper medication over the long term, and with sufficient “talk therapy” to explain the patient’s condition to his or her satisfaction, a moderately to severely ill person can now become essentially “high functioning.”

Also in the 1950s, we began to see a change in the popular culture regarding “insanity” or “madness.” Stories and movies like The Snake Pit, Harvey, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest told of innocent, eccentric, and sometimes just careless or carefree persons being railroaded into insane asylums, sometimes with the connivance of an uncaring judge or covetous relatives, and then fighting to get out. The fear of being incarcerated without cause or cure, like the Victorian fear of falling comatose and being prematurely buried alive, drove changes in society.

In California, the legislature passed the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act in 1967, which went into full effect in 1972; other states passed similar legislation at about the same time. The California act regulated involuntary civil commitment to a mental health institution. Basically, a person in any mental condition can only be held against his or her will for 72 hours (three days), and then only if he or she can be considered “a danger to self or others, or gravely disabled.”³ This is the premise of state’s Welfare & Institutions Code (WIC) 5150. After 72 hours, the person must be given a hearing before a judge, where the committing officer or county mental health representative can show through examination that the person is still dangerous or disabled; that may extend the commitment up to 14 days (WIC 5250). And after that, presumably with further treatment, another hearing can extend the hold for an additional 14 days, especially if the person is found to be suicidal (WIC 5260). And then, if the patient does not agree, he or she must promptly be released. This is why most court-ordered, mandatory treatments such as for alcohol or drug abuse are only for 28 days; after that, the person must either be charged under criminal statutes or released.⁴

This and similar legislation has the effect of going into the mental hospitals and asking, “Who here does not think they’re ill and so should be released?” And since anosognosia, or lack of insight into one’s own condition, is a symptom of most mental illnesses, the patients—whether they were wrongfully committed or not—all asked to be let go. In 1963, during the Kennedy Administration, the Community Mental Health Act was passed to provide local services for the mentally ill, allowing them to live in and become part of their local communities. But the act had no accompanying funding and remained an optimistic and hopeful ideal. In California, mental health services are funded and provided locally at the county level. Of course, it’s a lot more difficult, costly, and time-consuming to provide for people in the community on an individual, meet-and-greet, case-management basis than to assign them to a bed in a state hospital and care for them someplace far off in the hills. But that’s now the law.

Which means we are pretty much back to the pre-urban middle ages. Parents are caring for their severely disabled son or daughter, housing them in a back room, trying to get them the time-limited and inadequate care available under the county system or through private insurance, and eventually providing for their special needs with a modification in their wills that accommodates ongoing care and conservatorship after their own deaths without jeopardizing the disabled person’s access to public services. That, or the mentally disabled relative is turned loose by society to survive on the street as a homeless person, anesthetizing his or her mental condition with drugs and alcohol, scrounging in garbage cans for sustenance, and generally dying young.

But I don’t believe in end states. Every time, every system, every current condition is a point on a curve, in transition to either a better or a worse future state. And I believe that the thrust of science and technology—in this case, medical science, psychological understanding, advances in neurology and physiology, and pharmaceutical discoveries—is upward. That things will get better.

Our science will either improve the level of treatment available on an individual, personalized basis—perhaps with better medications, better understanding of disease processes, or therapies assisted by artificial intelligence—or we will develop more attractive, more socially acceptable, more comforting and caring treatment centers—perhaps on the basis of assisted living communities and therapeutic resorts. In either case, the under-funded, over-stressed, catch-as-catch-can approach of current community services cannot continue: the families caring for their wounded children will fail through exhaustion and revolt, and the society plagued with needles and feces in the streets and tent cities under its freeway overpasses will demand a better solution.⁵

One way or another, we must recognize, accept and care for the crazy people among us—or slip back into a dark age.

1. That is, as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous and other affected circles, the “chronically [or habitually] normal people.”

2. The one thing that cannot cause psychological injury is the sort of direct emotional and intellectual manipulation suggested by popular stories and movies of the early 20th century and referred to as “gaslighting.” You can intimidate people, confuse them, make them weary and angry, you can break down their social and emotional defenses, even cause them to lash out in fear and frustration—but you cannot “drive them [clinically] insane.”
    Of course, through profound exposure to bad experiences such as a total reversal of a person’s life condition, a violent trauma, cumulative fatigue or injury, especially in wartime situations, and other severe dislocations, a person may suffer continuing emotional distress: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This is a real psychological condition with recognized symptoms and recommended treatments. It can happen to anyone. But still, the trauma has not driven the person “insane” in the old sense of the word: laughing manically, cackling inanely, and seeing phantasms.

3. And it has been decided judicially that a person who can only feed him- or herself by scrounging in a garbage can does not fit the definition of “gravely disabled.”

4. Two exceptions exist. At the first 14-day hold, a person deemed to be gravely disabled due to mental illness (WIC 5270) may be held for an additional 30 days. And a person who has made a serious threat of substantial physical harm to another person (WIC 5300) may be held for an additional 180 days.

5. We are already seeing a backlash in the form of Laura’s Law, Assembly Bill 1421 from 2002 in California, inspired by a young woman killed by a man who had refused psychiatric treatment. The law allows for court-ordered Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) for people with severe mental illness. It is based on a similar statute in New York State and is being adopted elsewhere.

Three-Fifths of a Person

It was a compromise made in the drafting of the U.S. Constitution¹ that “other persons”—that is, enslaved people—should be counted as three-fifths of a person in the census for the purpose of allotting a state’s members in the House of Representatives, votes in the Electoral College, and direct taxes.²

Note that this clause does not mention “slavery,” “slaves,” or any race by name—except Indians, who didn’t count, having their own tribes and nations and, eventually, their reservations outside the jurisdiction of federal and state governments. But everyone knew whom the drafters were talking about: the Africans, brought to this country in chains and bound to their masters as chattel, the same as any cow or pig. And I am sure that many people in the 18th and 19th century assumed, on the basis of their own prejudice, that the three-fifths referred to the subhuman state of these bound people, not worth a whole white man in terms of spirit, understanding, and mental capacity.

But that is not at all the case. The “three-fifths clause” was intended to preserve the representative structure of the new federal compact. Under the Constitution, each state was apportioned two Senators in Congress, regardless of the state’s size or population. That way, every state got an equal say and share in governance. But then each state received a number of Representatives in proportion to its population. That way, individual citizens would get representation in proportion to their presence in the state. A populous state like New York gets two its Senators and, while it started with six seats in the House in 1789—because the whole nation had a much smaller population back then—that number has waxed to 45 seats in 1933-53 and waned to 27 seats today. Meanwhile, Alaska, with a territory about equal to an entire third of the “Lower 48,” gets its two Senators and just one Representative.

The justification for and the reasoning behind the three-fifths clause was that states with large slave populations would get outsized representation in Congress and in the Electoral College if each of those non-citizen, non-voting persons, living essentially outside the body politic, were counted towards representation. The Old South, plus any new states entering with the institution of slavery, would get an excess number of representatives and electoral votes. Since the slaves themselves would have no vote and therefore no say in the election of these representatives apportioned to their number—would not actually be represented by them—and so would not have their own needs and desires heard and presented, this excess of members in the House and the Electoral College would then be under the control of the voting-age white men. And that would give the latter more power and representation than the Constitution intended.

Without the three-fifths clause, the Old South and the slavery it spread to any new states would dominate the Congress and the election of the President. They would have an unfair advantage over the future, no matter which party was dominant in those states.

One could say that the same holds true for the status of women. They were counted in the census but were non-voting (until the 19th Amendment, passed in 1919) and therefore were impaired as citizens. That was an unfortunate oversight of 18th and 19th century minds and prejudices. But for the purposes of state representation in the federal government, the non-voting status of women did not sway the power of any state one way or the other. Women and men were present in roughly equal numbers, and that proportion was unlikely to change drastically with demographics and thus skew a state’s representation.³

The reasoning behind the three-fifths clause would apply today to the situation of open borders and unrestrained, undocumented immigration. Democrats and Progressives tend to favor open borders on humanitarian grounds. Republicans and Conservatives tend to oppose them on grounds of representation. Some people think the Conservative side fears that immigrants from Mexico and Latin America will generally vote for Progressive and Socialist causes. But that would only happen if the immigrants became citizens and acquired the right to vote—which one hopes would happen eventually but will not, in any numbers, happen right away. The alternative, one might believe, is that certain districts could illegally give these undocumented residents ballots and then happen to count them in a blatant violation of election laws. And that would be wrong.

The worse problem is that these undocumented residents would be counted in the decennial census, which currently has no way to differentiate them from citizens with voting rights and visitors holding valid visas, green cards, or other documentation but without the privilege of voting. That is, these undocumented residents will count towards an adjustment of the seats in Congress and votes in the Electoral College for any state in which they settle, but they will not then have the vote to ensure their own representation. They would increase the power of the legal voters in the state, but the state’s newly seated Representatives would have no real cause to hear and present the concerns and desires of the state’s undocumented residents. The latter would be used in a powerplay, the same as the slaves in the Old South if they had been counted one-for-one.

I have another reason for disliking open borders. People coming into this country without some form of official recognition—visa, green card, citizenship—are and will always be subject to restrictive immigration laws and the prospect of punitive deportation for any wrongdoing. Sometimes those laws will be enforced, sometimes not, but the threat will always be there. And that is a fact. But this situation also puts these people in the shadows, living as second-class residents, vulnerable to being bilked and defrauded, finding valid employment only in sweatshops and the gray market, and unable to go to the authorities for redress of wage and hour violations because of their status. This isn’t right. It represents a new kind of slavery.

And if we are going to apportion representation and electoral votes on the basis of non-voting residency, why stop at people? I can foresee a time when issues of environmental vulnerability and human-caused damage require representation for the non-human element, for endangered species and even trees. If we start counting trees along with people—and these days, it wouldn’t totally surprise me—then the world flops over, and states like Alaska and Vermont become the representational and voting powerhouses. But the presumably human representatives who took their seats in Congress would not actually be held accountable by the trees and so would only increase the power of the human voters in those states.

And that just wouldn’t be right—even if you counted a tree as only three-fifths of a person.

1. Article I, Section 2, Third Clause: “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”

2. Obviously not the federal income tax, which was not imposed until the 16th Amendment, passed in 1909.

3. Unless you counted the territories of the old and wild west, where men usually outnumbered women. But that situation tended to even out with the arrival of civilization—and so of women and families—which generally occurred before a territory could apply for statehood.

God and the U.S. Constitution

I am an acknowledged atheist. I don’t wear the label proudly or in rebellion. I know that this admission sets me apart from many of my friends and fellow human beings. I am an atheist not because I know a secret that others don’t, but because I lack a gene or a brain circuit or existential antenna that would let me commune with and feel the presence of God.

In my conception, in this absent state then, God—or Yahweh, Allah, Brahma, or any other name you use—is still a good idea. That is, for most people, the Existential Being that we revere and worship is a conception of goodness personified, something to strive for and emulate, a guide to right action and good thoughts, an inducement to calm and serenity.¹

In my conception, this godhead exists in the human mind, is transmitted through spoken and written words, and in utter reality has no existence outside of human thinking, action, and cultural conventions. In other words, do I believe that an immaterial Being, a palpable Force, a Spirit or Intelligence, Creator of the universe as well as of the human form and mind, has an actual presence out beyond the stars and existing for all time and outside of time? For me, no. For others, possibly yes to probably maybe.

But god, godhead, the idea of a loving, creative, affirming presence seems to be part of the human psyche. I credit this to the fact that humans, with our brains and developed skulls larger in volume than the pelvic passages of our birth mothers, are born prematurely, with soft heads. We therefore require the loving attention of our parents through the first couple of years of our being. It’s not for nothing that we think of the godhead then as a either or both Sky Father and Earth Mother. We needed these beings, both distant and close, from our first moments of consciousness.²

In the same way, the U.S. Constitution is a human idea—an ideal, if you will—that has no existence outside of the human mind and the actions it engenders. Like the idea of a god, it is formed in words and written down on parchment and printed in booklets, the same way that God is revealed in the Bible, the Quran, or other sacred texts. But the Constitution has no other physical presence or existence outside of the human mind. It has no force that the human mind does not give it.

And yet the Constitution has a powerful influence in American life. We refer our laws and practices back to it. We see it as the ultimate test of rightness for the American culture and virtues. It has stood for 229 years. It has been amended twenty-seven times—the first ten of those at its very creation and called the “Bill of Rights.”³

Today, we seem to be undergoing either a schism or a reformation with regard to the U.S. Constitution. On the one hand are the originalists, who want to strictly construct its language according to the words on the page and the body of legal practice surrounding the interpretation of such texts. On the other hand are the proponents of a “living Constitution,” who want to interpret the text in terms of the current culture and mores, and pin the words on the page to the presumed intentions and attitudes of 18th-century white Europeans who could not have anticipated our technically advanced, multicultural, and supposedly superior view of law and justice. To the latter, the Constitution is a good start but needs work. The disagreement over interpretation seems to center in that same Bill of Rights and not so much in the basic structure of government laid down in the main text.

Although that governmental structure, too, is under subtle attack. Consider the movement away from laws being written in compact, comprehensible, easily analyzed form by the Legislative branch and merely enforced by the Executive branch—toward a Congress that writes long, abstruse bills full of intentions and to-be-desired end states, which are then left to the Administration and its Cabinet departments and alphabet agencies to interpret into regulations and laws. This isn’t so much a direct and reasoned attack on the Constitution and the government’s structure as a decades-long, bipartisan, and mostly lazy approach to sliding responsibilities around from one branch that has to fight for reelection every two or six years onto the other branch whose staff of bureaucrats and regulators is largely unelected and insulated from public criticism.⁴

And what happens when the popular belief in the rightness of the Constitution or the power of God goes away?

We can see in the sober words of G. K. Chesterton what abandoning the guiding notion of God and the principles of religion has wrought in our current culture: “When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.” Socialism, Communism, environmentalism (absent of, and even opposed to, human values), “the arc or history,” and every other -ism, doctrine, cult, and clever notion springs forth as a mainstay of human thinking. It’s not just that many of these doctrines are destructive, unstable, or unsustainable in the long term. They are also not as hopeful and sustaining in a person’s everyday life as the belief in a benign and loving presence. Prayer offers the believer, at the very least, a little daily chat with a presumed intelligence that is stronger, wiser, and more forgiving than the believer him- or herself might personally be. Adherence to the tenets of pure social justice, environmental sacrifice, or some other collective doctrine usually entails a bitter denial of personal hopes.

In the same way, if we abandon the strict construction of the U.S. Constitution, its Bill of Rights, and the various modifying Amendments, we are left with the personal opinions of competing politicians—and those guided by some social, political, or economic theory with which the rest of us might not agree. The Constitution and its constituent Amendments are remarkably silent on issues of social, political, and economic theory, other than support for the individual in particular and the people in general against the tyranny of the state or the majority in control of the government. It’s a pretty lenient and forgiving structure; other systems of government are a lot more aggressive and demanding.

But again, in my conception, none of this is dependent on outside, impersonal forces. Both God and the Constitution are human creations, operating wholly within the scope of the human mind, and having effect only through the interactions among those who so believe in the first place.

These are, ultimately, fragile things.

1. Unless, of course, you worship Satan, the Devil, Baron Samedi, or some other dark force—and then your heart is in a different place from mine.

2. I imagine that a race of intelligent sea turtles would have a very different conception of God. They are abandoned by their mothers as a clutch of eggs in the sand, are warmed by an invisible Sun, hatch by the light of the Moon, and scramble across dry land to find the ocean, pursued all the time by hungry gulls and other predators. I imagine their God would not be caring or life-giving at all, but cold and distant like the Moon itself.

3. That is, the rights that citizens have above, beyond, and preceding the Constitution, as inalienable rights that come from some source—God, perhaps?—greater than the state or the federal union and the document that binds that union.

4. This is a basic problem with democracy. Ultimately, the people who have to run for office must seek approval from the voters. You do this in one of two ways: offer favors, projects, and advantages that other politicians can’t or won’t offer; or avoid association with damaging and restrictive laws and their effects that the voters won’t like. Promise the sky but avoid the whirlwind and the lightning.

The Myth of Powered Armor

The Human Condition:

The Myth of Powered Armor – October 6, 2019

Boston Dynamics robot “Atlas”

I have been re-reading William Barton’s When Heaven Fell, about Earth and the rest of the galaxy being overrun by our computer overlords with the assistance of the finest fighters among the universe’s species—humans, it turns out, among them. In the novel, powered armor with semi-magical properties of endurance, impenetrability, stability, and power supply plays a big role in battles, turning frail human bodies into invincible supermen, something like the comic-book hero Ironman.

Soldiers in the field do need some kind of protection against shrapnel and spent rounds, like helmets and sometimes a “bulletproof” vest. This is all light, unpowered body armor, more a guard against scrapes and cuts, concussion and sucking chest wounds, than invincible Ironman stuff. But the impact of large rounds and high explosives will defeat the purpose of anything you can feasibly wear on your body. We have known since World War I that anytime a human crew has to move into a shitstorm of firepower, you put them in an armored vehicle: a tank or personnel carrier. And that was a hundred years ago.

Today, we try not to put people into these situations at all. If there is immediate, lethal, unrecoverable danger, we will send a drone or a robot. With current technology, a robot’s responses are limited, so we use them in static situations like investigating unexploded bombs and entering for surveillance purposes buildings that are about to collapse. But as robots and automata become more agile, dexterous, and intelligent—through the marriage of AI to machine bodies—we will use them in more active roles.

We already fly unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, by remote control to perform surveillance and ground missions like bombing and strafing where a human pilot’s endurance, attention span, and bladder capacity might not hold out in the cockpit. Instead, the pilot sits on the ground, in a comfortable chair equipped with a videogame console, and flies the vehicle. If he or she needs to take a “bio break” (as we used to call it at my old biotech company), the pilot can pass control to another human or put the machine on autopilot. With satellite communications, the pilot does not have to be in the same country, not even in the same hemisphere, as the active machine itself.

And that’s just today. Again, with the mating of AI and better machines, we are not far from fielding a legion of robot soldiers that can act independently—or under the satellite control of a human expert sitting comfortably in a chair—to conduct our wars. One of the great lies told to American audiences came in one of the Star Wars prequels where the fighting robots were depicted as fragile imbeciles. One blaster shot, or even a sharp jab with a human elbow, and they fell apart. They moved stiffly and stupidly, and they were mowed down by ranks in combat. Maybe war is stupid, but its machines won’t be. The robot warrior of the future will be more like the Terminator and less like an animated broomstick.

The trend away from putting humans in harm’s way started, I think, in the 1970s. We sent people into space, into orbit, and to the Moon in the 1960s and early ’70s as a matter of national pride and endurance—and it was glorious. But we never went back, and not for reasons of economics or public boredom. We have no reason to go back to the Moon in human-rated ships and spacesuits. What we need to know, we can find out with satellites in orbit and robots on the surface, which are far more robust, cover more ground, and don’t suffer from inattention and boredom. Sending humans to do observation, research, and gee-whiz science experiments—dropping a feather and a hammer in the vacuum on the Moon’s surface—is valuable only for the “you are there” experience. Humans looking through camera lenses and probing with sophisticated equipment whose reach exceeds our five senses can cover more ground at less expense.

It’s even less important to send human beings to Mars and the other planets: other than astronomical, atmospheric, and geological studies—plus the off chance of discovering traces of life—we have no pressing economic need to colonize these distant and hostile environments. Not when so much of our home planet is easier to get to, make habitable, and profitably exploit for a much larger proportion of our population.¹ It would be easier to level the top of Mount Everest and then build and supply a five-star hotel with Olympic swimming pool there than to put a habitat on Mars. Actually living on Mars, after the novelty and the science experiments had worn out, would be tedious beyond belief.²

When we need to go back to the Moon, or on to Mars or Alpha Centauri, to establish a human base and the a prioris for colonial expansion, we will do it handily. We will build on what we learned in the 1960s Space Program and in other endeavors like deep-sea exploration, cybernetics, and our robotic explorations. Sending and attending to human bodies will then be a subset of existing technologies. But human beings living in domes or underground, visiting the surface only with robots or in spacesuits—think mobile, compact, Earthlike habitats—will not be the point. Eventually, we will have to terraform the planet or moon.

This is not an easy prospect. Terraforming first of all implies a breathable atmosphere. We humans like 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and 0.9% argon or other inert, nonpoisonous trace gases. We like a surface pressure of 14 pounds per square inch, although that’s negotiable within a few pounds either way. And our lungs are pretty delicate, so we don’t like nonnegligible amounts of fine dust or spores or hostile proteinaceous substances. The Earth can hold this atmospheric mix at this pressure because of the planet’s size, volume, and density, and so its mass and surface gravity.

The Moon can’t hold on to much of any atmosphere because its gravity is one-sixth that of Earth: all of the gases—which are in constant motion on a warm body, especially under the bombardment of the solar wind—take one bounce, exceed the gravity’s escape velocity, and fly off into interplanetary space, leaving a vacuum. Mars, with a surface gravity only two-fifths that of Earth, can’t hold on to any molecule much lighter than carbon dioxide. And even with that heavy molecule—which flows down onto the floor and into depressions when released on Earth—the Red Planet supports an atmosphere with a pressure only 1% that of our home. Think of flying a jet up to about 80,000 feet—more than twice the height of Mount Everest—and opening a window; that’s the atmosphere of Mars.

Terraforming any planet that does not have Earthlike geodetic specifications³ would require adding significant mass to the planet—something we cannot currently do—or running the atmospheric processors overtime at high pressure to make up for the gases lost to escape velocity. Either way, it’s going to be an expensive proposition, and the result will probably not be stable enough for people to bet their lives on.

No, human beings are not going to become super soldiers in their own frail bodies, or go out among the stars in their shirtsleeves, until we can solve some intractable problems of materials, mass, and energy supply. But when we do solve those problems, the sky will no longer be the limit.

1. And as for mining the asteroids for their mineral riches, when the time comes it will be much better to send intelligent machines than clumsy and inattentive human beings in spacesuits.

2. Oh, we’ll do it. After all, we have a continuous human presence at various national bases on Antarctica, and there is still scientific work to do. But no one moves there to live—to colonize the continent, make a life, and raise the next generation of “Antarcticans.”

3. And then there’s Venus, which is the most Earthlike of this solar system’s planets. But, because of its atmospheric composition and fractionally greater proximity to the Sun, the atmosphere is a high-pressure Hell composed of hot carbon dioxide laced with clouds of sulfuric acid.