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Living on Mars: The Stuff You Never Thought About
- jlebrech 9y agomhh if only someone owned a rocket company AND a boring company.
- szczys 9y agoI think we need biologically inspired robots. Have you seen a ground digger wasp (Eastern Cicada Killer)? They can mine many times their body weight in hard soil each day. Landing pods on the surface and then covering them in regolith is going to call for heavy machinery. A boring machine is also heavy machinery. These cost an enormous amount to get to Mars. But insect-like robots over a large timescale could do the work at a lower cost.
- branja 9y agoinsects also reproduce to account for death, requiring food sources, which there are none of on Mars
- jlebrech 9y agosure, we'd need: digging, shoveling, flattening, sintering robots etc. but surely we could send 1 boring machine (a small one about 2 meter wide) and bored a shaft straight down, for the first base.
- semi-extrinsic 9y ago> [Insects] can mine many times their body weight in hard soil each day. This is because of the square-cube-law. Basically, muscle strength is proportional to cross-sectional muscle area, while muscle weight is proportional to volume. So when you take e.g. an insect and start scaling it up, it gets heavier faster than it gets stronger, thus strength relative to weight decreases. But: I'd seriously doubt that wasps can mine more than an excavator. Let's take e.g. a Caterpillar 300.9D excavator (weighing 950 kg, same as about a million wasps). That excavator can lift 100+ kg with every swing of the bucket, so if you assume the wasps dig 30x their body weight, the excavator beats the wasps if it can dig more than 300 buckets in one day. That sounds easy - there are 480 minutes in an 8 hour working day, and a bucket each minute is very doable. And on Mars you'd have it fully robotic running 24/7.
- dragonwriter 9y ago> Let's take e.g. a Caterpillar 300.9D excavator (weighing 950 kg, same as about a million wasps). Not that it matters, given the way you did the calculation, but it's closer to 10+ million.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y agoNo need: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_lava_tube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_lava_tube
- jlebrech 9y agogenius, we just need to send airlocks.
- devrandomguy 9y agoAnd even those could be just inflatable doughnut plugs with a pair of inwards opening flaps. You could even squeeze the air out of the lock, against the user's suit, to avoid the need for a vacuum pump!
- jlebrech 9y agoalso a 100% flawless vacuum wouldn't be that crutial, there's an atmosphere and you can pump more oxygen into the base, and also have maybe more "sphincters" to keep the air in.
- lindgrenj6 9y agoVery cool article! It will certainly be interesting to see how we get around these hurdles. The most interesting one to me was definitely the lack of being able to electrically ground anything, we will definitely have to design newer electrical motors etc to get around that!
- maxerickson 9y agoIt wouldn't really impact devices, it would impact buildings. (for household service, ground and neutral are bonded at the service panel, grounding is a safety issue, not something electrical devices depend on to function)
- deegles 9y agoI've thought about a lot of things... think of the massive supply chain that would be needed to build semiconductors, for example. Or even something simple like... cheese. There's a reason Musk estimated that a million people would be needed for a fully self sufficient colony.
- jessriedel 9y agoSemiconductors are one of few products that are so value dense ($/kg) that you can ship them from Earth for a reasonable marginal price. It's everything else with a long production chain (or very large upfront costs, like mining) that's infeasible to do on Mars without 1M+ people.
- gaius 9y agoSo is (good) cheese
- semi-extrinsic 9y agoI imagine construction materials will be a right pain. E.g. concrete is right out, as is most metals, since you need a lot of carbon (coal) in the production process. Those two are pretty important in tunnel digging.
- asploder 9y agoWhat exactly would a Mars colony need to dig tunnels for?
- gaius 9y agoProtection. Meteorites not burnt in the sparse atmosphere. Thermal stability. Radiation.
- Matt3o12_ 9y agoAccording to many experts, this would be an easy way to shield humans from the radiation. A glass dome could also work but would be more expensive and could be fragile. On the other hands, tunnels do not provide any sunlight but I don't know if humans can actually use the sunlight on Mars (so a dome might be necessary as an addition or completely irrelevant anyways).
- maxxxxx 9y agoI remember a talk by a NASA guy that a first try would be to land some people with limited supplies on the Antarctic and let them live autonomously for a few years. He said before we go to Mars we need the ability to do this easily.
- idlewords 9y agoThe Antarctic is a poor analogue, since it has abundant water and food. The Atacama desert might be a better one. There's no earthly reason to make people live in the Atacama, but then again, there's no reason to send people to Mars, either.
- maxxxxx 9y agoI think that was his point. Antarctic is easier but I don't think we could make it work when you are not allowed to hunt for animals. Atacama is probably more realistic.
- hugs 9y agoFrom my brief trip to Atacama a few years ago, I noticed that the big reasons people are there are for mining, tourism, or astronomy.
- bluGill 9y agoActually that makes Antartic a better place to try. If there is a problem they use the food, water, and air available for survival. Then you learn whatever lessons needed and try again until you get to the point where you can live for an arbitrary amount of time there. Once you solve that problem you can move to the Atacama desert. Of course since we are on earth either way a rescue plan is at most a few days away (generally hours but bad weather might stop your efforts for days).
- jcranmer 9y agoThe continental margin and ice shelves are where all the wildlife is. On the interior ice sheet plateau, there are pretty much no animals or plants. Water is, of course, plentiful, albeit in the wrong phase of matter. Another "advantage" of interior Antarctica is that, in winter time, it is difficult-to-impossible to actually get in or out of it. The Amundsen-Scott research base is isolated for three months of the year, although two medevac flights have been done in winter.
- chrismealy 9y agoSo basically Mars would be a prison, with robots doing most of the work. Might as well just send the robots and leave the humans on Earth. If people want to live in a cave they can do that here.
- rm_-rf_slash 9y agoTechnically the sole inhabitants of Mars are robots so you're not too far off.
- erdle 9y agothey get unlimited data but the network is crap
- takingflac 9y agoThe bandwidth is improving. If they could fix that 240000ms ping it would at least be bearable.
- Apocryphon 9y agoThe lower gravity than Earth bit sounds like the most debilitating thing about Martian colonization. One of the reasons why I think Venus cloud cities would be a better long-term bet for baseline humanity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8985151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8985151
- erdle 9y agofor spring break or year round?
- justin66 9y agoNobody actually knows what an extended period living in 38% of Earth-normal gravity will do to a person. It seems probable that there will be bone density problems that might not be correctable with any existing drug or exercise regimen, but there's no evidence it will be as systematically debilitating as living for an extended period in microgravity.
- 0xffff2 9y agoAre the bone density problems actually a problem if you never plan to return to Earth?
- devrandomguy 9y agoWell, your constant mass means that you will still have the same inertia when playing sports. I would expect pairs of fractured skulls, pairs of broken shins in soccer players, etc. Wow, soccer would be epic in low G!
- finnh 9y agoMaybe ... you can't run much faster, so i'd imagine it would be like ultimate aerobee[0] - i.e., minutes-long chases of errant balls with no other player within hundreds of yards. [0] is this a thing?
- jononor 9y agoWonder if one can extract power from the static buildup caused by dust moving on surfaces (triboelectric effect).
- bluGill 9y agoYou can, but static electricity tends to be very high voltage but lot wattage. You typically cannot collect any meaningful amount of power.
- hellofunk 9y agoInteresting article, however, it did make one erroneous assumption: I have thought about these things before.
- baron816 9y agoI think there are going to be some very serious mental health issues for people trying to colonize Mars, especially if they're taking a one way trip. First, you have to deal with a different day-night cycle and the reduced gravity. That stuff matters for humans who have gotten used to 24 hour days and 9.807 m/s^2 gravity over the last 200,000 years. Then, you're going to have to deal with boredom and cabin fever. Mars seems cool in the abstract--"explore another world!"--but its just a big, completely dead desert. I'm betting the novelty of it will wear of in an hour (tops) of landing there. There really isn't that much for humans to learn by going there in person. Those people will just have to stay in a tiny space for years on end without a lot to do. Think of what a bust the video game No Man's Sky was. People hated it because it was boring. But I'm sure exploring planets in that game was much more interested than Mars will be. As the years go on, loneliness and despair will set in. Those first colonists will likely spend the rest of their lives pretty much with who they landed with. Their lives won't change much at all over the decades they're there, and they'll have no hope for things to ever be different. Settling to Mars seems so glamorous, but it really will not be a fun affair. It'll be extremely expensive, really depressing, and probably pointless.
- maxerickson 9y agoYeah, I wouldn't do it. But I bet that any substantial (more than a few dozen) effort would build some pretty huge indoor spaces.
- zeristor 9y agoThis was the most annoying thing about the film The Martian for me. Everyone crows about the science, but I've not heard anything about the psychological trauma someone marooned and isolated on an alien planet for several months would go through. I imagine it would be something on a par with the Dancing plagues of Strasbourg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_Plague_of_1518 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_Plague_of_1518 But without the cheesy disco music.
- samsonradu 9y agoDid you see the "Mars" series (National Geographic) ? Definitely touches the psychological implications of such a trip.
- jostmey 9y agoSounds like we need to find caves on mars to convert into easy shelters
- executesorder66 9y agoOr dig out underground rooms, and live dwarffortress style.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- elihu 9y agoLava tubes seem like they would be ideal, if we can find them in places that would be good for settlement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_lava_tube https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_lava_tube
- devrandomguy 9y agoPerfect timing! Isaac Arthur just kicked off Outward Bound with an in depth look at colonizing Mars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmFOBoy2MZ8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmFOBoy2MZ8
- BurningFrog 9y agoHaving your house covered in a few feet of regolith sounds like roofs and walls to me, not "living underground". Windows will be hard. Maybe you could have them on the side facing away from the sun, but I think general cosmic radiation is also a big problem. More realistically, you'd have "camera windows". A camera on the outside that displays an image on a screen inside of what you would see if there was a window there.
- mikhailfranco 9y agoDon't forget, that if you're unlucky enough to be an American (like Musk), you will still fall under the interplanetary/intersolar/intergalactic grasp of the IRS. Even an 'offplanet' bank will fall under FATCA and FBAR. Renounce before blast off!