3 ms·

Necessity is the mother of invention. Often this become necessary for no good reason, but once that are necessary they can be the only reason that matters.

tsimionescu 6y ago
This argument could be applied to anything that is not completely impossible, right? It essentially pre-supposes that if something is theoretically possible, humanity can do it with today's engineering practices. I don't think this is a safe assumption.
- TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  I think that’s taking it too far. We haven’t made Antarctica self sustaining because it hasn’t been necessary. But making Mars potentially self sustaining (at least in an emergency situation) is more important given the vast distance to Earth. And from an engineering and physics perspective it seems perfectly possible as long as humans can survive in low gravity for generations.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    It sounds like the scenario you are imagining is something like us building a colony on Mars dependent on the Earth, and some time after having a situation where the colony must become self-sustaining or go extinct. I would say that, unless the colony has a few more hundred years of contact with the Earth to prepare for this, it will go extinct with 100% certainty. The amount of resources and people that you would need for a colony on Mars to survive indefinitely without imports from Earth is staggering. You would need all of the highest tech industries from Earth (certainly chip fabs and robotics), large mining operations, smelters. You would need enough population to man all of these (or automation on a scale we are very far from, that could entirely handle factories and self-maintenance), and enough agriculture for this population. And you would have to do all of this with no access to fossil fuels - which also means no plastics and no access to many common lubricants. And of course, all of these things would have to be built underground, with huge tunnel boring operations required for any expansion. This may all seem possible from a physics perspective, but it is something that would have to be planned for generations in advance, well outside of our realistic civil engineering capabilities at least. And since doing all of this with the hundred million people that would be required with today's industrial practices would likely complicate things a lot more on Mars, you would need automation at a level that our robotics engineering is still very far from. It all seems possible to some extent, but definitely not something that could happen during a catastrophe, and absolutely not something that could happen without all of the bases being laid out from Earth (that is, it is impossible for a colony that was not designed and prepared from Earth to be fully self-sustaining to become self-sustaining once on Mars out of necessity).

tsimionescu 6y ago

This argument could be applied to anything that is not completely impossible, right? It essentially pre-supposes that if something is theoretically possible, humanity can do it with today's engineering practices. I don't think this is a safe assumption.

TaylorAlexander 6y ago
I think that’s taking it too far. We haven’t made Antarctica self sustaining because it hasn’t been necessary. But making Mars potentially self sustaining (at least in an emergency situation) is more important given the vast distance to Earth. And from an engineering and physics perspective it seems perfectly possible as long as humans can survive in low gravity for generations.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  It sounds like the scenario you are imagining is something like us building a colony on Mars dependent on the Earth, and some time after having a situation where the colony must become self-sustaining or go extinct. I would say that, unless the colony has a few more hundred years of contact with the Earth to prepare for this, it will go extinct with 100% certainty. The amount of resources and people that you would need for a colony on Mars to survive indefinitely without imports from Earth is staggering. You would need all of the highest tech industries from Earth (certainly chip fabs and robotics), large mining operations, smelters. You would need enough population to man all of these (or automation on a scale we are very far from, that could entirely handle factories and self-maintenance), and enough agriculture for this population. And you would have to do all of this with no access to fossil fuels - which also means no plastics and no access to many common lubricants. And of course, all of these things would have to be built underground, with huge tunnel boring operations required for any expansion. This may all seem possible from a physics perspective, but it is something that would have to be planned for generations in advance, well outside of our realistic civil engineering capabilities at least. And since doing all of this with the hundred million people that would be required with today's industrial practices would likely complicate things a lot more on Mars, you would need automation at a level that our robotics engineering is still very far from. It all seems possible to some extent, but definitely not something that could happen during a catastrophe, and absolutely not something that could happen without all of the bases being laid out from Earth (that is, it is impossible for a colony that was not designed and prepared from Earth to be fully self-sustaining to become self-sustaining once on Mars out of necessity).