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I 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 soi

by szczys 9y ago

I 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 ago
insects also reproduce to account for death, requiring food sources, which there are none of on Mars
jlebrech 9y ago
sure, 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.

by szczys 9y ago

branja 9y ago

insects also reproduce to account for death, requiring food sources, which there are none of on Mars

jlebrech 9y ago

sure, 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.