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You use your pile of lathes and mills to make replacement little parts. Probably skip making integrated circuits on-planet at first, but anything metal or plas
by Dylan16807 9mo ago
You use your pile of lathes and mills to make replacement little parts. Probably skip making integrated circuits on-planet at first, but anything metal or plastic can be done by the huge group of machinists.
And for every fifty people on mars you can have a thousand people back on earth figuring out the best way to make every component.
The hard part is building chemical stocks of all these different things. And while that's a huge task, it's so much less hard than a make-anything machine. Once you have graphite, clay, rubber, and wood, making it into a pencil is simple. Cut, mix, extrude, clamp. Wood (and rubber if that's the easiest way) can be grown on-site, wood can be turned into graphite, and clay shouldn't be amazingly hard to get from martian soil. Oh and glue, we can figure out a glue.