6 ms·

A roadmap to an industrially self-sufficient Mars base in the minimum time

62 points by robbiep 9y ago

phreeza 9y ago
How would such a settlement meets its energy needs? How do you bootstrap an industrial civilisation without fossil fuels? My guess would be that the time to amortise a solar cell is quite long because of the distance from the sun, and wind is also not very viable because of the thin atmosphere. So that really only leaves nuclear?
- fenaer 9y ago
  From the article: "Copious and reliable electrical power will be required on Mars, provided most likely by a nuclear fission plant(s) or solar, but is beyond the scope of this discussion."
  - phreeza 9y ago
    Ha thanks. I searched for "energy" to make sure I hadn't missed it, but forgot to check for "power" :-D
  - masklinn 9y ago
    Problems are defined as beyond the scope of this discussion, therefore this plan has no problems.
- joshvm 9y ago
  Nuclear RTGs are a reasonable solution for power generation in the kW range if you could have a bank of them. The benefits are that they're not particularly radioactive (when enclosed) and they also generate copious amounts of heat as a byproduct. I think one is used in the Martian? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
  - phreeza 9y ago
    Sure, but I think if we are talking about 10^6 people as the article does, the energy needs will be on the order of several GW at least...
    - joshvm 9y ago
      The main thing I'm thinking about is robustness and lack of maintenance. One advantage of RTGs is that you could distribute power wherever it's needed. RTGs are essentially maintenance free (decades) over the lifetime of the fuel. There are suitcase-sized power plants that NASA have proposed, but I have no idea how feasible they are - or what the maintenance requirements are. I've not been able to find any actual papers on the subject, just the usual gushing science press. Safety seems to be OK, but these are incredibly complicated systems requiring liquid metal cooling (for a start).
  - Pinckney 9y ago
    I don't know why you would use an RTG instead of conventional fission reactors.
    - phreeza 9y ago
      Yea, each A4W reactor on a Nimitz class aircraft carrier can produce on the order of 100MW electricity, and the fuel rods last about 25 years. So if you can scale those down sufficiently (maybe use in situ materials for shielding?), getting to the GW range doesn't seem as far off as I had initially suspected.
- mrfusion 9y ago
  Solar works fine. That's probably the first product they should become self sufficient making.
  - baq 9y ago
    And batteries, or more generally energy storage.
  - troymc 9y ago
    Mars is about 1.5 AUs from the Sun, so light intensity (and solar power) is about (1/1.5)^2 = 44% that of Earth. That doesn't rule out solar power, but it does make alternatives relatively more appealing. One partial source might be the burning of biomass (e.g. potato leaves and, um, other things).
    - zardo 9y ago
      That compares solar panels in orbit around Mars and Earth. How much do we lose on Earth with our thick atmosphere, ozone layer, and clouds? I don't think burning anything for energy is going to be an option. Oxygen isn't free.
ph0rque 9y ago
> Cuba, North Korea, Australia and Russia all have populations well over 10 million but are entirely dependent on trade to obtain advanced technology such as computers, aircraft, container ships, engines, cars, and so on. Sorry, but it's hard to take this author seriously when he thinks Russia doesn't manufacture "advanced technologies" such as "aircraft, container ships, engines, cars".
- grecy 9y ago
  Same for Australia. Though I will say the two car plants that design and build cars from the ground up are both closing.
  - phkahler 9y ago
    >> Though I will say the two car plants that design and build cars from the ground up are both closing. They wouldn't be if Australia was on Mars. This illustrates a point. Low shipping costs are what's killing those plants. High shipping costs are an issue for Mars. They'll have to make their own in almost every case.
  - robbiep 9y ago
    We can't rocket, semiconductor or aerospace
    - avmich 9y ago
      Australia used to be one of the world leaders in hypersonic flight research. That doesn't quite equate with Boeing/Airbus, or even Embraer/Bombardier, but suggests similar potential like with Russia.
    - manicdee 9y ago
      … because successive conservative governments have cut funding for science, education, and support of technology entrepreneurs. The current government is doubling down on efforts to drive the middle and lower class from education. Australia could absolutely have advanced industries like aerospace and semiconductor fabs if the regulatory environment wasn't directly hostile to those industries.
nabla9 9y ago
It's nice to see economic considerations. For many everyday things we must assume that Mars needs aerospace level reliability and safety. Typically it's assumed that there is at leas factor of ten increase when developing with aerospace standards. So multiply value of everything that can affect health with 10, including housing, fire alarms, ventilation and outdoor gear. It can't be assumed that settling Mars is preplanned. Every form of manufacturing and every process must constantly adapt and innovate to overcome the obstacles not seen beforehand. This takes lots of time and timelines will slow down. You can't just keep sending up robots in massive amounts. You need to send small batches and refine and constantly adapt them. This requires highly educated manpower. I's probably hard to find millions of people ready to sentence themselves into very low life standards and lower life expectancy once the hype wears off. There are lots of dreamers cheering who eventually balk or don't survive. How do you get millions of "right stuff" to live the life of constant maintenance. Maybe you need to have cult like sci-fi religion like Mormons :)
- fsloth 9y ago
  "Typically it's assumed that there is at leas factor of ten increase when developing with aerospace standards. " To my understanding Skunk Works developed e.g. the Blackbird from scratch with much better cost efficiency than a modern greenfield project would if they followed best practices written in stone. I think high quality engineering can be implemented with far less cost if the project allows for iterative development and efficient communication and ownership between stakeholders (e.g. the engineer and the machinist can figure things out on their own instead of rotating everythong through cost and quality control authorities). Ben Rich [0], an ex Skunkworks director laments at length of the inefficiency of bureaucratic style of product development - which is probably an outgrowth of the same phenomena that causes so many bullshit jobs. So, to my mind what things like F-35 cost and what are the intrinsic costs of proper, durable engineering are not entirely related. [0] Rich, Skunk works
  - nabla9 9y ago
    I'm not talking about developing experimental aircraft, I'm talking about manufacturing and maintaining safety critical equipment for everyday use. If you could order wide body jet without the attached standards, they would be able to build exact replica of the fleet with fraction of the cost. Same aluminum pieces with random quality inspections is much cheaper than every piece of aluminum checked and tested before installing, plus verifying that it's tested and inspected. Installing that piece would be cheaper if there would be no inspectors for every phase of work doubling or tripling the manpower. Just tightening a bolt is cheap. Tightening it the right amount, cheeking that it has been done correctly etc. are costly. Astronauts living in ISS periodically inspect every hatch and every safety critical device. Their days are filled with checklists. Things wear down and break and small undetected error can end life.
salesguy222 9y ago
Nuking Mars' polar ice caps is a good place to start. It will force greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, which will promote the raising of temperatures and formation of liquid water. Then maybe people will want to live there- the rest will be history :)
- sonium 9y ago
  The problem is really the lack of a magnetic field. Even if you manage to increase the atmospheric pressure, ionizing particles strip it away. What you would need to build is a superconducting ring on the equator to generate a artificial magnetic field. Unfortunatly the amount of material required with current superconducting materials (for a magnetic field compared to earth's) is several times the world-production and we don't even know how abundant the materials are on mars. But we can always hope for a breakthrough in super-conductance research.
  - mrfusion 9y ago
    This has been debunked many times. Even with no magnetic field an atmosphere can last thousands of years.
- BurningFrog 9y ago
  People already want to live there. A small minority, sure, but far more than we'll have capacity to send there for a very long time.
kyriakos 9y ago
For tldr the general idea is that we'll need self replicating robots to do the bulk of the work since transportation and human labour is extreme costly.
phkahler 9y ago
I said this before Elon got excited about tunnels. The people of mars will want to create usable space and the best way to do that will be tunnel boring machines. They'll need a way to reinforce and seal them, but with a boring machine they can have people constantly creating new living and working space with a minimum of materials. This will also provide some mining capability should there be any rock of value there. What will become currency? In other words, how can you use free markets to get people to provide work most efficiently? In software, OSS seems to be the most efficient development model but it lacks payment for the effort. Likewise once people are making stuff, it would be a waste of resources to have multiple competitors making similar things. I suspect not having patents is the quickest way to get efficient production in a low resource environment. A race to the bottom may be OK when everyone starts at the bottom. Lastly, It seems like a good idea for Mars to have a product or service that is extremely useful to the people of earth. This would allow them to exchange that for continuing shipments of materials they desperately need. An information service would seem to fit the bill, due to zero mass for shipping it back and few resources needed to create it. But what? Engineers could live and work on mars, but not enough to create a shortage of those services on Earth. Is there any use for the time delay inherent in transmission to Mars? For example, with HFT in the stock market, could a more "fair" system be built with transactions taking place on Mars where there is a large latency built into the system? Of course you'd have to keep locals on Mars from trading in that system. With our constant quest for higher speed an low latency it seems wrong to seek a solution that depends of guaranteed long latency. Something like that, of high value that is unique to the situation could go a long way toward preventing abandonment by Earth but I really don't know what that would be. I don't thing what it takes to build a minimum viable civilization on Mars will be determined until there is one.
- masklinn 9y ago
  > The people of mars will want to create usable space and the best way to do that will be tunnel boring machines. Tunnels are a great idea considering Mars has no atmosphere and ozone layer, but TBR strike me as completely overkill and out of proportion, you don't even remotely need >ø10m tunnels for a martian base of operation and should rather model after historical underground cities/shelters like Ouyi/Nushabad, Capadoccia's underground cities (Kaymakli, Derinkuyu) or various catacombs of the Old World.
spacecity1971 9y ago
Every analysis I've seen about the Mars settlement problem follows from the idea that we need to adapt the Martian environment to our needs. Perhaps it is ourselves that need to adapt. Synthetic bodies may be a better long term solution; isolate our nervous system in a compact support module, and connect it via neural interface to xeno-fit bodies.
- Coffeewine 9y ago
  The plot of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Plus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Plus !
  - spacecity1971 9y ago
    Ha! Parallel evolution of ideas never ceases to amaze me. Thanks (Have to find that book now).
Hasknewbie 9y ago
Honest question: assuming all the other technical/economical roadblocks could be solved, how are we supposed to colonize Mars on a long-term basis, as my understanding is that the gravity there will either kill or cause serious health issues for most of the population? If the low gravity makes peoples' fitness decay over a decade or two, parents can't raise their kids, and in fact kids can't develop either.
- jessriedel 9y ago
  What makes you think that 1/3 gravity has long-term health effects? Even zero-gravity health effects are manageable; they of course lead to temporary fragility when you return to full Earth gravity, but that's not really a key issue for a permanent Mars colony. Providing radiation shielding in an economical and psychologically benign way seems much more challenging.
  - Hasknewbie 9y ago
    Zero-gravity (and by extension low-gravity) health effects are manageable, but: for months (so far), and by military-grade athletes with the self-discipline to exercise every single day. This is quite different from: a whole population, and for many decades. The long-term health effects of low gravity are not a solved issue as far as I know: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-does-spending-prolong/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-does-spending... https://www.wired.com/2014/02/happens-body-mars/ https://www.wired.com/2014/02/happens-body-mars/ I asked about gravity and not the (many) other issues because we have at least some hints on how to handle say radiation shielding, however we have no idea how to change gravity if it does indeed prove to be a blocking point for permanent settlements.
    - jessriedel 9y ago
      First, I don't think the extension of ill-effects to low-gravity is obvious at all. (I.e., no reason to expect this is linear. The benefits of exercise on Earth have greatly diminishing returns, and I expect the same for gravity exposure.) Second, I don't see why we expect ill-effects to go from manageable to unmanageable with normal people. Astronauts on MIR weren't dropping dead before the started the rigorous exercise programs. By all means, file this under "possible, as-yet unquantified risk". It's certainly conceivable that there is some killer disease the crops up in 1/3 gravity if you don't exercise daily. But right now I don't think we have any data that's inconsistent with the reasonable first guess that normal people will be basically fine in 1/3 gravity. (This maybe just a question of what we mean by "basically". To me, a 10% lowering of life-expectancy is acceptable and expected when colonizing another planet. The trip itself will probably be a few percent chance of death.) On the other hand, we have fairly large, well-quantified risks for radiation exposure of long-term living on Mars, and we have no obvious way to solve it without huge concrete structures, underground tunneling, or as-yet-uninvented magnetic shields. EDIT: Actually, I retract my claim that this is a bigger worry than low gravity as I am no longer sure. The radiation exposure is less than I thought, and likely reduces life expectancy by less than 5%. https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/1_NAC_HEO_SMD_Committee_Mars_Radiation_Intro_2015April7_Final_TAGGED.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/1_NAC_HEO_SMD... http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0074988 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... http://www.space.com/18753-mars-radiation-manned-mission.html http://www.space.com/18753-mars-radiation-manned-mission.htm...
vivekd 9y ago
We may be taking the first steps to establishing a permanent undersea colonies 1. I'd like to see that happen before trying permanent outer space colonies. Establishing a permanent settlement in an area uninhabitable by humans seems like an incredible challenge that humanity has never attempted. It will likely have so many unforeseeable contingencies that are impossible to provide for before we actually try it. If we are going to try something like that, I'd much rather the first time be under the Ocean where there is a relatively easy out if we run into problems rather than in outer space where you're just stuck with no way out. 1. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29031512* http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29031512*

62 points by robbiep 9y ago

How would such a settlement meets its energy needs? How do you bootstrap an industrial civilisation without fossil fuels? My guess would be that the time to amortise a solar cell is quite long because of the distance from the sun, and wind is also not very viable because of the thin atmosphere. So that really only leaves nuclear?

fenaer 9y ago
From the article: "Copious and reliable electrical power will be required on Mars, provided most likely by a nuclear fission plant(s) or solar, but is beyond the scope of this discussion."
- phreeza 9y ago
  Ha thanks. I searched for "energy" to make sure I hadn't missed it, but forgot to check for "power" :-D
- masklinn 9y ago
  Problems are defined as beyond the scope of this discussion, therefore this plan has no problems.
joshvm 9y ago
Nuclear RTGs are a reasonable solution for power generation in the kW range if you could have a bank of them. The benefits are that they're not particularly radioactive (when enclosed) and they also generate copious amounts of heat as a byproduct. I think one is used in the Martian? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
- phreeza 9y ago
  Sure, but I think if we are talking about 10^6 people as the article does, the energy needs will be on the order of several GW at least...
  - joshvm 9y ago
    The main thing I'm thinking about is robustness and lack of maintenance. One advantage of RTGs is that you could distribute power wherever it's needed. RTGs are essentially maintenance free (decades) over the lifetime of the fuel. There are suitcase-sized power plants that NASA have proposed, but I have no idea how feasible they are - or what the maintenance requirements are. I've not been able to find any actual papers on the subject, just the usual gushing science press. Safety seems to be OK, but these are incredibly complicated systems requiring liquid metal cooling (for a start).
- Pinckney 9y ago
  I don't know why you would use an RTG instead of conventional fission reactors.
  - phreeza 9y ago
    Yea, each A4W reactor on a Nimitz class aircraft carrier can produce on the order of 100MW electricity, and the fuel rods last about 25 years. So if you can scale those down sufficiently (maybe use in situ materials for shielding?), getting to the GW range doesn't seem as far off as I had initially suspected.
mrfusion 9y ago
Solar works fine. That's probably the first product they should become self sufficient making.
- baq 9y ago
  And batteries, or more generally energy storage.
- troymc 9y ago
  Mars is about 1.5 AUs from the Sun, so light intensity (and solar power) is about (1/1.5)^2 = 44% that of Earth. That doesn't rule out solar power, but it does make alternatives relatively more appealing. One partial source might be the burning of biomass (e.g. potato leaves and, um, other things).
  - zardo 9y ago
    That compares solar panels in orbit around Mars and Earth. How much do we lose on Earth with our thick atmosphere, ozone layer, and clouds? I don't think burning anything for energy is going to be an option. Oxygen isn't free.

ph0rque 9y ago

> Cuba, North Korea, Australia and Russia all have populations well over 10 million but are entirely dependent on trade to obtain advanced technology such as computers, aircraft, container ships, engines, cars, and so on. Sorry, but it's hard to take this author seriously when he thinks Russia doesn't manufacture "advanced technologies" such as "aircraft, container ships, engines, cars".

grecy 9y ago
Same for Australia. Though I will say the two car plants that design and build cars from the ground up are both closing.
- phkahler 9y ago
  >> Though I will say the two car plants that design and build cars from the ground up are both closing. They wouldn't be if Australia was on Mars. This illustrates a point. Low shipping costs are what's killing those plants. High shipping costs are an issue for Mars. They'll have to make their own in almost every case.
- robbiep 9y ago
  We can't rocket, semiconductor or aerospace
  - avmich 9y ago
    Australia used to be one of the world leaders in hypersonic flight research. That doesn't quite equate with Boeing/Airbus, or even Embraer/Bombardier, but suggests similar potential like with Russia.
  - manicdee 9y ago
    … because successive conservative governments have cut funding for science, education, and support of technology entrepreneurs. The current government is doubling down on efforts to drive the middle and lower class from education. Australia could absolutely have advanced industries like aerospace and semiconductor fabs if the regulatory environment wasn't directly hostile to those industries.

nabla9 9y ago

It's nice to see economic considerations. For many everyday things we must assume that Mars needs aerospace level reliability and safety. Typically it's assumed that there is at leas factor of ten increase when developing with aerospace standards. So multiply value of everything that can affect health with 10, including housing, fire alarms, ventilation and outdoor gear. It can't be assumed that settling Mars is preplanned. Every form of manufacturing and every process must constantly adapt and innovate to overcome the obstacles not seen beforehand. This takes lots of time and timelines will slow down. You can't just keep sending up robots in massive amounts. You need to send small batches and refine and constantly adapt them. This requires highly educated manpower. I's probably hard to find millions of people ready to sentence themselves into very low life standards and lower life expectancy once the hype wears off. There are lots of dreamers cheering who eventually balk or don't survive. How do you get millions of "right stuff" to live the life of constant maintenance. Maybe you need to have cult like sci-fi religion like Mormons :)

fsloth 9y ago
"Typically it's assumed that there is at leas factor of ten increase when developing with aerospace standards. " To my understanding Skunk Works developed e.g. the Blackbird from scratch with much better cost efficiency than a modern greenfield project would if they followed best practices written in stone. I think high quality engineering can be implemented with far less cost if the project allows for iterative development and efficient communication and ownership between stakeholders (e.g. the engineer and the machinist can figure things out on their own instead of rotating everythong through cost and quality control authorities). Ben Rich [0], an ex Skunkworks director laments at length of the inefficiency of bureaucratic style of product development - which is probably an outgrowth of the same phenomena that causes so many bullshit jobs. So, to my mind what things like F-35 cost and what are the intrinsic costs of proper, durable engineering are not entirely related. [0] Rich, Skunk works
- nabla9 9y ago
  I'm not talking about developing experimental aircraft, I'm talking about manufacturing and maintaining safety critical equipment for everyday use. If you could order wide body jet without the attached standards, they would be able to build exact replica of the fleet with fraction of the cost. Same aluminum pieces with random quality inspections is much cheaper than every piece of aluminum checked and tested before installing, plus verifying that it's tested and inspected. Installing that piece would be cheaper if there would be no inspectors for every phase of work doubling or tripling the manpower. Just tightening a bolt is cheap. Tightening it the right amount, cheeking that it has been done correctly etc. are costly. Astronauts living in ISS periodically inspect every hatch and every safety critical device. Their days are filled with checklists. Things wear down and break and small undetected error can end life.

salesguy222 9y ago

Nuking Mars' polar ice caps is a good place to start. It will force greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, which will promote the raising of temperatures and formation of liquid water. Then maybe people will want to live there- the rest will be history :)

sonium 9y ago
The problem is really the lack of a magnetic field. Even if you manage to increase the atmospheric pressure, ionizing particles strip it away. What you would need to build is a superconducting ring on the equator to generate a artificial magnetic field. Unfortunatly the amount of material required with current superconducting materials (for a magnetic field compared to earth's) is several times the world-production and we don't even know how abundant the materials are on mars. But we can always hope for a breakthrough in super-conductance research.
- mrfusion 9y ago
  This has been debunked many times. Even with no magnetic field an atmosphere can last thousands of years.
BurningFrog 9y ago
People already want to live there. A small minority, sure, but far more than we'll have capacity to send there for a very long time.

kyriakos 9y ago

For tldr the general idea is that we'll need self replicating robots to do the bulk of the work since transportation and human labour is extreme costly.

phkahler 9y ago

I said this before Elon got excited about tunnels. The people of mars will want to create usable space and the best way to do that will be tunnel boring machines. They'll need a way to reinforce and seal them, but with a boring machine they can have people constantly creating new living and working space with a minimum of materials. This will also provide some mining capability should there be any rock of value there. What will become currency? In other words, how can you use free markets to get people to provide work most efficiently? In software, OSS seems to be the most efficient development model but it lacks payment for the effort. Likewise once people are making stuff, it would be a waste of resources to have multiple competitors making similar things. I suspect not having patents is the quickest way to get efficient production in a low resource environment. A race to the bottom may be OK when everyone starts at the bottom. Lastly, It seems like a good idea for Mars to have a product or service that is extremely useful to the people of earth. This would allow them to exchange that for continuing shipments of materials they desperately need. An information service would seem to fit the bill, due to zero mass for shipping it back and few resources needed to create it. But what? Engineers could live and work on mars, but not enough to create a shortage of those services on Earth. Is there any use for the time delay inherent in transmission to Mars? For example, with HFT in the stock market, could a more "fair" system be built with transactions taking place on Mars where there is a large latency built into the system? Of course you'd have to keep locals on Mars from trading in that system. With our constant quest for higher speed an low latency it seems wrong to seek a solution that depends of guaranteed long latency. Something like that, of high value that is unique to the situation could go a long way toward preventing abandonment by Earth but I really don't know what that would be. I don't thing what it takes to build a minimum viable civilization on Mars will be determined until there is one.

masklinn 9y ago
> The people of mars will want to create usable space and the best way to do that will be tunnel boring machines. Tunnels are a great idea considering Mars has no atmosphere and ozone layer, but TBR strike me as completely overkill and out of proportion, you don't even remotely need >ø10m tunnels for a martian base of operation and should rather model after historical underground cities/shelters like Ouyi/Nushabad, Capadoccia's underground cities (Kaymakli, Derinkuyu) or various catacombs of the Old World.

spacecity1971 9y ago

Every analysis I've seen about the Mars settlement problem follows from the idea that we need to adapt the Martian environment to our needs. Perhaps it is ourselves that need to adapt. Synthetic bodies may be a better long term solution; isolate our nervous system in a compact support module, and connect it via neural interface to xeno-fit bodies.

Coffeewine 9y ago
The plot of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Plus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Plus !
- spacecity1971 9y ago
  Ha! Parallel evolution of ideas never ceases to amaze me. Thanks (Have to find that book now).

Hasknewbie 9y ago

Honest question: assuming all the other technical/economical roadblocks could be solved, how are we supposed to colonize Mars on a long-term basis, as my understanding is that the gravity there will either kill or cause serious health issues for most of the population? If the low gravity makes peoples' fitness decay over a decade or two, parents can't raise their kids, and in fact kids can't develop either.

jessriedel 9y ago
What makes you think that 1/3 gravity has long-term health effects? Even zero-gravity health effects are manageable; they of course lead to temporary fragility when you return to full Earth gravity, but that's not really a key issue for a permanent Mars colony. Providing radiation shielding in an economical and psychologically benign way seems much more challenging.
- Hasknewbie 9y ago
  Zero-gravity (and by extension low-gravity) health effects are manageable, but: for months (so far), and by military-grade athletes with the self-discipline to exercise every single day. This is quite different from: a whole population, and for many decades. The long-term health effects of low gravity are not a solved issue as far as I know: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-does-spending-prolong/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-does-spending... https://www.wired.com/2014/02/happens-body-mars/ https://www.wired.com/2014/02/happens-body-mars/ I asked about gravity and not the (many) other issues because we have at least some hints on how to handle say radiation shielding, however we have no idea how to change gravity if it does indeed prove to be a blocking point for permanent settlements.
  - jessriedel 9y ago
    First, I don't think the extension of ill-effects to low-gravity is obvious at all. (I.e., no reason to expect this is linear. The benefits of exercise on Earth have greatly diminishing returns, and I expect the same for gravity exposure.) Second, I don't see why we expect ill-effects to go from manageable to unmanageable with normal people. Astronauts on MIR weren't dropping dead before the started the rigorous exercise programs. By all means, file this under "possible, as-yet unquantified risk". It's certainly conceivable that there is some killer disease the crops up in 1/3 gravity if you don't exercise daily. But right now I don't think we have any data that's inconsistent with the reasonable first guess that normal people will be basically fine in 1/3 gravity. (This maybe just a question of what we mean by "basically". To me, a 10% lowering of life-expectancy is acceptable and expected when colonizing another planet. The trip itself will probably be a few percent chance of death.) On the other hand, we have fairly large, well-quantified risks for radiation exposure of long-term living on Mars, and we have no obvious way to solve it without huge concrete structures, underground tunneling, or as-yet-uninvented magnetic shields. EDIT: Actually, I retract my claim that this is a bigger worry than low gravity as I am no longer sure. The radiation exposure is less than I thought, and likely reduces life expectancy by less than 5%. https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/1_NAC_HEO_SMD_Committee_Mars_Radiation_Intro_2015April7_Final_TAGGED.pdf https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/files/1_NAC_HEO_SMD... http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0074988 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.... http://www.space.com/18753-mars-radiation-manned-mission.html http://www.space.com/18753-mars-radiation-manned-mission.htm...

vivekd 9y ago

We may be taking the first steps to establishing a permanent undersea colonies 1. I'd like to see that happen before trying permanent outer space colonies. Establishing a permanent settlement in an area uninhabitable by humans seems like an incredible challenge that humanity has never attempted. It will likely have so many unforeseeable contingencies that are impossible to provide for before we actually try it. If we are going to try something like that, I'd much rather the first time be under the Ocean where there is a relatively easy out if we run into problems rather than in outer space where you're just stuck with no way out. 1. http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29031512* http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29031512*