3 ms·

There are a couple of points where I disagree with you, but one in particular I hear very often and should be debunked. A colony on mars, even of significant s

There are a couple of points where I disagree with you, but one in particular I hear very often and should be debunked. A colony on mars, even of significant size and population, is 100% condemned to certain death if separated from Earth. It would be, for all intents and purposes, in the same "basket". Google "how to make a pen from scratch" for a quick primer into why, but the tl;dr version is that it takes having a huge industrial base already existing in order to keep, let alone advance, our current technological level. And Mars is not friendly enough to support us with lower tech. Our intuitions go the way of "we can put 1000 smart people there, that's enough to survive and thrive". Well, we as a species can't move our microprocessor factories from Taiwan in less than a decade, and you expect them to be rebuilt on Mars from scratch?

boardwaalk 5y ago
Should be debunked if it’s not true (that a colony could be self-sustaining), but you haven’t debunked it here.
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  I'm probably not going to debunk it either, not by any real standards. But... It seems to me that our level of technology has increased, partly through new discoveries, partly through new ways of applying those discoveries, but also at least partly through increased specialization. You've got a farmer growing huge amounts of food. But that's because there's a tractor factory, and the tractors are smart because of the chips in them, and the chips connect to the GPS satellites in orbit. To make that work, you need more than the farmer. You need the workers in the tractor factory, but also the workers in the chip plant in Taiwan, and the chip factory needs the equipment manufacturer in the Netherlands. And you need the rocket manufacturers so you can put GPS satellites in orbit. And the rocket fuel manufacturers. And so on. It basically has taken a globally integrated material culture to achieve that level of productivity on the part of the individual farmer. Which we can do, because the farmers are so productive that we don't have to spend very many people on farming. A fair chunk of the progress of the last 200 years has been made possible by increasing scales of integration. But I worry, because we're running out of globe to integrate. (Africa, maybe?) So, back to Mars. Yeah, none of this proves that 1000 people couldn't be self-sustaining. But for them to do that, they'd need a fair amount of tools. And that means that they'd need someone who knows how to repair and/or replace every one of those tools (and any tools they use in the process). And there's a hard cutoff below which they cannot fall, due to the need for oxygen. They can't just fall back to being hunter-gatherers. So, yeah, I didn't debunk it. But, seriously, what's the maximum number of sophisticated kinds of machines that 1000 people can run and maintain? 100? 500? Can you build a self-sustaining colony on Mars with only 500 kinds of machines?
nickik 5y ago
Watch 'Mars Industrialization Roadmap' by Casey Handmer. That is exactly what he is addressing. He literally mentions the 'I, Pencil'. And btw a million people is the goal, not 1000. See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11hYo9UTSRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11hYo9UTSRM And the corresponding book: How To Industrialize Mars: A Strategy For Self-Sufficiency: How To Settle A Lethal Vacuum In 400 Easy Steps Part of the whole project of Mars is making this very thing possible in the first place. It requires rethinking a lot of how we do things.
- radu_floricica 5y ago
  The full conversation is a bit longer, and should veer into things like economic incentives: Mars will build nails pretty soon, electric screwdrivers a bit later, but microprocessors probably never, because it's many orders of magnitude cheaper to import them from earth, even if they have to sell electric screwdrivers in exchange. There are quite a few steps to proper, long term self-sufficiency. You need the colonists to get there, to form a permanent settlement, to get to reasonable numbers, to make a place where people would want to raise families into, to get to a point where it has a balanced trade deficit and so on. Everything up to here is mostly science fiction material, but if Musk lives long enough it might actually happen. Now, from this point you need a nation-sized colony on Mars make a strategic decision to duplicate critical infrastructure on Mars just to be self-sufficient. This is the step that the OP with his panicked "must not put all eggs in the same basket let the rockets fly now" is not even aware it exists. As an order of magnitude is probably at least equal to everything up to then. Partly because it's objectively hard, and also because when you have a nation-sized bunch of people, you have to convince them to invest half their resources to build factories that will make microprocessors that by the time you finish will be more expensive than those imported from earth, and probably also obsolete. And you have to keep investing in such obsolete industries because a million people can't compete with 10 billion that don't have to manufacture their air. Multiply this for every domain where you need such critical high-tech industries, like medical.
ncallaway 5y ago
> A colony on mars, even of significant size and population, is 100% condemned to certain death if separated from Earth It would be in the near future, true. In fact, the key milestone for humanity being truly multi-planetary is that each planet must be independently self-sufficient. There's no laws of physics that would prevent human life on Mars or Venus from eventually becoming self-sufficient. The time-frames to get to that point are large (mid-hundreds to low-thousands of years by my random guess). A thousand years isn't that long in terms of the evolution of the species, though, and are the time scales we should be thinking of multiplanetary life on.

boardwaalk 5y ago

Should be debunked if it’s not true (that a colony could be self-sustaining), but you haven’t debunked it here.

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
I'm probably not going to debunk it either, not by any real standards. But... It seems to me that our level of technology has increased, partly through new discoveries, partly through new ways of applying those discoveries, but also at least partly through increased specialization. You've got a farmer growing huge amounts of food. But that's because there's a tractor factory, and the tractors are smart because of the chips in them, and the chips connect to the GPS satellites in orbit. To make that work, you need more than the farmer. You need the workers in the tractor factory, but also the workers in the chip plant in Taiwan, and the chip factory needs the equipment manufacturer in the Netherlands. And you need the rocket manufacturers so you can put GPS satellites in orbit. And the rocket fuel manufacturers. And so on. It basically has taken a globally integrated material culture to achieve that level of productivity on the part of the individual farmer. Which we can do, because the farmers are so productive that we don't have to spend very many people on farming. A fair chunk of the progress of the last 200 years has been made possible by increasing scales of integration. But I worry, because we're running out of globe to integrate. (Africa, maybe?) So, back to Mars. Yeah, none of this proves that 1000 people couldn't be self-sustaining. But for them to do that, they'd need a fair amount of tools. And that means that they'd need someone who knows how to repair and/or replace every one of those tools (and any tools they use in the process). And there's a hard cutoff below which they cannot fall, due to the need for oxygen. They can't just fall back to being hunter-gatherers. So, yeah, I didn't debunk it. But, seriously, what's the maximum number of sophisticated kinds of machines that 1000 people can run and maintain? 100? 500? Can you build a self-sustaining colony on Mars with only 500 kinds of machines?

nickik 5y ago

Watch 'Mars Industrialization Roadmap' by Casey Handmer. That is exactly what he is addressing. He literally mentions the 'I, Pencil'. And btw a million people is the goal, not 1000. See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11hYo9UTSRM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11hYo9UTSRM And the corresponding book: How To Industrialize Mars: A Strategy For Self-Sufficiency: How To Settle A Lethal Vacuum In 400 Easy Steps Part of the whole project of Mars is making this very thing possible in the first place. It requires rethinking a lot of how we do things.

radu_floricica 5y ago
The full conversation is a bit longer, and should veer into things like economic incentives: Mars will build nails pretty soon, electric screwdrivers a bit later, but microprocessors probably never, because it's many orders of magnitude cheaper to import them from earth, even if they have to sell electric screwdrivers in exchange. There are quite a few steps to proper, long term self-sufficiency. You need the colonists to get there, to form a permanent settlement, to get to reasonable numbers, to make a place where people would want to raise families into, to get to a point where it has a balanced trade deficit and so on. Everything up to here is mostly science fiction material, but if Musk lives long enough it might actually happen. Now, from this point you need a nation-sized colony on Mars make a strategic decision to duplicate critical infrastructure on Mars just to be self-sufficient. This is the step that the OP with his panicked "must not put all eggs in the same basket let the rockets fly now" is not even aware it exists. As an order of magnitude is probably at least equal to everything up to then. Partly because it's objectively hard, and also because when you have a nation-sized bunch of people, you have to convince them to invest half their resources to build factories that will make microprocessors that by the time you finish will be more expensive than those imported from earth, and probably also obsolete. And you have to keep investing in such obsolete industries because a million people can't compete with 10 billion that don't have to manufacture their air. Multiply this for every domain where you need such critical high-tech industries, like medical.

ncallaway 5y ago

> A colony on mars, even of significant size and population, is 100% condemned to certain death if separated from Earth It would be in the near future, true. In fact, the key milestone for humanity being truly multi-planetary is that each planet must be independently self-sufficient. There's no laws of physics that would prevent human life on Mars or Venus from eventually becoming self-sufficient. The time-frames to get to that point are large (mid-hundreds to low-thousands of years by my random guess). A thousand years isn't that long in terms of the evolution of the species, though, and are the time scales we should be thinking of multiplanetary life on.