3 ms·
We've made a lot of improvements to nuclear reactor design since the 60s, and potentially we'll have working fusion by the time we have a colony on Mars, which
by fastball 5y ago
We've made a lot of improvements to nuclear reactor design since the 60s, and potentially we'll have working fusion by the time we have a colony on Mars, which would probably be the best solution (can easily get H from water and then would have He which is useful).
I can't imagine a viable self-sufficient Mars colony that doesn't involve a lot of manpower anyway (I'm talking thousands of people).
- qayxc 5y agoWell a working fusion reactor would render any current power source obsolete anyway. I wasn't necessarily thinking about complete self-sufficiency, just the fact that it might take up to 2½ years to get replacement parts.
- fastball 5y agoRight but without complete self-sufficiency that applies to any power generation method. The only viable solution is to have enough raw material and redundancy on Mars that you can recycle things if something fails. e.g. have multiple redundant reactors, if one breaks you fix it, if it can't be fixed you dismantle it and start using the parts to build a new one, taking parts from other things when necessary and using parts you can't use for other things. Basically there needs to be enough "stuff" on Mars that you can use stuff to make other stuff in perpetuity. To my mind that would require enough diversity of equipment that you'd want on the order of 1000 / 10k people. And of course Mars is not a totally barren world – another big part of the solution is to build things with materials that can be gathered on Mars.