Out of this World and into the Next
Adriana Marais (UK); (US))
Do you yearn to leave dusty footprints on the moon or prowl the rocks of Mars? Could a new life await you on future off-world colonies? Theoretical physicist Adriana Marais is convinced we are on “the brink of a new era” of humanity, where we will spread across the worlds of our solar system – and perhaps farther.
Out of this World and into the Next is Marais’s attempt to share her wonder at this vision, and to sell you her dream. “Just decades since we first went to space, it won’t be much longer before we’re building new worlds beyond home,” she writes, earnestly.
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As proof, she offers the success of SpaceX’s reusable rockets, nearly 25 years of human habitation on the International Space Station and the proliferation of missions to the moon and Mars in the past decade, culminating in NASA’s upcoming Artemis missions to the moon and plans for the Lunar Gateway space station. She sees these as stepping stones towards tech we need for life off Earth – radiation shields, faster propulsion, long-term life support, off-world fuel production and so on.
Marais writes as a devoted would-be Martian: she applied to the Mars One contest for colonists and reached the top 100 before the organisation’s bankruptcy. She reports “a sense of belonging” when considering the stars, and throughout the book romanticises exploration, stellar and earthly, as an apolitical frontier. The pages she sets aside for European colonialism and similar histories are noticeably sanitised, with references to genocide smoothed over by the passive voice. She writes that we must inhabit the stars because migration is innate to our thriving – that and the sun’s eventual wrathful death make it wise to get our butts to Mars.
To drive the point home, Marais envisions an imaginary day on Mars, 10 years from now, complete with abundant, humid greenhouses, lava-tube sleeping quarters and intricate resource management systems drawn from technology she claims we are close to. She describes efficient, lower-waste fission reactors using thorium and sets out how we might terraform Mars and the moons of outer worlds using greenhouse gases. If we just apply ourselves, she says, the tech road will rise to meet us.
Marais opines about migration as innate to our species as the US ramps up its anti-immigrant stance
For all its rapture, I found her vision quite bleak: it’s a future reliant on billionaires, with a big focus on SpaceX’s Elon Musk. She posits the incentive for space investment as coming from new demands on resources caused by “international conflict, sanctions, [and] extreme weather” – that plus tourism. Meanwhile, billionaires use data centres, private jets and more to de-terraform (“pollute”, to you and me) this planet. Yet Marais still hopes interplanetary societies can build on such foundations to develop altruistic economies and other utopian concepts.
It is hard to read this book as an American in 2025, as Musk’s DOGE undermines grants for cancer research and hollows out state programmes my parents rely on. Meanwhile, rich musician Katy Perry gets to dip her toes above the Kármán line (the border between our atmosphere and outer space).
While Marais opines about migration as innate to our species, the US continues to ramp up its anti-immigrant stance. Space is inherently political – not just because allocation of resources is political, but because the universe’s hostility puts into stark relief what is irreplaceable and endangered about Earth. A book that lauds space exploration without serious reflection on who benefits feels wholly inadequate for the zeitgeist.
If, like me, you prefer work that balances the contradictions inherent in extraterrestrial quests, I have suggestions. For the enchantment of other worlds and our effort to comprehend them, try The Sirens of Mars by Sarah Stewart Johnson, or Jaime Green’s The Possibility of Life. To discover more about the origin and fate of our universe in a way that is about us, New Scientist columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein’s The Disordered Cosmos is wonderful. And if well-researched speculation about our someday interplanetary society is more your thing, try The Expanse or For All Mankind. They’re popular for good reason.
Christie Taylor is a science journalist based in New York
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