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Imagine the same project (Lunar base? Moon telescope? Rocket fuel harvester?) but in the Sahara. Now add the constraint that you want it there, but without ever

• retrac 6y ago
  Indeed. Slightly tangential, but when you start thinking about a Mars colony -- but here on Earth -- a self-sufficient hermetically-sealed environment somewhere underground -- it really starts to drive the scope of the problem home. We don't really know how to create a self-contained ecosystem here on Earth, with everything on-hand. And the residents won't even all die if someone accidentally pokes a hole in the wall in the Antarctic prototype base.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
    Indeed. If we're going to be serious about extraterrestrial colonies we should be workshopping our solutions right now here at home where the problems and consequences are orders of magnitude lesser.
  • jandrese 6y ago
    There was the Biosphere II project from the 90s, but it ultimately failed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
    • BurningFrog 6y ago
      Run by Steve Bannon, of all people!
      • andrewem 6y ago
        From reading the Wikipedia article, it sounds like "run by" overstates his role, but wow nevertheless.
      • TLightful 6y ago
        "Steve Bannon left Biosphere 2 after two years, but his departure was marked by an 'abuse of process' civil lawsuit filed against Space Biosphere Ventures by the former crew members who had broken in.[70] Leading managers of Biosphere 2 from the original founding group stated both abusive behaviour by Bannon and others, and that the bankers’ actual goal was to destroy the experiment." Shocking ...
      • asimpletune 6y ago
        I believe bannon came in after the experiment had already concluded.
    • hvdfhbj 6y ago
      Really more of a PR spectacle than a worthwhile experiment. Including humans seems to have caused most of the problems there. If you actually wanted to experiment with closed biological systems in a useful way then I'd recommend doing a bunch of trials with a less cantankerous species of large omnivorous mammal, like the goat.
      • heymijo 6y ago
        Biosphere 2 was originally meant to demonstrate the viability of closed ecological systems to support and maintain human life in outer space[0] >including humans seem to have caused most of the problems I chuckled a bit at your reply hvd. The hardest, seemingly intractable problems in the world aren't engineering problems, they are human ones. If we want to level up as a species those are the ones we will need to figure out how to solve.
    • lozaning 6y ago
      There was still some very cool engineering that went into making what it was supposed to be. Check out this video on the 'south lung' youtube.com/watch?v=Wind4fjbt_k Because they didnt want air going in or out of the biosphere they had to figure out a way to account for the massive change in volume as the air temperature inside changes between super hot days and cold nights, otherwise you'd blow the windows out of the thing during the day.
    • asimpletune 6y ago
      I don’t know if I’d call it a total failure. There’s a pretty cool documentary about it an Apple TV+. I think if they had communicated the caveats better and more honestly then it would have been a success on the grounds of being a baby step towards the direction of the more ultimate case. I’d say the biggest success was showing that even with all the resources on earth available, this problem is non-trivial.
      • michael1999 6y ago
        Low oxygen, low food, crashed ecosystem. Interesting science, but a total failure at demonstrating the feasibility of a closed ecosystem.
    • lmm 6y ago
      I don't see it as a failure? The first attempt needed a relatively small amount of oxygen injection (which is very much achievable for a Mars mission). The second achieved self-sufficiency.
  • tzs 6y ago
    One approach is to not try to make our colonies self-sufficient. Instead send a study stream of cargo missions to resupply them. At first, that seems completely impractical due to the enormous fuel costs but it turns out that if you are in this for the long term there is a way around that. Getting around the solar system is expensive if you are in a hurry, but if you can take your time it can be cheap. It is not just actual planetary bodies that a spacecraft can orbit. It turns out there are also orbits around Lagrange point. Some stable, some unstable. If you want to get from planet A to planet B cheaply and aren't in a hurry, what you can do is first put your cargo container in an orbit around an appropriate A/Sun Lagrange point, then nudge it into a carefully chosen unstable orbit. The unstable orbit gets farther and farther away from the Lagrange point. At some point, it crosses an unstable B/Sun Lagrange orbit, with a low enough delta-V between the two that a nudge can move it from the former to the later. It then gets closer and closer to that B/Sun Lagrange point, until you reach a point where another nudge can move it into the same orbit as B, just ahead or behind. Another nudge gets it to B. How long this takes depends on A and B, and it is all over the place. Some combinations take a decade or two. Some take hundreds of years. Some take thousands. This then is a plan for a long term thinking civilization to colonize their solar system (I'm going to assume that they also call their planet "Earth" and a major moon of it "Moon"). First, get yourself a serious presence in Earth orbit and Moon orbit, and maybe also on the Moon. Anything you can make in one of those places that is needed for your deep space missions is a win because you won't have to get it out of Earth's gravity well. When you've got to the point that you can produce a steady stream of unmanned space cargo containers loaded with non-perishable items in Earth orbit or Moon orbit, you can start moving them to appropriate Lagrange points, and nudging them into appropriate unstable orbits for the places you want to colonize. It will take a long time, but when you have a good number of shipments accumulated at a place you want to colonize, you then send your colonists using the fast, expensive route. Note that your colonists only need to take enough supplies for the trip itself. (And they don't need to take return fuel if not everyone is going to stay, as that can be included in the pre-sent cargo). Here are a few articles on this [1][2][3]. [1] http://www.gg.caltech.edu/~mwl/publications/papers/IPSAndOrigins.pdf http://www.gg.caltech.edu/~mwl/publications/papers/IPSAndOri... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplanetary_Transport_Netwo... [3] http://www.dept.aoe.vt.edu/~sdross/papers/AmericanScientist2006.pdf http://www.dept.aoe.vt.edu/~sdross/papers/AmericanScientist2...
  • dwaltrip 6y ago
    To be fair, we have never had a reason to do so. It is a hard problem, but it isn’t impossible.
    • 0xffff2 6y ago
      Of course we have reason to do so (to test whether we can do it) and projects like Biosphere 2 suggest that while it's not impossible, it is for the time being unsolved.
      • dwaltrip 6y ago
        I meant other than purposes related to space exploration and general scientific research. I fully support such activities.
    • michael1999 6y ago
      Nobody has ever constructed an independent human-compatible biosphere. We have 0 evidence that it is possible at a practical scale. N=1.
• vorpalhex 6y ago
  Is robotics (longterm) a solution here, and if so, what level of autonomy do we need? Latency between Earth and the Moon is just enough to make realtime command a bit too rough to use I'd imagine, so I imagine we'd need at least low level autonomous tasks of "move resources from landing pad to storage" and "prepare build site" with enough intelligence to detect when these tasks hit an exception. On top of that, I suspect we'd need enough robotic automation to be able to build, maintain and run whatever the thing is. That probably means several specialized robots (packing dirt for a foundation, deploying construction pieces, a crane) as well as some general robots for when things do go off script (haul away a broken robot, right a fallen pylon, remove debris). Does this feel like something achievable in the next decade or two? Are there large pieces we're missing?
  • kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    Robotics in hard vacuum with abrasive soil, extreme temperature fluctuations, and bullets raining down. We don't deal with that on Earth.
    • m4rtink 6y ago
      Some of the deep sea robots used on oil and gas rigs come close IMHO.
    • inglor_cz 6y ago
      Except for abrasive soil, all the challenges exist on the orbit as well. And various satellites seem to cope. If attrition of the robots turns out to be a factor, it could still be solved like this: expect that an average robot can survive 6 months on the lunar surface. So send twenty of them to the remote base, build a cave for the reserve robots and "burn" through the reserve slowly. Every 4-5 years, send a human crew to replace or repair the dead robots. Can be done, the main question is the price tag.
• travisporter 6y ago
  I smell an XPrize!