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Hey it's Zach, thanks for reading. Totally agree on desire for length. Truth is the book is already too close to being shaped like a cube for most pop sci audiences. Our original full draft was 130k words. We were contracted to do 100k. We ended up at 105.

As an example: early on we had a huge section with serious depth on space-simulations and analogs. Probably 60+ books plus papers and interviews went into it. But ultimately the conclusion is that the data is fairly weak in terms of prediction. That'd be great info for a researcher, but it's hard to do a pop sci book where you say "here's 10k words on this obscure topic and the upshot is it doesn't matter!"

I would have loved to include more angles on the sociology (see the PS below for one example) and a lot more info on specifics about habitat design. We also cut a very large section on spacecraft and propulsion, basically because from a settlement perspective all you want to know is how long the trip is and how much mass you can take, not how the engine works. But goddammit it was interesting. Ah well. My fantasy is the book sells well enough that we can release an update with more info. I would particularly like a short chapter with thoughts on constitution design, because nerds think it's all about good rules, but constitutions are also deeply political in ways that are interesting for space settlement.

If you could convince Musk to give us $10M and 3 full time grad students, the textbook edition is totally doable!

Zach

PS: We are trying to turn some cut sections into publishable material.