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There's a fantastic novel series that starts with Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson. It follows a series of the first colonizers of Mars, and every time it shif

There's a fantastic novel series that starts with Red Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson. It follows a series of the first colonizers of Mars, and every time it shifts perspective it dives into a new science/technology frame. For a few chapters you are following an engineer, and it talks about the alloys and techniques she's using to build housing. A little while later you follow a geologist and the topic shifts a bit as this geologist goes out exploring. You follow biologists, psychologists, economists, and each time it dives into the challenges they have in how they perceive Mars and what to do with it. Inevitably, there's a conflict between the "Reds" and the "Greens". Given the series titles (Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars), I'm sure you can figure out who wins. However, it seems to suggest a result that I find fairly likely -- it doesn't matter what you say we should do with Mars, people are going to do what they want. We already don't care about externalities here on Earth, there's no way we can police them on Mars. That said, while I used to be a huge fan of the idea of colonizing Mars, I've swung around to the idea that colonizing asteroids is far more interesting. Mars is relatively resource poor, and asteroids are incredibly resource rich. There are some kilometers wide balls of iron, nickel, and platinum group metals out there. Not to mention water and carbon. All the materials you'd need to undertake construction in space and none of the challenges of having to lift it into orbit.

cryptoz 5y ago
I love Red Mars. The whole series is good but Red Mars itself is fantastic, one of my favorite books. You practically get an undergrad in areology reading it. Super curious to see how our reality lines up with the timelines in the book.
- OmicronCeti 5y ago
  Speaking of areology, there is a small subreddit for precisely that field which is quite good: reddit.com/r/Areology
OmicronCeti 5y ago
Also going to voice my love for Red Mars, I found Green Mars to be much more of a slog to get through, but I really like anything KSR writes. Blue Mars was a nice finale though.
Robotbeat 5y ago
On the contrary, Mars has all the resources of asteroids but the advantage of a water cycle that has concentrated and reformed minerals like on Earth. The ability to process the atmosphere directly is a massive and under-rated advantage. MOXIE proves it’s not just possible but feasible to generate fuel (carbon monoxide) and oxidizer (oxygen) from the Martian atmosphere, and nitrogen and even a bit of water (hydrogen and oxygen) as well as argon are available anywhere on the planet. The “let’s just build cylinders” (which I think we should eventually do!!) often strikes me as a knee jerk contrarian position, an attempt to avoid hard questions about environment, and a “grass is always greener in fields further in the future and with less solid understanding.” Planetary bodies with water cycles (or a history of them) are rich. Airless bodies have massive difficulties that are often handwaved away. And now we have powered flight (without needing propellant) demonstrated. Mars really is a much better place to establish a permanent human presence.
- Baeocystin 5y ago
  I think a lot of it will ultimately depend on whether Mars has enough gravity to avoid the health issues that we see in orbital microgravity environments. Do we have any idea, based on our experiences with space stations & lunar landings? Genuine question, I'd really like to know.
  - rbanffy 5y ago
    Mars has about a third of the Earth's, so it's not microgravity and is about twice as powerful as the Moon's. There are not many reasons to expect it will create huge health issues for earthlings but if you spend too much time on Mars without exercising on a centrifuge, adapting back to Earth could be a problem. There will be some loss of muscular mass, at least.
    - Baeocystin 5y ago
      I suppose the core of my question is just wondering what the shape of the g-dose response curve is. 1g is nominal. 0g has significant long-term problems, even with countermeasures like daily exercise. Is the physiologic response between the two extremes linear? My intuition says no, but I don't have real data to check.
BurningFrog 5y ago
I wanted to like Red Mars, and the science stuff was well made, but a lot of the book is about politics, and to me, those parts were painful to read. I found it incredibly naive and unrealistic. Clearly many others disagree :)
- rbanffy 5y ago
  I couldn't really like, or care for, the characters.
- elsonrodriguez 5y ago
  The funny thing is that just when the politics were getting interesting, the author takes a detour into the effects of memory and hand-waves away all the tensions between Earth and Mars.
- garmaine 5y ago
  Kim Stanley Robinson is insufferable. He has so many deep misunderstanding about politics, economics, and even things like climate science and limits to growth that are his core schtick. And the flaws are so embedded into the central plots of his books that it is really hard to suspend disbelief and ignore. I originally encountered the Mars Trilogy as a teen and it is fair to say that it changed my life. I feel in love with the romantic portrayal of Mars colonization, and eventually ended up working at NASA. Recently I decided to go back and re-read the trilogy and found myself unwilling to finish even the first book. I just couldn't stand it. So you're not alone. You might like Icehenge though. It works more as a stand-alone novel (or 3 novellas, really) set in the same universe, but with a focused plot and the politics mostly relegated to the background. It's a very under-rated book, being overshadowed by the more well-known RGB Mars trilogy that followed.
BurningFrog 5y ago
> I've swung around to the idea that colonizing asteroids Metal asteroids can, with some luck, provide us with boundless supplies of pretty much all metals, as I understand it. This will be one of the great milestones in human civilization. But I think it's a place you go to work. Mars is far more interesting as a place to live and build a society.
- 8note 5y ago
  You can fit a lot more people in the asteroids, and it'll be easier to transport stuff between them. Mars has a lot of the same disadvantages that earth does. Its got a lot of gravity, and you can't communicate through the planet from one side to the other
  - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
    Gravity does seem like a disadvantage, but satellites have worked pretty well for the other problem... we've even got some in place around Mars already.
- hinkley 5y ago
  Well, the underclass always gets the shit jobs, and habitat. Owkwa beltalowda.
mrec 5y ago
> We already don't care about externalities here on Earth, there's no way we can police them on Mars. That depends very much on how the putative Martian society is set up. There used to be an idea in cultural anthropology that a society becoming heavily dependent on technology and coordinated labour (specifically, sophisticated irrigation systems) went hand in hand with the evolution of a centralized authoritarian state to manage that. The idea has fallen out of favour, but you can see how something similar might apply in spades on Mars. Life there is going to be marginal at the best of times; living off-grid would be a truly daunting prospect. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_empire
iandanforth 5y ago
Interesting anecdote, KSR as of 2015 didn't believe in mars colonization any more. The perchlorate issue really got to him and he basically said we'd never live there. Maybe he's changed his mind again but I got a chance to ask him some questions at a reading from Aurora and the scales really fell from my eyes at his answers.
godelski 5y ago
You want Mars because you want the asteroids. You want the moon because you want asteroids. Moon because you need to get the material to Earth and it is better to mine in space. Mars because you need access to the asteroid belt. They are just different steps towards the same goal. One thing I liked about Red Mars is how it brought up independence. Astronauts are well known to rebel against their respective commands (US, Russian, etc). It'll be interesting when command cannot do anything about it on a longer timeframe than your stay on the ISS (or skylab).
inglor_cz 5y ago
What you lack in the asteroid belt is the feeling of a planet with a reasonably short day/night cycle, some kind of skies and a diverse landscape. Maybe we can live without them, but for people who grew up on Earth, living on Mars might be psychologically easier.

cryptoz 5y ago

I love Red Mars. The whole series is good but Red Mars itself is fantastic, one of my favorite books. You practically get an undergrad in areology reading it. Super curious to see how our reality lines up with the timelines in the book.

OmicronCeti 5y ago
Speaking of areology, there is a small subreddit for precisely that field which is quite good: reddit.com/r/Areology

OmicronCeti 5y ago

Also going to voice my love for Red Mars, I found Green Mars to be much more of a slog to get through, but I really like anything KSR writes. Blue Mars was a nice finale though.

Robotbeat 5y ago

On the contrary, Mars has all the resources of asteroids but the advantage of a water cycle that has concentrated and reformed minerals like on Earth. The ability to process the atmosphere directly is a massive and under-rated advantage. MOXIE proves it’s not just possible but feasible to generate fuel (carbon monoxide) and oxidizer (oxygen) from the Martian atmosphere, and nitrogen and even a bit of water (hydrogen and oxygen) as well as argon are available anywhere on the planet. The “let’s just build cylinders” (which I think we should eventually do!!) often strikes me as a knee jerk contrarian position, an attempt to avoid hard questions about environment, and a “grass is always greener in fields further in the future and with less solid understanding.” Planetary bodies with water cycles (or a history of them) are rich. Airless bodies have massive difficulties that are often handwaved away. And now we have powered flight (without needing propellant) demonstrated. Mars really is a much better place to establish a permanent human presence.

Baeocystin 5y ago
I think a lot of it will ultimately depend on whether Mars has enough gravity to avoid the health issues that we see in orbital microgravity environments. Do we have any idea, based on our experiences with space stations & lunar landings? Genuine question, I'd really like to know.
- rbanffy 5y ago
  Mars has about a third of the Earth's, so it's not microgravity and is about twice as powerful as the Moon's. There are not many reasons to expect it will create huge health issues for earthlings but if you spend too much time on Mars without exercising on a centrifuge, adapting back to Earth could be a problem. There will be some loss of muscular mass, at least.
  - Baeocystin 5y ago
    I suppose the core of my question is just wondering what the shape of the g-dose response curve is. 1g is nominal. 0g has significant long-term problems, even with countermeasures like daily exercise. Is the physiologic response between the two extremes linear? My intuition says no, but I don't have real data to check.

BurningFrog 5y ago

I wanted to like Red Mars, and the science stuff was well made, but a lot of the book is about politics, and to me, those parts were painful to read. I found it incredibly naive and unrealistic. Clearly many others disagree :)

rbanffy 5y ago
I couldn't really like, or care for, the characters.
elsonrodriguez 5y ago
The funny thing is that just when the politics were getting interesting, the author takes a detour into the effects of memory and hand-waves away all the tensions between Earth and Mars.
garmaine 5y ago
Kim Stanley Robinson is insufferable. He has so many deep misunderstanding about politics, economics, and even things like climate science and limits to growth that are his core schtick. And the flaws are so embedded into the central plots of his books that it is really hard to suspend disbelief and ignore. I originally encountered the Mars Trilogy as a teen and it is fair to say that it changed my life. I feel in love with the romantic portrayal of Mars colonization, and eventually ended up working at NASA. Recently I decided to go back and re-read the trilogy and found myself unwilling to finish even the first book. I just couldn't stand it. So you're not alone. You might like Icehenge though. It works more as a stand-alone novel (or 3 novellas, really) set in the same universe, but with a focused plot and the politics mostly relegated to the background. It's a very under-rated book, being overshadowed by the more well-known RGB Mars trilogy that followed.

BurningFrog 5y ago

> I've swung around to the idea that colonizing asteroids Metal asteroids can, with some luck, provide us with boundless supplies of pretty much all metals, as I understand it. This will be one of the great milestones in human civilization. But I think it's a place you go to work. Mars is far more interesting as a place to live and build a society.

8note 5y ago
You can fit a lot more people in the asteroids, and it'll be easier to transport stuff between them. Mars has a lot of the same disadvantages that earth does. Its got a lot of gravity, and you can't communicate through the planet from one side to the other
- blacksmith_tb 5y ago
  Gravity does seem like a disadvantage, but satellites have worked pretty well for the other problem... we've even got some in place around Mars already.
hinkley 5y ago
Well, the underclass always gets the shit jobs, and habitat. Owkwa beltalowda.

mrec 5y ago

> We already don't care about externalities here on Earth, there's no way we can police them on Mars. That depends very much on how the putative Martian society is set up. There used to be an idea in cultural anthropology that a society becoming heavily dependent on technology and coordinated labour (specifically, sophisticated irrigation systems) went hand in hand with the evolution of a centralized authoritarian state to manage that. The idea has fallen out of favour, but you can see how something similar might apply in spades on Mars. Life there is going to be marginal at the best of times; living off-grid would be a truly daunting prospect. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydraulic_empire

iandanforth 5y ago

Interesting anecdote, KSR as of 2015 didn't believe in mars colonization any more. The perchlorate issue really got to him and he basically said we'd never live there. Maybe he's changed his mind again but I got a chance to ask him some questions at a reading from Aurora and the scales really fell from my eyes at his answers.

godelski 5y ago

You want Mars because you want the asteroids. You want the moon because you want asteroids. Moon because you need to get the material to Earth and it is better to mine in space. Mars because you need access to the asteroid belt. They are just different steps towards the same goal. One thing I liked about Red Mars is how it brought up independence. Astronauts are well known to rebel against their respective commands (US, Russian, etc). It'll be interesting when command cannot do anything about it on a longer timeframe than your stay on the ISS (or skylab).

inglor_cz 5y ago

What you lack in the asteroid belt is the feeling of a planet with a reasonably short day/night cycle, some kind of skies and a diverse landscape. Maybe we can live without them, but for people who grew up on Earth, living on Mars might be psychologically easier.