Astrophysicist Adam Frank suggested last Saturday during an appearance on the "Lex Fridman Podcast" that one day, millions or billions of humans will inhabit the galaxy and that conflicts would be interplanetary.
"If we settle Mars, it will very quickly want to become its own nation," Frank said, responding to a question from Fridman regarding relations between Earth and Mars mirroring those of nations on Earth today.
"Well, no, there's already going to be nations on Mars — that's guaranteed," Fridman pushed back. "Once you have a million people, there's going to be two tribes and then they're going to start fighting. Right? And the question is interplanetary fighting — how quickly does that happen and does it have a different nature to it because of the distances?"
"Are you a fan of 'The Expanse?'" Frank asked, segueing to a thought experiment. "It's all about the settled solar system."
"It takes place about 300 years from now," he added, "and the entire solar system is settled. And it is the best show about interplanetary politics." The show, Frank continued, is a series dramatizing political and social tensions in a future where humanity has spread across planets and the asteroid belt.
"I think human beings being human beings, yes, there will be warfare and there will be conflict. And I don't think it'll be necessarily all that different, you know, because really I think within a few hundred years we will have lots of people in the solar system, and it doesn't even have to be on Mars."
Frank described that in "The Expanse," people live in hollowed-out asteroids. But what the science shows, he said, is that it's not possible.
"If you tried to spin it up to the speeds you need to get one-third gravity, which is, I think, the minimum you need for human beings, the rock would just fall apart, it would break."
However, he noted, "we came up with another idea, which was that if you take small asteroids, put a giant bag around them, a nanofiber bag, and spin those up, it would inflate the bag, and then even a small, couple-of-kilometer-wide asteroid would expand out to —you could get like a Manhattan's worth of material inside. So forget about even colonizing Mars — space stations, right? Or space habitats with millions of people in them. So anyway, the point is that I think, you know, within a few hundred years, it is not unimaginable that there will be millions, if not billions, of people living in the solar system."
Nick Koutsobinas ✉
Nick Koutsobinas, a Newsmax writer, has years of news reporting experience. A graduate from Missouri State University’s philosophy program, he focuses on exposing corruption and censorship.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.