> You could totally just dig a 1 meter deep hole with a fancy bulldozer, then plop down a prefabbed house and bury it Yes, and that "prefabbed house", that is

> You could totally just dig a 1 meter deep hole with a fancy bulldozer, then plop down a prefabbed house and bury it Yes, and that "prefabbed house", that is sturdy enough that we can "bury it" under a pile of rock [1] thick enough to provide adequate protection from cosmic radiation, where does that come from? How much mass is that? How is that mass transported to mars? What machines and tools are required to assemble it there, and how much mass are those? How is the energy for these tools provided? [1]: Just to be clear what a pile we are talking about here: If we used the water-shield method, it would require 5m of water for a 50% reduction in radiation intensity.