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> Life in a Martian colony would be miserable, with people forced to live in artificially lit underground bases, or in thickly protected surface stations with s
by elihu 6y ago
> Life in a Martian colony would be miserable, with people forced to live in artificially lit underground bases, or in thickly protected surface stations with severely minimized access to the outdoors. Life in this closed environment, with limited access to the surface, could result in other health issues related to exclusive indoor living, such as depression, boredom from lack of stimulus, an inability to concentrate, poor eyesight, and high blood pressure—not to mention a complete disconnect from nature.
I don't know why there's this assumption that living underground has to be in some dank basement with flickering fluorescent tubes, and that this is an absolute unsolvable barrier to Mars settlement.
I think we should just accept that if humans go to Mars, they're going to live underground and either go outside rarely or not at all, and just get over it. Maybe it won't be all that bad if it's done the right way. Realistically, a lot of space is going to be needed just for growing food, and that means the population per square foot of usable pressurized habitat floor space might not actually be very high. There may be wide open spaces and the opportunity to go on long walks through pleasant farms.
In Oregon near Bend we have a pretty decently large lava tube that's about a mile long, and in some parts it's huge. It's not exactly a pleasant place to imagine living when it's cold inside and lit by flashlight or latern, with walls that look like the inside of a dragon's colon and a floor of featureless sand that plays tricks with depth perception, but if one imagines it well lit with sealed, insulated walls, painted in light colors, or made to mimic the sky, with clusters of apartments and workshops and rows of plants, it actually could be pretty nice. The weirdest thing to get used to would be the one-dimensionality of the cave; it's just one long shaft with no side tunnels. That's what I imagine an early Mars habitat looking like: find a natural lava tube (due to reduced gravity they should in theory be bigger than the ones on Earth), and seal the walls and divide it into large compartments. Install solar panels on the surface, and then move right in.
Eventually one could imagine a habitat expanding by digging side tunnels once the right kind of heavy equipment is available, and maybe establish production for native building materials like sulfur-based concrete.
- Udik 6y agoIf you just want to live underground, isn't it simpler to do it on Earth?
- fractionalhare 6y agoThat's what I never understand about these proposals...we can't manage to stop climate change on Earth, but we're going to somehow terraform a planet? Or failing that, establish "colonies" the same way we have people live in Antarctica? I don't envy the colonists. I think the urge to just hit reset and start from scratch is attractive because it removes all the messy unquantifiable problems like politics. But the reality is you'd just get more of that on top of virtually insurmountable technological problems.
- Isinlor 6y agoWe can quite easily, probably for less than 1T dollars [0], stop climate change with geoengineering, but nobody wants to experiment with Earth climate. Cost analysis of stratospheric albedo modification delivery systems > We conclude that (a) the basic technological capability to deliver material to the stratosphere at million tonne per year rates exists today, (b) based on prior literature, a few million tonnes per year would be sufficient to alter radiative forcing by an amount roughly equivalent to the growth of anticipated greenhouse gas forcing over the next half century, and that (c) several different methods could possibly deliver this quantity for less than $8B per year. [1] Benefits, risks, and costs of stratospheric geoengineering > Using existing U.S. military fighter and tanker planes, the annual costs of injecting aerosol precursors into the lower stratosphere would be several billion dollars. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering#Costs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering#Costs [1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/3/034019 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/3/034... [2] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2009GL039209 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/200...
- elihu 6y agoWe might eventually end up doing something like that if we don't get CO2 emissions under control. However, it's not a complete solution. It wouldn't do anything to address ocean acidification, for instance, which is one of the lesser-known consequences of excess CO2 in the atmosphere. That's why we really ought to be concentrating on emitting less carbon dioxide.