9 ms·
Understanding the make-buy question in a growing Mars city
- twic 4y agoPhil Metzger is also working on Mars city economics: https://twitter.com/DrPhiltill/status/1548465323770200065 https://twitter.com/DrPhiltill/status/1548465323770200065 So far, i am not convinced by either of these analysis, so i hope they and others keep working on them.
- mikewarot 4y agoI think a model of economics which doesn't ignore the huge value inherent in the fossil fuels we're burning, and can account for both energy and currency, would go a long way to better understanding the Earth economy, as well as giving better predictions of the Mars economy.
- vardump 4y agoDeveloping Mars industry and economy will almost certainly lead to better ways of doing things on the Earth. Necessity is the mother of invention.
- eesmith 4y agoDeveloping a negative carbon emission industry and economy will almost certainly lead to better ways of doing things on the Earth. Which is cheaper? Which has higher certainty?
- _Microft 4y agoYou might be happy to hear that the author of the article founded a company (Terraform Industries) that is working on making carbon sequestration and synthetic fuels economically viable.
- ncmncm 4y agoMoney put into synthetic hydrocarbon production is extremely premature when we don't have enough renewable generating capacity yet to displace current CO2 emissions.
- zamadatix 4y agoI'd word it as "Developing negative carbon emission industry and economy on Earth will almost certainly lead to better ways of doing things on the Mars" as in the two questions aren't different enough to phrase them as a "this one" or "that one". Solving one without solving at least a significant portion of the other doesn't seem possible and I don't see the desire for either shrinking as time goes on.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> Which has higher certainty? This one’s easy: Mars. There is limited evidence large populations are willing to incur pain to solve the climate crisis. To the degree money is spent, it’s politicised and inefficient. The necessity of survival simply isn’t there here. It would be on Mars.
- ncmncm 4y agoIt would help, some, for it to be actually possible for a Mars colony to exist, and then maybe to survive at all. But there is thus far no reason to expect that. Certainly not by relying on Starship/Superheavy, which is so far from adequate it is comical. Starship might be adequate to keep a small moon base operating. That would be an achievement.
- akira2501 4y agoWould be far more interesting if he considered the local labor market and how that's going to interact with all of this. I'd also like to know why he thinks the GDP per capital will be 10x higher on Mars, or where the "virtually unlimited" amount of supplies will actually be stored. There's a massive difference between "just in time" production and "stockpile" production. This seems to view the problem down one dimension, and I don't find the analysis particularly satisfying or complete.
- rkagerer 4y agowhy he thinks the GDP per capital will be 10x higher We'll, it's all somewhat pie in the sky predictions. But I don't think that's intended as an assumption, but rather an argued outcome predicted by the other assumptions and mechanics of his model (annual tonnes-per-capita of consumption of various classes of goods, $/T, etc).
- JumpCrisscross 4y agoWhat was the GDP/capita of the early colonies relative to their source populations? An order of magnitude wouldn’t surprise me given the initial and ongoing selection pressure.
- ncmncm 4y agoOrder of magnitude more? Or less? Back home, they had centuries worth of physical plant to rely on. Colonists have to make do with what can be cobbled up on the spot.
- blamestross 4y agoAs long as the contents don't mind being in vacuum, a mylar bag will last a long time just sitting in a field on Mars. No not much 02 to oxidize things, not even enough air for wind to cause dust abrasion. As much as I love "The Martian", once you get there and pay the prices of setting up shop it is likely to be very stable. Daily and seasonal thermal shock will be the primary force of erosion. Dead planets are nice that way.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y agoUnless I've missed something, the SpaceX estimates this seems to be based on miss the rather basic fact that the energy/time (and presumably economic) cost of Mars trips varies depending on the synodic cycle. It's never just point and shoot. So the current SpaceX estimates are going to be for the most efficient and cheapest trajectories. If you want to ignore the synodic cycle and run missions every day for years, the costs are going to be much higher.
- PartiallyTyped 4y agoIs it possible for a mission starting at T1, to arrive later than a mission starting at T2, where T1 < T2 due to the sheer speed w/ which the planets are moving?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- bombcar 4y agoYes, and I believe this has already happened with some of the various probes sent out to the planets. Voyager 1 launched after Voyager 2 and overtook it; both overtook earlier probes to leave the solar system.
- ncmncm 4y agoAlmost everything about SpaceX's Martian colonization announcements is very, very far from what could be practically realized with anything we can build today. For example, Musk repeatedly mentions a six-month trip. No, it is 9 months, at best. He talks about transporting 100 colonists for those 9 months, 6500 hours, in a ship with the room that an airliner uses taking that many with their baggage across the Atlantic Ocean, up to 9 hours. Might they not need food, water and, maybe, air for 9 months? The airliner pumps air through on the way. It collects its sewage, to deliver there. Maybe a pressure suit for when they get there? Change of underwear? By NASA standards, Starship has room for at most 17 crew for such a trip. That is if you know they all get along, or don't care how many kill one another on the way. More practically, 8 is probably the limit. Probably you need to send ships in pairs, so they can be swung on a cable between ships' noses for centrifugal gravity. That way their bones don't dissolve on the way. Will 1/3g be enough? Nobody knows. But it had better be. It is a good plan to send uncrewed cargo ships ahead of time with what they will need there. You probably need at least five of those per colonist ship. With on-orbit fueling, that amounts to ~80 Superheavy launches, 10 for each colonist. Will Starship be rated for launching crew? Maybe you need a couple of Falcon/Dragon launches, besides, for each Starship-load of 8 colonists. So for a million colonists, you need ten million Superheavy launches. At 10 launches/day, every day, that is 3000 years. Maybe breeding colonists in situ would be faster? Because over 3000 years, some will die. (Hopefully not all at once.) How many do you need to launch just to keep numbers from falling? Maybe later ones can move into dead colonists' pressure cans, so need less cargo? But a million colonists is very far from enough to be self-sufficient. No microchip manufacturing, no biochemicals, no Cybertruck. So you still need all the cargo launches, 10 every day, century in and century out. Hopefully the colony produces enough (movies?) to pay for that, because you can't bring them back. So, no, there will be no SpaceX Mars colony. But promoting it keeps Tesla stock price inflated.
- Comevius 4y agoThe hard part would be finding a way how to synthetize all the chemicals we need without oil. I imagine that would require a vast amount of energy.
- mikewarot 4y agoThe atmosphere there provides all the carbon, oxygen and nitrogen you need, hydrogen (from water) is the thing in short supply at present. If you can synthesize methane there, you should be able to make longer chains and polymers with the right application of chemistry. One thing for sure, you'd never just burn fuel/oxygen together instead of using fuel cells, batteries and solar. Nuclear would be a good power source if cooling isn't impractical.
- ncmncm 4y agoThere is very, very little accessible water, thus very little hydrogen. Any expedition planning in situ fuel synthesis had better bring its own hydrogen.
- usrn 4y agoThere's a ton of carbon in the Martian atmosphere. It sounds like a great place for an algae farm (which is where terrestrial oil came from.)
- Nomentatus 4y ago"Import replacement" is the proper term in economics. It comes from Jane Jacobs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Import_replacement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Import_replacement
- louwrentius 4y agoPersonally I would rather see that we quit the rocket stuff and focus on real problems. Playing with rockets serves the entertainment needs of billionaires and maybe the tech bros on HN, but serves no other purpose. Starlink does come to mind, but that need can be served cheaper and more effectively if we would not be so capitalistic and spend a bit less on military. Speaking of purpose, at times it feels to me that the space thing is the only thing that gives the audience a higher meaning. But it seems so desperately hollow. It seems so gratuitous that billions are spent on nothing, whereas some very serious issues here down on earth are going out of control. But let’s keep dreaming and fantasizing about Mars. I keep my focus on the disintegration of society by the people who finance this rocket stuff.
- vessenes 4y agoCouple thoughts: First, I would gently suggest that, while it is easy to complain, it is hard to build - if you are into spending energy on humanity’s current plight, ‘focusing on disintegration of society’ is going to be a full and complete waste of your time, and of no benefit to the rest of us - I’d encourage you to do the much harder (and often riskier/scarier) thing of figuring out what you might do to improve things. Probably won’t look like what Elon does, but it’s a big world! Second, counterpoint on Starlink. Starlink is actually pretty amazing - it, at scale, will provide global relatively low-ping pervasive broadband internet EVERYWHERE. Without any ground-based deployments. Logistics in much of the world are prohibitively difficult to even get strung-out microwave repeaters into places humans live, much less 30-100ms broadband. Seriously, Starlink is amazing. While I agree that military budgets could often be better repurposed for the good of humanity, I’m not sure that even the US military budget could blanket the earth with broadband in any other way than this — politics plus logistics make it seem impossible to me. Anyway, I personally think the world could do with a lot more crazy dreamers building things right now! (Sent over Comcast)
- louwrentius 4y agoThese crazy dreamers are building shit that destroys our societies so I gently suggest they stop.
- golemiprague 4y agoI don't understand those dreams about Mars, Musk failed even with a simple thing like the boring company and settling Mars is so much more complicated than that. Musk succeeded in places where the technology was there and all was needed was to refine and market it, spaceX, Tesla and even paypal are all good examples. But digging tunnels, let alone building on Mars, are two problems that don't have any known solutions at the current moment and will not improve dramatically in the near future.
- ncmncm 4y agoTunneling is tech that goes back thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians cut many miles through bedrock with primitive tools. Musk failing at tunneling, thus, says a lot. Success with rockets I have to attribute to lucky hires.
- grogers 4y ago> Alternatively, shipping costs could fall to $10/kg. This would require several large miracles Come on, at $10/kg it'd be cheaper to send something to Mars than to mail it across town. Even $10,000/kg would require many miracles...
- corncob15 4y agoSmall-parcel courier services (read: USPS, UPS, FedEx) are far, far more expensive than the freight shipping that moves most things around. It costs about $1/kg to ship things all the way from China to the US by ocean container (much more expensive than it used to be because supply chain issues).
- ETH_start 4y agoThis is an absolutely fantastic article that gives me a much better sense of how and why an extraterrestial city would emerge, and what form it would eventually take.