A City on Mars: Reality kills space settlement dreams
A City on Mars: Reality kills space settlement dreams
Let’s not send a few thousand people to Mars as a big experiment in survival.
A book review on the latest Weinersmith creation. It’s true, there is so much we don’t know.
Just throwing this out there on this forum because missing technology is the problem that kills the dream of Mars, according to the authors.
i mean shoot, mars is actually kinda worse than the moon in some ways. Like, the worst of both worlds except 'worlds' pertains to 'celestial bodies in general'. You have the same ultrafine toxic razor sharp dust that gets everywhere, sticks to everything, and destroys mechanical joints on contact, but on MARS it gets blown around by dust storms that blot out the entire sky sometimes for months or years on end, whereas on the moon it only redistributes and resettles due to electrostatic repulsion (due to solar radiation).
Mars' atmosphere is just thick enough to be a hassle for creating risk of burning up on reentry but still too thin to reliably drag-brake so you end up having to thread a much more annoying needle with respect to approach velocity, whereas on the moon it's just straight up active thrust descent every time you're landing.
In both cases, living on the surface is a sucker's game and the only viable option would be to tunnel down beneath into the regolith where a sufficient rock barrier will block enough of the solar and cosmic radiation to not drastically shorten your lifespan.
Furthermore the energy cost to get a payload from earth to mars is LITERALLY ASTRONOMICAL whereas escaping the moon's relatively weak gravity well to reach almost anywhere else in the solar system (including mars) is dwarfed by the oomph it takes to climb out of the earth's gravity well in the first place alone.
I'd go so far as to say that a mars colony would never be viable until and unless we have a viable lunar colony
but make no mistake, a lunar colony is mandatory if we ever want to explore the rest of the solar system or not have all our eggs in one basket as a species. the moon is practically MADE OF the infrastructure we'll need across the entire solar system,some assembly required. The amount of Aluminum and Silver waiting for us in that silicate regolith will be instrumental, especially because smelting and building up there will be drastically cheaper than manufacturing shit down here and then having to carry it ALL THE WAY UP ALL OVER AGAIN.
and like, that isn't even factoring sending any of what's produced back to earth, because even that might be a waste of effort when everything we could ever BUILD outside our gravity well is worth more being up there just by virtue of the fact that we didn't have to pay through the nose to SEND IT.
Do not colonize other planets. They suck. They have all the downsides of space habitats (needing sealed environment, etc), while also adding more (breaches now let in toxic dust instead of vacuum, cannot control gravity via spin, etc).
Just build O'Neil cylinders. If you can't do that, maybe work on stabilizing the ecosystem we evolved to live in. Nowhere will ever be better than here, folks.
All the more reason to send billionaires there.
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard." -JFK
Space is inhospitable to human life, but look at the countless inventions and benefits we've gotten from exploring space, the moon, etc. Humanity will continue to grow, learn, and try new things regardless of what the pessimistic Weinersmiths believe.
Is anyone really thinking we just need to reach Mars, then immediately set up a colony? No, reaching there is obviously only a first step, but once we can reach it, we can try things to see if we can live there. For myself, I’ve been saying we need to hurry up and reach Mars because we have like 100 years of work before we can establish a colony so let’s get started
That was a very interesting read. I've always been a bit skeptical of people who say we'll be living in space or colonizing other planets in the near future. I definitely want to read their book.
Also, this made me laugh:
And do you really want to create a group of hungry, disgruntled miners that are also able to sling very large rocks at the Earth?
That said, slinging large rocks back to Earth is the only way I can see them returning whatever they mine and that doesn't sound like a great plan either.
Is someone actually proposing that we're simply going to dump would-be colonists on Mars with a shovel and some O2 tanks then wave goodbye? Like, no shit we still need to work things out but that just means it's unknown, not impossible.
This book seems unnecessarily pessimistic. I don't know why I would spend money on doomscrolling, Kindle Edition.
Yeah, there's a lot we don't know and a lot we haven't figured out yet. And it's definitely a tough nut to crack. But concluding from that, that is impossible is dumb. Everything is impossible until somebody goes and does it.
For instance, supposedly space will end scarcity… and yet, any habitat in space will naturally have only a single source of food, water, and, even more urgent, oxygen, creating (perhaps artificial) scarcity.
Huh? Sure, if we forget absolutely everything we ever knew about reliability engineering.
Take air, for instance. If you're considering a community on the scale of a town or city, expect that it will be naturally divided into smaller physical units, corresponding to smaller social units in the community. Rather than having one big air supply for the whole "town" — which can fail or be sabotaged, creating an existential risk for the whole community — it'd likely be much safer to have small air systems for each household, neighborhood, commune, or other unit. You probably have to have them anyway for emergencies.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Unfortunately for the Weinersmiths, they actually asked questions like “how would that work, exactly?” Apart from rocketry (e.g., the getting to space part), the answers were mostly optimistic handwaving combined with a kind of neo-manifest destiny ideology that might have given Andrew Jackson pause.
The Weinersmiths start with human biology and psychology, pass through technology, the law, and population viability and end with a kind of call to action.
Apparently, nuclear weapons-wielding countries won’t react negatively to private citizens claiming large bits of space.
The magical thinking is more apparent when you realize that it is believed that encountering the vastness of space will make humanity ultra-altruistic, while still being good capitalists.
In a more realistic take on how societies function when there is only one source for the vitals of life, the Weinersmiths draw on the experiences (positive and negative) of company towns.
The point is that we have a tiny space station, and we have the potential to build a lot of experimental facilities on Earth where we can investigate some of the practical problems.
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Mars has no magnetosphere so it's very hard to have a breathable atmosphere.
The moon's barely got gravity, and our bodies need it.
A space station would be a good start so long as it spins so we can have the semblance of gravity.
No one knows if you can turn a profit mining asteroids.
If mining techniques reach the same level of advancement as on Earth? I don't see why not. I also don't see why bother to send ore back other than to pay-off some initial investment.
(One of) the biggest obstacles in space is leaving Earth's gravity well, so sending mining machines to the asteroids would be interesting. Then maybe move the ISS to a La Grange point instead of destroying it, use it as a base to turn that ore into a spinning space station.
I’m sure I’ll never actually get to it, but I want to try to check this out next after the current book that’s taking way too long to read.
I don't wanna go to Mars
What kind of brainwashed idiot does
It's all a lab rat life in jars
They branded the dream of ages
I had some Elon-stan dude being adamant that it would be safer to colonize Mars because what if the apocalypse happened on Earth? I asked him what an event like that would look like and he said a giant asteroid. I linked him to a wiki page outlining major crater impacts on Mars to get him started and he never responded. I'd like to think that he learned a valuable lesson in astronomy but I can never be too sure.