We are continually being asked to feel sorry for men, to understand that there is some significant sense in which we men are being poorly served by a liberal society. Exactly how is usually left undefined. It's taken for granted that we’re being ignored, disrespected, or ‘left behind’. When a specific grievance is asserted, it's transparently false. In both cases, I think the grievance-merchants are relying on us to ‘connect the dots’ and pick up on something not quite being said. 

Take Chris Arnade’s recent article in the Free Press, arguing that men—all men—need to be heroic, or at least to be seen as heroes. Modern liberal society is apparently hostile to this and won’t give us these opportunities. In doing so, it deprives us of some innate drive, making us unhappy and unfulfilled. 

I personally find these ‘think of the poor men’ pieces condescending. They don’t understand my life and I don’t like their claim to speak for me. This one especially so, and that’s no accident. Chris Arnade’s entire project is a sort of voyeuristic ventriloquism: gawping at, and speaking for, people who he imagines can’t speak for themselves. His origin story is, after a long career in finance, he got a buyout and was able to retire early. With his newfound freedom, he took up a hobby of photographing poor people (no, really) in ways many have criticised as exploitative and demeaning. Because our mainstream media are unfathomably stupid, he swiftly gained publication and recognition. His writing follows in the same suit—reporting on the ‘forgotten’ people of America in the manner (and one suspects with the factual accuracy) of a Victorian anthropologist lecturing on a tribe of noble savages he encountered. 

Naturally, Arnade is a big proponent of the poverty narrative—people vote Trump because of economic desperation and cultural disrespect. And this Free Press article seems to move towards the masculinity narrative—effete liberalism is pushing men right. I’ve said my piece on both of those. I want to put the political implications to one side, and focus on the core argument.

What to me seems wrong—and obviously wrong—are the two claims Arnade makes in his title and byline: That “all men” need to be heroes to be happy and fulfilled, and that the opportunity to do so is somehow being denied them.

To be a man

When I was much younger, I saved someone from drowning. They had (possibly while intoxicated) gone into a rough and choppy sea, at night, and were struggling to stay above water. Worse, the tide was pulling them out. I went in after them and, with some effort, brought them back to shore. As we got close, an older man I did not know also came in to help and, between the two of us, we dragged them out. Exhausted and freezing cold, but safe. 

It might surprise someone like Arnade to learn that this has not proved an especially important moment in my life. I’m glad I did it. I received profuse thanks from the person in question and general plaudits from my peers (which Arnade imagines all young men need). And then, well… life moves on. Other things happen to you. It’s not something that’s provided any great moral lesson for me. Nor is it important to my sense of identity—this is the first time I’ve mentioned it publicly, not out of humility; I honestly just don’t really think about it. 

I’ve also provided support to people in less dramatic, more long-term, more female-coded ways. For instance, assisting a loved one through a disability. Or being, with my family, a carer for a close relative with Alzheimer's. There is absolutely no doubt the latter have given more meaning to me, developed my character more, and have strengthened my relationships with others in a way more traditional ‘heroics’ couldn’t.

Providing long-term care for someone is an endless series of small decisions to prioritize the other person, most in themselves trivial and quickly forgotten. Rather than one moment in which you have to master yourself, you have to decide to continually live that value. And it improves you. It will teach to be kind, it will teach you how to care about someone in a way that taking a one-time risk won’t. You will feel frustration with people for things that are not their fault and have to move past that. You’ll then feel guilt—often quite profound guilt—for having felt that frustration. You will learn—and you will be forced to learn—how to forgive others and yourself. All of this will be mixed with moments of real joy and real connection. I can’t speak for everyone, but these have been among the most important parts of my life.

On a societal level, if there is a crisis of acts of service not being recognised it is of this latter, female-coded, kind. Despite Arnade’s claim that heroics are now (somehow) looked down on, whenever I’ve done something (even something quite minor) that fits this male-coded frame, I’ve received praise and recognition. In Arnade’s own story—which he takes as an exemplar of his thesis—the ‘hero’ (who retrieved a drunk from a locked bathroom) was bought drinks and made to feel good about his actions. (“he strutted around like the cat’s meow.”)  In contrast, looking after a relative in cognitive decline can be very isolating. Despite it being the much more common experience, many carers feel  profoundly alone. Finally, as societies age, more and more of us are going to need to fill this role.

There is not the same structural need for an army of men pulling people out of locked bathrooms or choppy seas. That’s not the point, Arnade might say—men need that, and without it we’ll be forlorn, miserable, useless mopes. But will we? For most of us, a true emergency rescue moment might happen once or twice throughout your life. You want to meet the moment, but I think it will be challenging to build a stable identity around. 

How could you? Take my case: I was happy enough to be given credit, but am I going to tell that story in every interaction for evermore? Am I going to sit, day after day, meditating in satisfaction on my ‘hero moment’? Can you imagine a more insufferable prat?

And most men who want this to be their personality don’t even have that. They live in anticipation of one.  Consider gun nuts who define themselves by making themselves ‘ready for the moment’. With a grim predictability, study after study shows they are far, far more likely to use their beloved firearms to end their own lives than to stop a ‘bad guy with a gun’.

Professional heroics 

To find real meaning and fulfillment in heroism, I think you’d have to do more of it. For most of us, this sort of thing might happen once or twice in your life. You’ll make a—likely poorly informed and impulsive—decision. Hopefully everything works out. And then the world will move on. There are, however, plenty of vocations which involve ‘heroic’ acts. 

The opportunity to pursue these (or, for that matter, for the rest of us to behave commendably in a rare emergency) is not something being ‘taken away’ from men. Indeed, it's difficult to even understand why Arnade thinks this. As mentioned, in his own specifically selected anecdote, the man is both allowed to be ‘heroic’ and praised for it. The only evidence he offers is this article, which he characterises as arguing “the ancient hero archetype is corrosive, bad, and unnecessary—an outdated concept of masculinity, which promotes imperialism.” 

The first issue here is that’s not what the linked article says. It’s an examination of how men like Jordan Peterson and Elon Musk love to cite ancient heroic poetry, but largely misunderstand it. However I can easily see how Arnade would read it as saying something else: I imagine he gave it a quick scan and his priors kicked in—academic liberal author, ‘front of the class kid’, bet he ‘sneers’ at real men. It’s saying something about the hero, about masculinity. Must be against it. Arrogantly so. 

His whole article is framed this way. The smug pseudo-knowledge of liberal intellectuals is contrasted with the real world wisdom he gleaned from uncouth mouths in a trashy dive bar (it's even more explicit in the Substack post on which the article is based—“one of the divey-est dive bars in the US, with a collection of intoxicated, high, and strung out customers”). This is, in the words of social science, a dubious social epistemology. By its standards, Arnade should defer to my perspective: I’d bet money I’ve spent more time in working class American dive bars as he has. And I was there as a customer, not an ex-banker on a poor person safari. 

I suspect however that what Arnade is channeling isn’t a deeper meaning he’s deduced from proximity to the poor, but a narrative pushed by conservative writers he reads. Namely, that liberalism is a feminising ideology. That ‘back in the day’ men might go to war and be rewarded with social standing and an obedient woman. That  now society has no use for men. We cannot prove ourselves this way, and must work meaningless feminised office jobs that suck the life out of us and quash our masculine urges. 

As always with conservatism, it’s not immediately clear what day ‘back in the day’ was. But we can perhaps start with some of their models of masculinity: They love the image of the Spartan warrior—the iconic helmet, or even just the name ‘Spartan’, appears on memes, fitness routines, team logos, and ‘trad’ accounts. The European knight is likewise a common symbol of lost manhood. The thing is, both those figures sat atop rigid hereditary caste systems. Something like 90% of Sparta were helots (slaves); only 2-3% were the famed warriors. One medieval knight required an economic base of around 300 tenants or serfs (semi-free agricultural workers) to support them. Even in Republican Rome, which recruited much further down the social ladder (and won wars because of it), limited conscription to landowners. Non-property owners, the urban poor, and of course slaves were excluded. 

Sparta, Rome, or the age of the Crusades were not a better time to be a man—even if your only criterion is ‘gives opportunities to be a hero in battle’. The overwhelming odds are you would be working to support a warrior aristocrat, not be one. Also, if our concern is men being disrespected, consider that workers supporting the aristocrats were usually defenceless against humiliation or abuse from them. You have to get into the modern age before mass conscription allows most men to ‘prove themselves’ in war. Even then, race and class discrimination might limit how you could participate. Finally, if I were to choose an era to prove my manhood in battle, I would choose one which had antibiotics and surgery with anesthetic.  

Some far-right commentators—for instance the Bronze Age Pervert—are quite open that this is not a problem for them: their project is about a few exceptional men, not the peons who support them (much less women). Those who might be tempted by this worldview should realize that the commentators pushing it do not expect you to be one of the masculine elect. You will be toiling so they can larp as heroic warriors.  Arnade doesn’t go that far, indeed that bullet-biting isn’t available to him: he claims “all men” need to be heroes. Applying that standard honestly, he should come to the conclusion that past societies were much, much worse for his ‘forgotten’ men. 

Today, virtually anyone can become a soldier, or police officer, or firefighter (and be well compensated in pay and social status).  Liberalism's critics are forever claiming it's ‘taken away’ things there’s never been more universal access to. ‘Traditional marriage’ is not being taken from you. Anyone can still do that. You want to be a ‘trad’ with a stay at home wife and lots of kids? Millions of people do, plenty of women still want that role, and broad economic prosperity makes it easier, not harder. Want masculine hobbies? No one is stopping you. Just want to grill? Meat has never been more accessible for the common man!

Liberalism: good for men too!

The revealed preference however is that most men don’t want these vocations. The Army aggressively recruits; really any young man at any point can join. The vast majority don't. Men fantasise about being in combat scenarios but, by and large, don’t seek them out. This is one reason why conservatives (and fellow travelers like Arnade) hate liberalism so much: free choice disproves their biological essentialism. Rather than abandon the narrative (all men gravitate towards certain roles), they abandon reality. Men aren’t choosing non-’heroic’ roles, liberalism is (somehow) stopping them. 

Most men don’t want to be heroes and that’s fine. Arnade doesn't know what’s in your head and, despite his ‘listening to the common man’ schtick, he doesn’t care. He has his narrative, informed by elite conservative writers, and goes into the world reading it into his interactions with poor people. Even when, as we have seen, those interactions flatly contradict it. He has his perception of liberalism and, as we have seen, that’s what he’ll read us as saying—regardless of what we actually do say. 

Liberal freedom isn’t just about finding the life that best suits you, it’s a grand experiment in us all finding the best ways we can care for one another. Arnade characterizes modern liberalism as favouring “the individual over the community”. This is wrong; liberalism values both. Its canonical texts—On Liberty for instance—are self-consciously about finding a balance between the two. In recent times, the great push for unconstrained individualism, the tearing down of structures of communal aid, and the bleak insistence that “there’s no such thing as society” have come from the political right. Liberalism has compromised too much with this vision of men reduced to want fulfillment, but never let go of the insight that freedom, choice, and pluralism are both better for individuals and better for society.

I think it’s better for men to be able to choose the ways we do things for others. I know several men my age who take on equal, or even primary, parenting responsibilities. They do so, not because a feminised society has forced this on them, but because they enjoy doing it. They love their kids, these relationships give their lives meaning, and it makes them better people. Past societies might have discouraged, or even prohibited men from taking on this role. Now they can. And I think they will be better at it precisely because they have chosen it, as J. S. Mill puts it:

In proportion to the development of his individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is therefore capable of being more valuable to others. There is a greater fulness of life about his own existence, and when there is more life in the units there is more in the mass which is composed of them.

Arnade imagines that this sort of freedom leaves men frightened and confused. That we are simple and stupid creatures who need “to play a stock character.” To again quote Mill, that we should fit ourselves into “the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their own character.” I can’t help but find this condescending. If you want to play a stereotype, fine, no one is stopping you. But note that Arnade only makes this claim about other men, never himself. Does he find himself unable to choose his life path, unable to make decisions, unable even to know how to present himself to others, without a stronger guiding hand from society? He never says, but one suspects not. 

So what’s this actually about?

With all that said, it must be noted that articles on male angst clearly have resonance. Why? For one thing, the people in every historic period and type of society have felt angsty. It's just something people do. And articles like Arnade’s give an easy answer. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with feeling insecure or sad. If there’s one thing the ‘think of the men’ articles get right it's that men’s mental health is underdiscussed and stigmatized—though they rarely provide useful solutions.

If there is a significant societal change that these articles are responding to, it’s not a matter of men losing something—we demonstrably haven't—it's about women gaining something. They can now make their own way in the world. Women can be heroes too!  We men can still earn respect in all sorts of ways, but are no longer granted it simply by virtue of being men. People like always having someone beneath them. That, I think, is what the ‘male malaise’ genre is, at its core, about. 

When we’re asked to consider the poor, left behind young men, we’re often reminded that girls are now exceeding boys in most aspects of education. This is true and, on the surface, a reasonable enough thing for public policy to think about (for instance, is this gap due to different socialisation, different learning styles, etc?). Beneath the surface, I think something uglier is sometimes being said: That it is an unbearable indignity for boys to have girls ‘above’ them like this. I think what’s gone wrong for a lot of men in their lives is—though they might not admit it to themselves in these terms—they’re angry that their sisters went to college and they didn’t. Their lives have been fine, but their sisters or female school peers have been better and that feels like an injustice. One they’ve not been able to let go of. Their fathers had to reconcile themselves to female peers in the workplace, most young men now will be managed by a woman at some point. When we hear about how ‘disrespected’ men feel, is it that feminists are stopping men being firefighters? Or is it that men in office jobs are being told what to do by a woman? 

There’s an urge in liberalism to debate the highest version of the opposing argument. Steelman, not strawman. That’s valid and useful, but we shouldn't let it get in the way of plainly understanding what the manosphere is complaining about. These are not tortured souls, reading Homer in a world of hyper-feminists who no longer care for it. They’re useless miserable prats who wish they had the courage to call their female boss a b**** and live vicariously through Trump because they imagine he’d do that. 

Liberalism does not force us from the communal to the individual. I doubt helots had a great sense of community with the Spartan overlords who hunted them for sport. Nor does it force men from male-coded forms of community service to female-coded ones. It gives us the choice. We have never before had more ability to develop ourselves as fathers, as children caring for parents, or in who or how we date. We’ve also never before had more opportunity to be traditionally masculine—to make a vocation of the army, or pulling people from burning buildings, or competing in professional sports. Despite the silly and shallow self-pity of some, there has never been a better time to be  a man. 

The ‘cost’ for all this is we have to give up having women as automatic social inferiors. That should be an easy trade to make.  

Featured image is פסל אכילס הגוסס לאחר שנפגע בחץ בעקבו by י.ש., CC BY-SA 3.0

Among the many evils the 2024 election released into the world was a renewed round of discussions of the woes of young men, and how we’re being failed by liberalism, or feminism, or the Democratic Party. This narrative has been around for some time, but has been slowly gathering momentum. It runs something like:

Young men in America are lonely, struggling to find community and romantic partners. Many are permanently single. Whereas modern society affirms women, boys are looked down on, scolded, treated like dangerous predators post MeToo, their concerns arrogantly dismissed by feminists, a culturally dominant liberalism, and the Democratic Party alike. Liberals fail to provide young men guidance, role models, or a narrative that will give their lives meaning. As a result, men are moving to the right. The right signals that it values them; it wants a world that has a place for them in it. It gives them advice on how to pick up girls, or that they should clean their room. This may not have good consequences, but it is only to be expected given our (liberal/feminist/Democratic) treatment of them.

Unlike a narrative that centers economic desperation and poverty, this story (hereafter called the ‘masculinity narrative’) does at least have some supporting data: young people (of both genders) are seeing friends less in person, dating less, having less sex. Less quantifiably, there does seem to be a general malaise around gender roles, an ambivalence on whether a feminist society was really the right goal. And young men have definitely shifted right: Men under 45 have gone from supporting Biden by 8% in 2020, to supporting Trump by 8% in 2024. From a purely pragmatic point of view, the masculinity narrative’s proponents on the left (there are many) are correct to say we can’t simply eat a 16 point swing in such a big chunk of the electorate, especially if there’s no compensating gain among women. By and large, there wasn't.

But facts—even relatively incontrovertible empirical facts—don’t interpret themselves. We have to interpret facts, and build stories around them. I do not think the masculinity narrative is a good one. I do not think it interprets the above facts well. I do not think the implicit values it draws on are good ones. I do not think it helps us work out what to do going forward. 

What did you say to make him hit you?

At its simplest, the masculinity narrative imagines young men reacting to a failure of liberal feminism to provide certain things for them and, as a result, turning to the right. This means the story frames liberals as having caused men’s rightward lurch. Implicity then, we bear responsibility for its consequences. The onus is on us to talk them out of it and repair the harm. 

I have an intentionally ugly term I use for this moral sleight of hand: ‘What did you say to make him hit you?’ politics. Our (often implicit/subconscious) ways of thinking about moral responsibility are gendered and this is reflected in, and reinforced by, how we use language. A classic example is ‘Mary is a battered woman.’ Mary is the object of the sentence. Being beaten is presented as a property she has, not something done to her. The agent actually responsible (let’s call him John), is nowhere to be found in that framing. ‘John beats Mary’ invites us to ask why John does this. ‘Mary is a battered woman’ invites us to ask what Mary does that makes her so. And people do: women who are abused are often asked what they said to provoke it. Common advice is to avoid saying things that ‘set him off.’

We likewise perceive political ideologies and political parties in subconsciously gendered ways. In contemporary American discourse, liberalism is female-coded, conservatism male-coded. As a result, rivers of ink are spilled to frame liberals as possessing sole agency, and hence responsibility. There is a palpable aversion to saying voters who loudly proclaim the most extreme racism, sexism, threats of violence, or deranged conspiracy theories are doing anything wrong. They are just reacting. Reacting to alleged liberal disrespect, to alleged liberal cultural dominance, to some kid hundreds of miles away on a college campus using obtuse social justice terminology, to Democratic politicians getting their messaging a bit wrong, not ‘talking their language.’ We shouldn’t even be thinking about what is wrong with them—we should be asking what we did to provoke it. We should be careful, always so careful, not to ‘set them off.’ 

People who treat conservatives as without agency often defend doing so on the grounds that liberals are persuadable; the right isn’t. It makes sense to focus on people they can reach. This is doubtful on its own terms—Republican politicians are susceptible to public opinion (see the failed ACA repeal), and they do respond to incentives (although gerrymandering often means they have more to fear from a primary electorate than a general one). Assuming the right is unpersuadable creates a vicious self-fulfilling prophecy in which we don’t even try. The masculinity narrative however assumes the right’s followers can be persuaded, if only liberals could find the right words.

The armchair generals pushing these ‘don’t set them off’ criticisms never imagine it’s their job to dissuade those drifting toward fascism. Instead they lecture Democrats and liberals about their messaging. The most efficacious strategy may well be the reverse: your Fox news-addled uncle isn’t going to listen to what Kamala Harris has to say, but he might listen to you. I hear people, all the time, say some version of “my friend/relative gets really mad at liberals. Here’s what you should say/stop saying so you don't set them off.” When I ask—and I usually do ask—what they say to this person, the response is an awkward pause. It has often never even occurred to these armchair generals that they themselves might join the fray and test their proposed persuasive tactics. 

Unfortunately for the rest of us, the masculinity narrative is right about this much: Whatever is going on with men is now a political problem. Men are moving right. It’s worth unpacking the claims it makes so we can start to think through possible political solutions. 

When you take off the ‘conservatives don’t have agency’ glasses, it becomes obvious the narrative has it exactly backwards: The modern right messaging ecosystem—the Republican Party, but also the manosphere, the anti-woke podcast bros, people who use the word ‘cuck’, meme pages of ‘women’s Ls’, the incels, get rich quick scammers, MGTOW, ‘how to be an alpha’ charlatans, pick up artists, and so on—is not responding to a crisis of masculinity. It is creating a crisis of masculinity. 

The problem

I don’t have children myself, but I’ve recently been staying with a number of family and friends, most of whom, as it happens, are raising boys—from toddlers to young teens. Something that has come up again and again is how difficult it is to protect them from vicious anti-women and anti-LGBT messaging online and how young the far-right’s recruitment starts. Your seven year old is watching some perfectly fine Minecraft video on YouTube, appropriate controls enabled, you turn around for a second and BAM—the algorithm has shifted them over to an Andrew Tate style misogynist. Again and again, I’ve heard from parents and teachers just how much standing men like Tate have with boys of alarmingly young ages. 

To be a straight young man today is to stand under a Niagara of messaging telling you that women are promiscuous harlots, that they take glee in rejecting good men, that the problems of the world are a result of it being ‘feminised,’ that it (and women) are against you, that it has no place for you, and that to succeed you must be an alpha—unpleasant, angry, and unconnected. To an extent it was ever thus—we’ve always raised our children in gendered narratives—but the hatred and resentment of women in today's online world is of a totally different intensity and saturation than a generation ago. Most young men of course are not incel school shooters, but many are something adjacent to that. Many, many more have picked new right views up through scrolling or chatting. To some degree they’re not even aware of their influence, but the saturation is so great it's gotten into the back of their minds. 

All of this is making it harder for men to form friendships (of either gender), to succeed in the world, and—as we are continually informed—to have sex and form relationships with women. Since liberals are allegedly ceding the ground of relationship and dating advice to the right, I’ll offer my own advice to young men: Don’t be a conservative. That’s it. Never mind the morality or philosophy of it, there are far more liberal young women than conservative ones, and they are increasingly unwilling to date across ideological lines. For all the excuses that have been offered for men turning to conservatism because they’re lonely, becoming a conservative is probably the single worst thing you can do for your romantic life. 

This isn’t ‘liberal intolerance,’ but a sensible, practical, and defensible line for women to draw. Modern conservatism of the sort that attracts young men is premised on being bitterly angry at women. It is quite rational for women themselves to conclude that men holding these beliefs will be less capable of stable, loving relationships. Surveys show ‘manosphere beliefs’ specifically are a dating deal breaker for an overwhelming majority of women. Further, most young liberal women have LGBT friends and family. It's perfectly sensible to not want to risk a social interaction between Black, gay, or trans family members and a right-wing partner who's been trained to mock and antagonise them. 

Dating and its discontents

Am I saying there’s no problem with modern dating, apart from how the right is training men? Well, no society anywhere at any time in history has achieved frictionless romance and harmonious relationships for all. We’re in something of a technological transition moment, with dating apps increasingly the main forum. I think it’s fair to say neither men nor women think the current set up is perfect. But let's be cautious of narratives that catastrophize or pit one gender against the other. 

And dating apps aren't the only game in town: A cursory scroll through a ‘What’s on’ in any major town will reveal plenty of singles meetups, speed dating nights, and the like. I’d also suggest joining clubs, volunteering, a church even, if you’re religious. Anything that will help build a mixed-gender group of friends. That’s both going to be a good thing for you in itself, and will increase your odds of meeting someone organically through friends of friends or being set up. Again, we find the modern right is deeply hostile to its followers doing this: The entire focus is on ‘manly’ pursuits; on creating a fierce hostility to anything female-coded; on relentlessly defending male-coded hobbies (like video games) against perceived female encroachment. This ethos is objectionable on its own, but it also sabotages its followers' romantic prospects. The thing about a ‘no girls allowed’ treehouse is it doesn’t have any girls in it. 

Being a straight man has its challenges and contradictions when it comes to dating. For instance, we’re both potentially dangerous to others and expected to be strongly agential, to ‘take the lead.’ With that said, have you seen what we’re competing against? Core life competencies like being able to produce edible food, or decorating an apartment with something other than empty beer cans, will win you a preposterous amount of points. 

Ultimately, dating isn’t this awful, impossible thing. The main correlation between young men not having sex or relationships is not having asked someone out in the last year. The defining attribute of people who are single for long periods is that they stopped trying—something the right urges them to do, not the left. They want men to feel angry and alienated because that keeps them in their political camp. 

Feminism and its frustrations

The right also impresses on its followers that feminists hate men as a class and have remade the world to disadvantage us. I’ve heard many young men voice some version of the following (sometimes with an eye roll, sometimes jokingly, sometimes with real anger): Feminism means competing for jobs and promotions on equal terms, but men still have to pay for dinner. Conversely, I’ve heard many older women complain that feminism ‘screwed them over’—they had to work a full time career, but still ended up doing all the childcare. 

In both cases, the ‘trick’ is fairly simple: We live in a society that doesn’t have one coherent set of gender norms but a ‘mixed regime’ of two (it’s a bit more complicated than that, but we can simplify to two): A ‘traditional’ set of norms that ascribes different roles and responsibilities to men and women, and an ‘egalitarian’ one that stresses equality. Sometimes one set of norms is operative, sometimes the other. 

This incoherence is frustrating. If you’re not doing well, it feels like you’re getting the ‘worst of both worlds’: as a man you don’t gain any advantage when it comes to promotions (egalitarian), but you still pay for dates (traditional). Or, as a woman, you’re expected to work as long and hard as a man (egalitarian) and also do most of the childcare (traditional). It can also feel like other people are getting one over on you by appealing to whatever norm happens to advantage them in the moment. Both genders may feel like they’re fulfilling their half of the patriarchal bargain, while the other is skating on theirs. 

The right ascribes all the discontents of this mixed regime to feminism. The right also tells men that the mixed regime privileges women. It doesn’t. While men can get the worst of both worlds under it, the total sum of inequities it imposes on women is still greater. (The total time cost of women doing more childcare is greater than the money cost of us paying for dinner more.) It is this largely fictional view of feminism that young men are voting against.

And that is the most charitable account of anti-feminist anger. At best, it is about men being tricked into thinking the world is against them, that the pendulum has swung too far the other way and now women are unfairly advantaged. Much of the time however the core impulse is anger at losing social inferiors, fury at women for not ‘knowing their place.’ 

Are you sure you didn’t say something to make him hit you?

The right is targeting young men and boys with a propaganda campaign the scope and scale of which feels like one of the more intentionally exaggerated passages from Orwell. And yet, people who know all this still can’t seem to let go of the instinct that we—Democrats, liberals, feminists, the left—must have done something to drive them to it. 

Liberals can certainly acknowledge some sins of omission—we needed to aggressively contest the online space much earlier. We’re a decade into this new media landscape and only starting to belatedly recognise a yawning communication gap. Likewise, liberalism just hasn’t been as robust, as self-confident, as it's needed to be. But as for sins of commission—what we supposedly did to young men to provoke this backlash—I just don’t see it. 

Feminists get portrayed as ideologically inflexible, as dismissive of contrary opinions. ‘Feminism is a religion’ was a common refrain in the old days of the male-dominated New Atheist movement. That’s not my impression of it at all: I’ve interviewed many, many feminist philosophers on my podcast. I can say from considerable experience these aren’t people who have not considered different points of view, or are arrogant or dismissive when you challenge theirs. 

Most of the people I’ve been closest to in my life have been women—I have three sisters, I dated women, I’m married to a woman, and most of my best friends have been women—and their politics run from center to far-left but almost all would consider themselves feminists. I’ve basically never felt any of them to be hostile to me as a man. Feminism as an ideology has been unusually willing to grapple with its own history with regards to racism and trans inclusion, as well as to reconsider and discuss key commitments, like its position on sex work and pornography. 

That the Democratic Party is saying something bad enough to provoke sweet young men into fascistic hatred is an even stranger claim. The party's messaging is almost defined by its inoffensiveness. It can be a bit bland—vacuous even—but when has any Democratic leader ever said anything as offensive about men as what Trump and Vance regularly say about women? 

We’re told we need to offer young men meaning. I’ll be the first to say I think modern liberalism and socialism alike have failed to provide an inspiring vision of the future, but that’s not the same thing. If Harris had better articulated her vision for the country, that wouldn’t make your existence complete. Ideologies can’t do that. They’re guides, they help or hinder our perception of things, and inform the moral judgements we make, as we journey from this world to the next. But being liberal or conservative in and of itself doesn’t provide purpose. Nor can a political party. Except for a few unfortunates whose vocation is being a politician, that’s manifestly not what they’re here to do. Parties are vehicles for better or worse policy, nothing more or less. 

Telling people their lives are meaningless unless they join your group is a cult recruitment tactic (which makes sense, fascism has many similarities to a cult). Meaning is something we have to find and create for ourselves. That’s both the beauty and the challenge of our fleeting lives. Different people will find meaning in different projects, different struggles. For most of us, meaning will be found in relationships, our families, friends, and partners but how that looks will be different for different people. There is no ultimate authority that imposes a single, universal meaning on the universe. People who insist there is—religious fundamentalists, cults, political authoritarians—are usually trying to sell you something you shouldn't buy. Contrary to much self-involved angst from philosophers, that there's no ultimate source for meaning isn’t terrifying, depressing, or absurd. It isn’t even, when you think about it, particularly interesting.

We’re told we need to offer young men more role models, people who are both credibly masculine and embody our values. But wasn’t that Tim Walz? He was selected overtly for that purpose. The response from the poor, lonely young men we liberals have apparently been failing? Pure, visceral anger. “Tampon Tim” was arguably subject to more gender-based attacks than even Harris precisely because he didn’t validate their misogyny. The problem isn’t the left’s role models, it's the right’s. Men have been reached first by the influencers and politicians they hold up as the masculine ideal: people who, almost to a man, have been credibly accused of rape or assault, who have failed to maintain their long-term relationships, who, in the final resort, are cleary not happy, or even capable of happiness. In the internet age, they are aggressively importing the beliefs that so damaged their own lives directly into the minds of young boys who ordinarily might be kept safe, or at least distanced, from them.

We’re told we need to offer dating advice or assistance. Sure, that seems like a bit of a gap in the market. Apparently, there have been efforts to fill it in the form of socialist singles nights and speed dating. The result? Not enough straight men showed up. And this failure was mocked by the poor, lonely young men we’re told we’re failing. They weren't any more willing to accept non-misogynistic dating help than they were non-misogynistic role models. I strongly suspect the same will be true of non-misogynistic life advice.

Men aren’t moving away from the left because of something we said. They’re moving away because they’re getting taken in by the right’s propaganda. This is the thing that people who push any ‘what did you say to make him hit you?’ narrative just don't get: People aren’t listening to the messaging of individual liberal politicians anymore. If they think Democrats said X, it's not because they said X, it’s because the media they consume told them they said X. There are no ‘magic words’ that will reach the white working class, or men. We can say everything the appeasers want us to say—a lot of the time we already have—and it wont make the slightest bit of difference. 

What is to be done?

It seems like every political writer in the age of Trump thinks that their article is a failure unless it ends with ‘and that’s the one weird trick to defeating MAGA.’ ‘What’s the solution then?’ is a question I’m often asked. There may not be one. We‘re not really in a ‘solution space’ right now. America is currently at the intersection of multiple, profound, interconnected, system-level failures: an unserious electorate drifting right, unprecedented levels of misinformation, institutional safeguards like impeachment no longer working, a justice system that cannot perform its most basic functions, a slow-moving constitutional coup from the terrifying zealots who’ve captured the Supreme Court, an always biased media now fully capitulating to fascism, and, yes, whatever the hell is going on with men. 

My main concern with the masculinity narrative is it urges a mindset that is actively harmful: We’re asked to respect young men, to empathise with them, to see if from their point of view. Throughout the entire Trump era we’ve had this omnipresent theory that Trump voters could be swayed from voting Trump if liberals learnt more about them and it's never made the slightest bit of sense. The demand is that I put my values, my facts, to one side. I don’t know how to say this more basically: validating men’s false feelings of persecution will not reduce the power of ideologies who feed on those feelings. It will make them stronger. 

This feels like one more shakedown. When it became clear that liberal democracy would be on the ballot in a series of disturbingly close elections, multiple groups rushed, not to support those of us who wanted to save it, but to see what they could leverage from our fear. ‘If you want Democrats to win in 2016 you’d better make Bernie the nominee or we’ll sit it out,’ ‘I don’t like they/them pronouns, knock that off or I’ll elect people who will kill you all,’ ‘Democrats should stop talking about race altogether if they want my vote.’ 

Now, in the 11th hour, the last free election we may have, when all hope seemed lost, young men run in to decisively throw their support behind the fascist and then start yelling some incoherent nonsense that we couldn’t capitulate to if we tried. The hostages are all dead, the negotiator has fled, and you’re in the middle of the destroyed building confidently telling the wreckage you can’t get laid. The Bernie-or-bust demands were at least intelligible. This is a bad joke. 

What is to be done? You already know what we can do. We can be still more rigorous about what our boys are exposed to online, we can teach them online literacy, and teach them early. We can practice better digital hygiene ourselves—this stuff gets in the back of your head. Many on the left pushing the masculinity narrative frame it as being about other men, but clearly buy into misogyny themselves on some level. (Socialist discomfort with anti-Trump liberalism—the derision of ‘wine-moms,’ ‘girlbosses,’ liberals ‘at brunch,’ etc—is clearly misogynistic.) 

We liberals can more aggressively contest the new digital media landscape. No more complaining about people not reading broadsheets anymore; that’s not coming back. We can invest the time, energy, and money into building a presence in this new world. And when we do so, let’s make it one for us, not a sad imitation of the right—there won’t be a liberal Joe Rogan in the same way there never did end up being a liberal Rush Limbaugh. Their audience is different to ours, different behaviourally, different psychologically. What works for them won’t work for us. We need to find our own way. 

Finally, when we see men around us drifting into this worldview, we do need to try and talk them out of it. In times like these, there is a duty to persuade. Not by silencing ourselves to validate false and pernicious grievances, but by directly and respectfully telling people they are wrong. That they are being lied to. And that these lies will make their own lives harder. That’s all hard. Misogyny is a particularly stubborn mental software to uninstall. It makes people unpleasant, and often dangerous. That’s the path. It’s steep, but at least it's real. 

We are where we are because we’ve been pretending we’re somewhere else. Pretending that fascists aren’t serious about what they’re telling us they plan to do. Pretending that people don’t really buy into their ideas, that it's actually about something else. Pretending, most perniciously of all, that liberals said something to provoke them, that we can stay safe by staying quiet, by not setting them off. 

At this point it may be too late. I don’t know. But let’s at least stop pretending. I promise you; you’ll feel better for facing the world as it really is. 

Featured image is Drinking Alone, by atmtx

This post is the second in a series. Read part one here.

“From a mathematics and trajectory standpoint and with a certain kind of technology, there’s not too many different ways to go to Mars. It’s been pretty well figured out. You can adjust the decimal places here and there, but basically if you're talking about chemical rockets, there's a certain way you're going to go to Mars.” - John Aaron^[1]

Unlike the Moon, which hangs in the sky like a lonely grandparent waiting for someone to visit, Mars leads a rich orbital life of its own and is not always around to entertain the itinerant astronaut. There is just one brief window every 26 months when travel between our two planets is feasible, and this constraint of orbital mechanics is so fundamental that we’ve known since Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic what a mission to Mars must look like.^[2]

Using chemical rockets, there are just two classes of mission to choose from: (The durations I give here can vary, but are representative).

• Long Stay: Spend six months flying to Mars, stay for 17 months, spend six months flying back (~1000 days total). This is sometimes called a conjunction class mission. This profile trades a simple out-and-back trajectory for a long stay time at Mars.
• Short Stay: Spend six months flying to Mars, stay for 30-90 days, spend 400 days flying back (~650 days total). This is also called an opposition class mission. This profile trades a short Martian stay time for a long and frankly terrifying trip home through the inner solar system.

Before comparing the merits of each, it’s worth stressing what they have in common—both are long, more than double the absolute record for space flight (438 days), five times longer than anyone has remained in space without resupply (128 days), and about ten times humanity’s accumulated time beyond low Earth orbit (82 days).^[3] It is this inconvenient length, more than any technical obstacle, that has kept us from going to Mars since rockets capable of making the trip first became available in the 1960's. ^[4]

And because this length is set by the relative motions of the planets, it’s resistant to attack by technology. You can build rockets that go faster, but unless you make Mars go faster, you’ll mostly end up trading transit time for longer stay times. Getting a round trip below the 500 day mark requires fundamental breakthroughs in either propulsion or refueling. ^[5]

Delta-v requirements for short stay missions of varying length (left) and a long-stay mission (orange line right) for comparison. Note the sharp jump at around 500 days. source.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that these constraints are so strong that we can say a lot about going to Mars without committing to any particular spacecraft or mission design. Just like animals that live in the sea are likely to have good hearing and a streamlined body shape, there are things that have to hold true for any Mars-bound spacecraft, just from the nature of the problem.

I. No escape, no rescue

A trip to Mars will be commital in a way that has no precedent in human space flight. The moon landings were designed so that any moment the crew could hit the red button and return expeditiously to Earth; engineers spent the brief windows of time when an abort was infeasible chain smoking and chewing on their slide rules. ^[6]

But within a few days of launch, a Mars-bound crew will have committed to spending years in space with no hope of resupply or rescue. If something goes wrong, the only alternative to completing the mission will be to divert into a long, looping orbit that gets the spacecraft home about two years after departure.^[7] And if they get stuck on Mars, astronauts will find themselves in a similar position to the early Antarctic explorers, able to communicate home by radio, but forced by unalterable cycles of nature to wait months or years for a rescue ship.

Delta-v in km/sec required to return to Earth in 50, 70, and 90 days from various points in a long-stay Mars mission. Values above 10 km/sec are not realistic at our current technology level. source

The effect of this no-abort condition is to make Mars mission design acutely risk-averse. You can think of flying to Mars like one of those art films where the director has to shoot the movie in a single take. Even if no scene is especially challenging, the requirement that everything go right sequentially, with no way to pause or reshoot, means that even small risks become unacceptable in the aggregate.

To get a feel for this effect, consider a toy model where we fly to Mars on a 30 month mission. Every month there is a 3% chance that a critical system on our spacecraft will fail, and once that happens, the spacecraft enters a degraded state, with a 5% chance every month that a subsequent failure kills the crew.

In this model, the probability that the crew gets home safely works out to 68%. But if we add an abort option that can get them home in six months, that probability jumps to 85%. And with a three month abort trajectory, the odds of safe return go up to 92%.

These odds are notional, but they demonstrate how big an effect the absence of abort options can have on safety.^[8]

This necessary risk aversion introduces a tension into any Mars program. What’s the point of spending a trillion dollars to send a crew if they’re going to cower inside their spacecraft? And yet since going outside is one of the most dangerous things you can do on Mars, early missions have to minimize it. The first visitors to Mars will have to land in the safest possible location and do almost nothing.

Risk is closely tied with the next issue, reliability.

II. Reliability

The closest thing humanity has built to a Mars-bound spacecraft is the International Space Station. But ‘reliable’ is not the first word that leaps to the lips of ISS engineers when they talk about their creation—not even the first printable word. Despite twenty years of effort, equipment on the station breaks constantly, and depends on a stream of replacement parts flown up from Earth.^[9]

A defective heat exchanger packaged for return to Earth from ISS in 2023

Going to Mars will require order of magnitude reliability improvements over the status quo. Systems on the spacecraft will need to work without breaking, or at least break in ways the crew can fix. If there’s an emergency, like a chemical leak or a fire, the crew must be able to live for years in whatever’s left of the ship. And the kind of glitches that made for funny stories in low Earth orbit (like a urine icicle blocking the Space Shuttle toilet) will be enough to kill a Mars-bound crew.

Complicating matters is that traditional reliability engineering practices don’t work in life support, where everything is interconnected, often through the bodies of the crew. Life support engineering is much more like keeping a marine aquarium than it is like building a rocket. It’s not easy to untangle cause from effect, the entire system evolves over time, and there’s a lot of “spooky action at a distance” between subsystems that were supposed to be unrelated.^[10] Indeed, failures in life support have a tendency to wander the spacecraft until they find the most irreplaceable thing to break.

Nor is it possible to brute-force things by filling the spacecraft with spare parts. The same systemic interactions that damage one component can eat through any number of replacements. The bedrock axiom of reliability engineering—that complex designs can be partitioned into isolated subsystems with independent failure rates—does not hold for regenerative life support.

The need for long and expensive test flights to validate life support introduces another kind of risk aversion, this time in the design phase. With prototypes needing to be flown for years in space, there will be pressure to freeze the life support design at whatever point it becomes barely adequate, and no amount of later innovation will make it onto the spacecraft.

This is a similar dynamic to one that afflicted the Space Shuttle, a groundbreaking initial design so expensive to modify that it froze the underlying technology at the prototype phase for thirty years. In that period we learned nothing about making better space planes, but burned through decades and billions of dollars patching up the first working prototype.

Such timorousness goes against the grain of a development strategy that proven spectacularly successful in recent years for SpaceX, an approach you could call “fly often and try everything”. With hardware to spare, SpaceX is not afraid to make wholesale changes between tests of its Starship rocket, relying on rapid iterations to advance the state of the art at an exhilarating pace.

But this Yosemite Sam approach to testing won’t work for Mars. It only takes a few hours for engineers to collect the data they need after a Starship launch, while test runs of Mars-bound systems will last for years. The inevitable outcome is a development program that looks an awful lot like NASA, with long periods of fussing and analysis punctuated by infrequent, hideously expensive test flights.

III. Autonomy

Autonomy is a concept alien to NASA, which has been micromanaging astronauts from the ground since the first Mercury astronaut had to beg controllers for permission to pee (the request went all the way up the reporting chain to Wernher Von Braun).

To this day, missions follow a test pilot paradigm where the crew works from detailed checklists prepared for them months or years in advance. On the space station, this takes the form of a graphical schedule creeping past a red vertical line on a laptop screen, with astronauts expected to keep pace with the moving colored boxes. Most routine work on the space station (like pumping water or managing waste heat) is relegated to specialized teams on the ground and is not even visible to the crew.

Alan Shepard aboard Freedom 7, explaining that he really has to go pretty bad.

But as a Mars-bound spacecraft gets further from Earth, the round-trip communications delay with ground control will build to a maximum of 43 minutes, culminating in a week or more of communications blackout when the Sun is directly between the two planets. This physical constraint means that the crew has to have full control over every system on the spacecraft, without help from the ground.

Autonomy sounds like a good thing! Who wants government bean-counters deciding how astronauts spend their space time? But the ground-driven paradigm has its advantages, most notably in limiting workload. The ISS is run by a staff of hundreds who together send some 50,000 commands per day to the station. The seven astronauts on board are only called in as a last resort, and even so the demands on their time are so great that the station has struggled to perform its scientific mission.^[11]

One benefit of NASA’s backseat driving has always been that in an emergency, the crew has access to unlimited real-time expert help on Earth. The starkest illustration of this came on Apollo 13, when an oxygen tank in the service module ruptured 56 hours into the flight. It took the crew and mission controllers nearly an hour to get their bearings, at which point there was only a short window of time left to power down the spacecraft in a way that would preserve their ability to return to Earth.

A transcript of that first hour shows how difficult it was for crew and ground to figure out what was happening, and prioritize their response. It casts no aspersions on the crew of Apollo 13 to say they could not have survived a Mars-like communications delay.

And while this mission is the most famous example of ground controllers backstopping an Apollo crew, there were at least five more occasions in the Apollo program when timely help from the ground averted serious trouble:

• Apollo 12 was hit twice by lightning after launch, scrambling the electrical system and lighting up the command module with warning lights. Flight controller John Aaron recognized the baffling error pattern and passed into NASA legend by telling the crew to flip an obscure switch that restored sanity to their displays.
• On Apollo 14, the descent radar on the lunar module failed to lock on properly, returning spurious range data. Without a timely call from ground control (who told the pilot to reset a breaker), the problem would likely have led to an aborted landing.
• On Apollo 15, the crew struggled to contain a water leak that threatened to become serious. After fifteen minutes, engineers on the ground were able to trace the problem to a pre-launch incident with a chlorination valve and relay up a procedure that solved the problem.
• Also on Apollo 15, a sliver of loose metal floating in a switch caused an intermittent abort signal to be sent to the lunar module engine. Suppressing the signal so the lunar module could descend safely required reprogramming the onboard computer in a procedure guaranteed to raise the hairs on the head of every modern software developer.
• On Apollo 16, a pair of servo motors on the service module failed in lunar orbit. Mission rules called for an abort, but after some interactive debugging with the command module pilot, ground controllers found a workaround they judged safe enough to continue with the landing.

While these incidents stand out, Apollo transcripts reveal numberless other examples of crew and ground working closely to get on top of problems. The loss of this real-time help is a real risk magnifier for astronauts going to Mars.

IV. Analysis

Another way in which the ISS depends on Earth is for laboratory analysis of air and water samples, which are collected on a regular schedule and sent down with each returning capsule. The tests that can be performed on the station itself are rudimentary, alerting crew to the presence of microbes or contaminants, but without the detailed information necessary to trace a root cause.

For Mars, this analytic capability will have to move into the spacecraft. In essence, this means building a kind of Space Theranos, an automated black box that can perform biochemical assays in space without requiring repair or calibration. Such an instrument doesn’t exist anywhere, but a Mars mission requires two flavors of it—one that works in zero G, and another for Martian gravity.^[12]

This black box belongs to a category of hardware that pops up a lot in Mars plans: technologies that would be multibillion dollar industries if they existed on Earth, but are assumed to be easy enough to invent when the time comes to put them on a Mars-bound spacecraft. ^[13]

Some Mars boosters even cite these technologies as examples of the benefits going to Mars will bring to humanity. But this gets things exactly backwards—problems that are hard on Earth don’t get easier by firing them into space, and the fact that nonexistent technologies are on the critical path to Mars is not an argument for going there.

V. Automation

The requirement that the crew be able to handle the ship when some members are incapacitated and there is no communication with Earth means that an ISS-size workload has to be automated to the point where it can be run by two or three astronauts.

Astronaut Alexander Gerst (right) interacting with CIMON, NASA's $6 million AI chatbot

Automation means software, and lots of it. To automate the systems on a Mars-bound spacecraft will be a monumental task, like trying to extend the autopilot on an airliner to make it run the airport concession stands, baggage claim, and airline pension plan. The likely outcome is an ISS-like hotchpotch of software tested to different levels of rigor, running across hundreds of processors. But this hardware will be exposed to a far harsher radiation environment than systems on the ISS, making software design and integration a particular challenge.

A special case of the automation problem comes up on long-stay missions, when the orbiting spacecraft has to keep itself free of mold, fungus, and space raccoons for the year and a half that the crew are on the Martian surface. Anyone who owns a vacation home knows that this problem—called “quiescence” in the Mars literature—is already hard to solve on Earth.

Unless carefully managed, the interplay between automation, complexity and reliability can enter a pathological spiral. Adding software to a system makes it more complex. To stay reliable, complex systems have to degrade gracefully, so that the whole continues to function even if an individual component fails. But these degraded modes, as well as unexpected interactions between them, introduce their own complexity, which then has to be managed with software, and so on.

The upshot is that automation introduces its own, separate reason for running full-length mock missions before actually going to Mars. There will be too many bugs in a system this complex to leave them all for the first Mars-bound crew to discover.

Implications

The extreme requirements for autonomy, reliability, and automation I’ve outlined are old news to designers of deep-space probes. The solar system is full of hardware beeping serenely away decades after launch, most spectacularly the forty-six-year-old Voyager spacecraft.

But no one has ever tried attaching a box of large primates to a deep space probe with the goal of keeping them alive, happy, and not tweeting about how NASA sent them into the vast empty spaces to die. A Mars-bound spacecraft will be the most complicated human artifact ever built, about a hundred times bigger than any previous space probe, and inside it will be a tightly-coupled system of software, hardware, bacteria, fungi, astronauts, and (for half the mission) whatever stuff the crew tracks with them back onto the spacecraft.

Designing such a machine means taking something at the ragged edge of human ability (building interplanetary probes) and combining it with something that we can’t even do yet on Earth (keep a group of six or eight humans alive for years with regenerative life support).^[14]

My argument is not that it is impossible to do this, but that it is impossible to do it quickly. Preparing for Mars will be an iterative, open-ended undertaking in which every round of testing eats up years of time and most of our space budget, like Artemis and the ISS before it. The first decade of a Mars program will be indistinguishable from the last forty years of space flight—a series of repetitive, long-duration missions to orbit. The only thing NASA will need to change is the program name.

Nor is this a problem that can be delegated to billionaire hobbyists. Life support is going to be a grind no matter whose logo is on the rocket. The sky could be thick with Starships and we’d still be stuck doing all-up trials of hardware and software on these multi-year missions to nowhere.

The only way to explore Mars in our lifetime is to ditch the requirement that people accompany the machinery.

Choosing a profile

But since we’re determined to go to Mars, and have two profiles to choose from, which one is better?

Everyone agrees that only the long-stay profile makes sense for exploration. There’s no point in spending 95% of the trip in transit just to get a rushed couple of weeks at the destination.

But on early missions, where the goal is just to get the crew home alive, the choice is tricky.

Long Stay

The virtue of the long stay profile is simplicity. You fly your rocket to Mars, wait 17 months for the planets to align, and then fly the same trajectory home. Each leg of this transfer journey lasts about as long as an ISS deployment, and it’s possible to tweak the transfer time by burning more fuel (although the crew then has to stay longer on Mars to compensate).

At every point in the mission, the ship remains between 1 AU and 1.5 AU from the Sun. This simplifies thermal and solar panel design and greatly reduces the risk to the crew from solar storms.

But the problem of what to do with all that time on Mars is vexing. 500 days is a long time for a first stay anywhere, even someplace with nightlife and an atmosphere. And as we’ll see, an orbital mission is probably out of the question. The requirement that the crew go live on Mars on their first visit adds enormously to the level of risk.

Short Stay

The appeal of the short stay profile is right in the name. Instead of staying on Mars so long they have to file taxes, the first arrivals can plant the flag, grab whatever rock is nearest the ladder, and get the hell out of there. Or they can choose to skip the landing and make the first trip strictly orbital, following a tradition in aerospace engineering of attempting the impossible sequentially instead of all at once.

But the problem with the short stay profile is that trip home. The return trajectory cuts well inside the orbit of Venus, complicating the design of the spacecraft and adding spectacular ways for the crew to die during the weeks near perihelion. For most of that journey, the ship is on the wrong side of the Sun, hampering communications with Earth while leaving the crew with no warning of solar storms.

And that crew has to spend two consecutive years in deep space, maximizing their exposure to radiation and microgravity, the biggest known risks to astronaut health.

The short stay profile also requires more propellant, in some years a prohibitive amount. If your strategy for mitigating risk on Mars is to launch crews during every synodic period, so that there are always potential rescuers en route to Mars, then this is a problem. 

A diagram comparing the delta-v requirements for short stay and long stay missions across future launch dates. Since propellant requirements go up exponentially with delta v, a mission in 2041 requires five times as much propellant as one in 2033. source“

Orbit or Land?

Once you’ve picked a profile, the other decision to make is whether to land the spacecraft.

Obviously you have to land a crew at some point; if you don’t, the other space programs will make fun of you, and there will be hurtful zingers at your Congressional hearing.

But since surviving a trip to Mars requires tackling a sequence of unrelated problems (arrival, entry, landing, surface operations, ascent, rendezvous), there is a case for cutting the problem in half by making the first mission orbital. This was the approach taken by the Apollo program, which looped the first crew around the Moon before a working lunar lander existed.

Not having to carry a lander on the first mission means more room for spare parts and consumables, which improves the margin of safety for the crew. It also buys time for engineers to work on the hard problems of entry, landing, quiescence, and ascent without holding back the entire program.

But there are powerful arguments against an orbital mission. Since so much of the risk in going to Mars is a simple function of time, why roll the dice more than necessary? And given the expense and physical toll on crew, how do you justify not attempting a landing? Imagine driving to Disneyland, turning the car around in the parking lot, and announcing to your family that you’re now ready for the real trip next year. There will be angry kicking from the backseat, and mutiny.

NASA has waffled for years over which option to choose. In the 2009 design reference architecture, they favored sending a crew of four on the long stay trajectory. Their more recent plans envision a shoestring mission on a short-stay profile with four crew members, two of whom attempt a landing.

Elon Musk, for his part, has proposed solving the problem in stages, sending volunteers to settle Mars first, then figuring out how to get them home later.^[15]

What makes the choice genuinely hard is that we lack answers to two key questions:

1. How does the human body respond to partial gravity?

Decades in space have given us a good idea of what prolonged periods in free-fall do to astronauts, and how they recover after returning to Earth. But we have no idea what happens in partial gravity, either on the Moon (0.16 g) or on Mars (0.38 g). In particular, we don’t know whether Martian gravity is strong enough to arrest or slow the degenerative processes that we observe in free fall.^[16]

The answer to this question will drive a key decision: whether or not to spin the spacecraft. As we’ll see, spinning a spacecraft to create artificial gravity is an enormous hassle, but whether it’s avoidable depends on the unstudied effects of long stays in partial gravity.^[17]

2. What is the risk to the crew from the heavy-ion component of galactic cosmic radiation?

Radiation in space comes in many varieties, most of which are well-understood from experience with their analogues on Earth.

Low-dose heavy-ion radiation, however, is different. It doesn’t exist outside of particle accelerators on Earth and is hard to study in low orbit, where both the magnetosphere and the bulk of our planet shield astronauts from most of the flux they’d experience in free space.

Heavy ion radiation has biological effects that are not captured by the standard model of radiation damage to tissue. In particular, there is a class of phenomena called non-targeted effects (NTEs) that are known to damage cells far from the radiation track. This is a weird effect, like if found yourself hospitalized because your neighbor got hit by a car. It’s believed that NTEs disrupt epigenetic signaling mechanisms in cells, but the phenomenon is poorly understood.

Uncertainty about the effects of low-dose heavy ion radiation widens our best guess at radiation risk by at least a factor of two.^[18] At the low end of the range, these effects are just a curiosity, and Mars missions can be planned using traditional models of radiation exposure. At the high end of the range, long-duration orbital missions may not be survivable, and astronauts on the Martian surface will either have to live in a cave or cover their shelter with meters of soil.

Prediction of tumor prevalence after 1 year of galactic cosmic radiation exposure. The solid line at bottom shows the standard radiation model (TE). The dotted lines show the influence of non-targeted effects (NTE) under different assumptions. Note the nearly threefold uncertainty in predicted tumor prevalence in the unshielded case. source

This uncertainty about biological effects makes radiation the greatest uncharacterized known risk facing a Mars-bound crew, and it affects every aspect of mission design.

It’s helpful to combine the three main risk factors in going to Mars into one big chart: 

The gray areas in these grids represent knowledge gaps that have to be filled before we decide how to go to Mars.

How long this preliminary medical research would take is anyone’s guess, but it has to be some multiple of the total mission time. Studying partial gravity in particular is tricky—you can do it on the Moon (42% of martian gravity) and hope the results extend to Mars, or you can build rotating structures in space and do more precise tests there.

Studying radiation effects means flying animals outside the magnetosphere for a few years and then watching them for tumors, which (unless the radiation news is really bad) is also going to take some time.

In software engineering we have a useful concept called “yak shaving”. To get started on a project you must first prepare your tools, which often involves reconfiguring your programming environment, which may mean updating software, which requires finding a long-disused password, and pretty soon you find yourself under the office chair with a hex wrench. (The TV show Malcolm in the Middle has a beautiful illustration of yak shaving in the context of home repair.)

The same phenomenon afflicts us in trying to go to Mars. It would be one thing if, given enough rockets and money, explorers could climb on a spaceship and go. But there is always this chain of necessary prerequisites. We paint Destination: Mars! on the side of our spaceship and then find ourselves in low Earth orbit a decade later, centrifuging mice. It’s dispiriting.

It’s tempting to say “you can just build things” and dismiss all this research and testing as timid and unnecessary. But this would mean ignoring the biggest risk factor for Mars, which I’ll include here for the sake of completeness.

A trip to Mars is so difficult that we don’t have the luxury of ignoring known risks—we need all the room we can spare in our risk budget for the things we don’t know to worry about yet.

My goal in all this is not to kill a cherished dream, but to try to push people to a more realistic view of what it means to commit to a Mars landing, and in particular to think about going to Mars in terms of opportunity costs.

In recent years, there’s been a remarkable division in space exploration. On one side of the divide are missions like Curiosity, James Webb, Gaia, or Euclid that are making new discoveries by the day. These projects have clearly defined goals and a formidable record of discovery.

On the other side, there is the International Space Station and the now twenty-year old effort to return Americans to the moon. These projects have no purpose other than perpetuating a human presence in space, and they eat through half the country’s space budget with nothing to show for it. Forget even Mars—we are further from landing on the Moon today than we were in 1965.

In going to Mars, we have a choice about which side of this ledger to be on. We can go aggressively explore the planet with robots, benefiting from an ongoing revolution in automation and software to launch ever more capable missions to the places most likely to harbor life.

Or we can stay on the treadmill we’ve been on for forty years, slowly building up the capacity to land human beings on the safest possible piece of Martian real estate, where they will leave behind a plaque and a flag. But we can’t do both.

Next time: Eyes and Bones

Footnotes

[1] Quote taken from a 2000 oral history with Aaron.

[2] For an early example, see the 1928 Scientific American article, “Can we go to Mars?”, While understandably hand-wavy about the means of propulsion, it describes a conjunction-class orbital mission not substantially different from NASA’s 2009 Design Reference Architecture.

[3] Valerii Polyakov set the 437 day record on a space flight that landed in 1995. The International Space Station went without resupply from Nov 25, 2002 to April 2, 2003. Nine Apollo missions went beyond low Earth orbit, the longest of these (Apollo 17) was gone 12.4 days.

[4] The Saturn V was capable of launching about 20 tons on a Mars flyby trajectory. NASA undertook preliminary planning for such a mission (requiring four Saturn V launches) in 1967.

[5] In 1987 a team chaired by Sally Ride proposed a ‘split/sprint’ mission architecture that is probably the best way to get to Mars. In this architecture, slow-moving tankers pre-position cryogenic propellant depots in Mars orbit, and then in the next synodic period a human mission (the “sprint” part of the mission) lands briefly on Mars, refuels from the orbiting depots, and get home within 400 days. Such a mission requires about 15 heavy launches and two nonexistent technologies: long-term storage of liquid hydrogen in space, and the ability to pump liquid hydrogen between spacecraft in space. (Interestingly, both of these technologies are part of Blue Origin's plan to build a moon lander).

The other way to get to Mars fast is with nuclear thermal rockets. A nuclear thermal rocket is just a nuclear reactor that shoots hot hydrogen out one end. Nuclear thermal rocket designs are about twice as efficient as chemical rockets, making it feasible to fly missions with higher delta V requirements.

[6] For a comprehensive discussion of Apollo abort modes, see 1972 Apollo Experience Report - Abort Planning.

[7] You can read about possible Mars abort modes in Earth to mars Abort Analysis for Human Mars Missions. What kind of a failure scenario would even benefit from a two-year abort option is an interesting philosophical question.

[8] I wrote a little python script if you want to play with these scenarios yourself.

[9] Life support equipment on ISS is packaged into components called ‘Orbital Replacement Units’. In some cases, this means that an assembly weighing hundreds of kilograms has to be flown up because a tiny sensor within it failed.

Here's a partial list of ORUs replaced in calendar year 2023 (source):

• Heat exchanger in Node 3
• Common cabin air assembly water separator
• Node 3 water separator
• Common cabin air assembly water separator liquid check valve
• 21 charcoal filters stationwide
• HEPA filters in Node 3
• Blower in carbon dioxide removal assembly (twice, first replacement failed)
• Sample Distribution Assembly in Node 3
• Mass Spectrometer assembly
• Multifiltration bed
• Pump in oxygen generation assembly

[10] An early urine reprocessor on the space station failed after it got clogged up by calcium crystals from the astronauts' dissolving bones, an effect of weightlessness that wasn't properly accounted for in the design.

[11] The 50,000 command figure is from The ISS: Operating an Outpost in the New Frontier, a detailed primer on space station operations. ISS utilization has gone up in recent years, but still remains below 80 hours/week—two full-time equivalents. The seven-member crew spends most of their waking time on mandatory exercise, housekeeping, and station repair.

[12] Existing instruments in space are usually set up to identify chemicals on a target list of 10-20 substances, a much easier task than identifying arbitrary compounds.

For the state of the art on the latter, see Progress on the Organic and Inorganic Modules of the Spacecraft Water Impurity Monitor, a Next Generation Complete Water Analysis System for Crewed Vehicles (ICES-2023-110).

[13] Other examples of magic Mars technology include leakless seals for spacesuits, waterless washing machines, biofilm-proof coatings, nutritionally complete meals that can be stored for years at room temperature, and autonomous solar-powered factories for turning CO2 into hundreds of tons of methane.

[14] The endurance record for closed-system life support belongs to Biosphere 2, which kept a crew alive for 17 months before oxygen fell to dangerous levels because of unanticipated interactions with building materials.

[15] Plans involving Starship and Mars depend on being able to produce hundreds of tons of propellant on the Martian surface so the rockets can launch again. In the absence of any details from Musk or SpaceX, the closest thing we have to a detailed plan is this analysis in Nature.

[16] For all we know, the set of problems collectively called "deconditioning" could get worse in partial gravity. This goes against our intuitions, but there have been bigger surprises in space.

[17] Another decision that hinges on the effects of partial gravity is whether or not to include heavy exercise equipment on the Mars surface habitat, where space and mass are at a premium.

Before John Belushi, before Bill Murray or Chevy Chase or Dan Aykroyd—before any of them, there was Gilda.

Gilda Radner was the first performer Lorne Michaels hired for the cast of Saturday Night Live when it launched, in 1975. She was, at the time, one of the stars of The National Lampoon Radio Hour, the only woman in a cast of men destined to be famous. “I knew that she could do almost anything, and that she was enormously likeable,” Michaels once said of the decision. “So I started with her.”

Television audiences immediately fell in love with Radner. How could they not? She was magnetic. She sparkled with a kind of anything’s-possible energy, and stole every scene she was in. She made everything hilarious, and more daring. That was Radner—the tiny woman with the gigantic hair having more fun than everybody around her.

Radner’s charm was so off the charts that practically every character of hers wound up with a beloved catchphrase. There was the bespectacled nerd Lisa Loopner (“So funny I forgot to laugh!”); the poof-haired newscaster Roseanne Roseannadanna (“It just goes to show, it’s always something.”); and the little old lady Emily Litella (“Never mind.”). A typical Litella rant on “Weekend Update” went like this: “What’s all this fuss I keep hearing about violins on television! Why don’t parents want their children to see violins on television! … I say there should be more violins on television!” Chevy Chase eventually leans over and corrects her: Violence, not violins. Litella, sheepish: “Never mind.” Radner based Litella on her own childhood nanny. And the portrayal, like everything she did, was shot through with love.

Radner also appeared in the now-classic “Extremely Stupid” sketch, which became one of the earliest examples of actors breaking—that is, breaking character and cracking up on live television—in SNL history after the guest host, Candice Bergen, flubbed a line. Radner used the moment to great comedic effect, turning directly to the camera to exaggerate the impeccable delivery of her own lines, while Bergen dissolved into laughter beside her.

Almost every comic who came after Radner—and certainly the ones who wound up on Saturday Night Live—counts her as a formative influence. You can see Radner in the rag-doll chaos of Molly Shannon’s character Mary Katherine Gallagher; in the total commitment to the bit of Adam Sandler’s singsong gibberish; in the weird imagination of Kristen Wiig’s universe of absurd characters (the mischievous Gilly and the tiny-handed Dooneese both come to mind); and in the master-class physical comedy of Melissa McCarthy.

Radner herself was always drawn to classic physical comedy—among her idols were Charlie Chaplin, Lucille Ball, anyone who was, in her words, “willing to risk it.” So it made sense that Radner parodied Ball—and the legendary chocolate-factory episode of I Love Lucy—in a sketch, alongside Aykroyd, that had her juggling nuclear warheads coming down a conveyor belt. Then there was Radner’s wordless dance routine with Steve Martin—in which the pair toggles between all-out slapstick and total earnestness—that remains a higher form of comedy, even 50 years later. Radner’s particular charisma came from this blend of bigheartedness and fearlessness. She always went for it. “There was just an abandon she had that was unmatched,” Martin has said. She’d keep going until she got the laugh, however far that took her. And she could make fun without being mean-spirited. (See: her impressions of Barbara Walters as “Baba Wawa” and Patti Smith as “Candy Slice.”)

In 1979, Radner gave the commencement speech—fully in character as Roseanne Roseannadanna—to the graduating class at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, part of which wound up on her comedy album Gilda Radner: Live From New York, released that same year. And while the delivery is pure Roseannadanna, listening to it today is also a reminder of the trail Radner herself blazed, along with SNL cast members Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman, as women in comedy in the 1970s. “Imagine, if you will, an idealistic young Roseanne Roseannadanna, fresh out of the Columbia School of Broadcasting, looking for a job in journalism,” Radner-as-Roseannadanna says. “I filled out applications, I went out for interviews, and they allll told me the same thing: You’re overqualified, you’re underqualified, don’t call us, we’ll call you, it’s a jungle out there, a woman’s place is in the home, have a nice day, drop dead, goodbye. But I didn’t give up.” Radner didn’t give up either. But her sense of purpose wasn’t about proving a point or being a feminist, but something even more straightforward. If she wanted something, she went for it. Why wouldn’t she?

Radner was famously boy-crazy. (She used to joke that she couldn’t bring herself to watch Ghostbusters because it starred all of her ex-boyfriends.) She had on-again, off-again romances with Martin Short and Bill Murray (and that was after she’d dated Murray’s brother), among others. In her own telling of her eventual marriage to the great Gene Wilder, the two wound up together only because she pursued him so relentlessly. She knew from the minute she saw him that she wanted to be with him forever. He did not share this view, not initially. An interviewer once asked Wilder if it had been love at first sight. “No, not at all,” Wilder said. “If anything, the opposite. I said, How do I get rid of this girl?”

He would come around. “If I had to compare her to something I would say to a firefly, in the summer, at night,” Wilder recalled. “When you see a sudden flash of light, it’s flying by, and then it stops. And then light. And stops. She was like that.” What Wilder meant, in part, was that Radner could have the highest of highs but also the lowest of lows. In moments of lightness, the whole world was illuminated, and everything in sight seemed to bend in her direction. But other times she was anxious and sad. She grieved the death of her father, who died of cancer when she was a teenager, her whole life. She described herself as highly neurotic. She had had eating disorders more or less since she was 10 years old. And she suffered in other ways, too. She never got to be a mother, which she’d desperately wanted. And while she brought untold joy to millions of people, her short life ended tragically. At one point, toward the end, she looked back on the early SNL years and marveled. “We thought we were immortal, at least for five years,” she wrote in her memoir. “But that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Wilder and Radner were married for only five years before she died, at 42, of ovarian cancer. And today, she is remembered as much for the unfairness of her young death—like Belushi before her and Chris Farley after her—as she is for her originality and spectacular talent. In a gentler world, all three of them would still be with us. Radner and Belushi would be in their 70s, Farley in his 60s. In a gentler world, Radner could have had all the babies she wished for, made all the movies she never got to, and would still be making people laugh. When I think about Radner now, what I think about most is the way she lived, and how that ought to be a lesson to the rest of us. She had a sense of total urgency, and a willingness to do the things that terrified her. Somehow, she made it look easy. “I don’t know why I’m doing it,” she once said in an interview, about why she’d chosen to take her act to Broadway, “except that for some reason I’ve chosen to scare myself to death.”

That was Gilda Radner. Gilda, who as a child once overheard her mother saying, “Gilda could sell ice cubes in winter,” and so set up a little stand outside to do just that. Gilda, who loved work so much that she’d get impatient on the way to NBC Studios and ask her taxi drivers to speed up already. Gilda, who fell in love easily and often, and wasn’t afraid to be weird, or look ridiculous. Gilda, who could make anything funny. But her real legacy, it turns out, is something much more profound than her comedy. This is the lesson of Gilda Radner’s too-short life: For God’s sake, don’t bother with fear. Just go for the thing you want, with your whole heart. Each of us gets only so much time on this planet, and none of us knows for how long. Life can be terrible this way, and sad, and it isn’t fair at all. But it is funny, anyway. Really, really funny.

There is something puzzling about software development. It doesn’t work like many tasks, it doesn’t break down the same way. It feels strangely personal, like there’s a connection between the code and the coder, or else it goes brittle.

Today I learned a word for this!

Ursula Franklin was a physicist, among other things, and she has real thoughts about technology. First, she speaks about technology as practice, not as objects. Technology is how we do things; the material objects that we use are necessary details. Second, she makes some distinctions between kinds of technologies. One of them clears up my puzzle about software development.

Franklin divides technologies into holistic and prescriptive. Holistic technologies put decision-making near the work; prescriptive ones remove control to supervisory levels.

“Holistic technologies are normally associated with the notion of craft.” Potters, cooks, woodworkers — even when the output looks the same for several iterations, the process of getting there includes feeling into this particular material. There is an interaction between the medium and the crafter, a shaping. Each person leaves their mark. When people work together, “the way in which they work together leaves the individual worker in control of a particular process of creating or doing something.”

Prescriptive technologies break production down into well-specified steps that can be executed by separate groups. Assembly lines, Taylorism, standardized procedures. Each step is designed to fit into the others. This determination happens higher in the org chart. The work and the decisions are separated. This technology makes the work controllable, scalable, in theory legible, predictable.

Software itself is the most prescriptive technology ever! It does the same thing over and over in as many copies as we choose.

Software development is wonderfully holistic. It needs one mind understanding it, implementing it, integrating it, operating it. (For resilience, that mind is best embodied by a team of several developers working closely.) When you try to partition the work (gather requirements, design, implement, test, operate), projects fail. The understanding between the steps is too thick. I need all the context of learning what is needed and where, and then I can implement it, and then look at it, and show it to you, and then we get it right and then we run it in production and keep grooming it through change.

“Any tasks that require immediate feedback and adjustment are best done holistically.” Software does need that. We never know what “good” is until we try things.

“Such tasks cannot be planned, coordinated, and controlled the way prescriptive tasks must be.” This is why managing software teams is a different task than managing industrial production. Software managers are support staff, because developers are doing holistic work, so that the software can do incredibly prescriptive work.

This is my new favorite adjective for our work. Software development is holistic.