A City on Mars: Reality kills space settlement dreams
A City on Mars: Reality kills space settlement dreams
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.
Gravity is kind of necessary for long term human health though, at least until we figure out a way around that...
You do realize that Martians abandon Mars because the protomolecule opens up worlds that are already habitable, so terra forming becomes pointless? It has nothing to do with infrastructure or economy, Mars is supposed to be an eventual second home, not a place to mine. They leave because interstellar travel becomes a reality before Mars becomes viable.
Unless we discover that Charon is actually a Mass Relay, Mars is the best possible second place for humans.
Titan is too cold and the atmosphere would require a full changeover, and the Galilean moons are constantly bombarded with radiation, Venus could support a floating colony but thats tenuous at best. Mars is basically it, if we can develop the tech to turn it into a reasonable place to be.
But gravity may be useful in many applications. We don't really know how to effectively manufacture many things in microgravity at the moment. The moon would still be important for early space infrastructure.
Edit: In addition, the moon will be useful for mining and resource extraction for a long time, most likely, due to its proximity to earth and size.
It is less energy to go Mars to the moon than earth to the moon
It is also about the same delta-V to go from the surface if the earth to the surface of the Moon OR Mars. At least Mars has water.
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.
If it’s a Jack O’Neil cylinder, I will consider your proposal.
It works like a regular O’Neil cylinder, but cooler somehow.
Lol
The whole concept behind colonizing a planet is to be able to exploit the resources.
Which you cannot do with an O'Neal Cylinder. Since you have to manufacture it yourself.
There is so much about the cylinder concept that hasn't been thought out, it's just an insane undertaking even if it could all work. It started as a joke, but hey maybe one day someone will prove it to be a better reality.
This isn't a permanent solution.
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.
Im a little bit disappointed, i was expecting things that where only possible because of research made in space, not things that were developed because NASA thought they were needed for astronauts.
Edit: seeing the reaction, sorry if my disappointment disappoints you. We can very well use this argument to justify war
"We can't do metric, there's just so many road signs, and I'm tired" - every American, today.
Nobody is going to live on Mars until letting it out on Airbnb is profitable
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
I don't disagree that having a self sustaining population of humans somewhere other than earth will be an important milestone.
But a much more pressing milestone is a the first self sufficient population, which I don't see mars supporting
I think the far-more realistic scenario is we create a colony of robots, first for experiments, then (if possible) to build out a colony that can eventually be inhabited by humans.
If we’re going to get anything useful out of mining (other than just building material), it’s going to be incredibly sparse. I think we need to start asap working on robotic mining vehicles to wander around collecting and refining useful stuff. By the time we send people, we ought to have spent years collecting tankfuls of oxygen and water, caches of refined ores, piles of bricks and pavers (maybe even sheds/garages), maybe even sheets of crude solar cells, miles of wire.
Navigation and communication will be crucial, so we need to lead with a constellation of gps/communications satellites so no matter where you are, you know your location, can reliably contact your base, and even all back to earth. We’ll want many automated weather and seismic stations that need to send a flood of data somewhere
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.
Not to mention the doors and corners…
That's where they get you.
Earth would have access to WMDs too, if those Mars miners want to get into a fight like that they should perhaps consider that they depend on fragile glass bubbles to survive.
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.
Plugging our ears and going “NYAAAAAA” isn’t going to help. We need pragmatists to ask hard questions to cover all the bases, and force us to anticipate problems. Being aware of potentially fatal issues isn’t “doomscrolling”.
The authors aren’t saying that we should never, ever try to colonize Mars. They’re only saying that there are a LOT of questions to answer before we try.
You don't think all the scientists and engineers working around the world on this problem aren't aware of the potentially fatal issues? The last thing they want is to be the reason people die in space.
Elon Musk talks a lot of shit, but the actual scientists are busy considering the real problems, dangers, and solutions to getting to and colonizing Mars.
Which is why you don't hear NASA going "yep we're good to go! No scientifically obtained issues to worry about!" Also sometimes you have to answer the questions through physical experimentation, which is why we send science teams before we send spacecraft full of colonists.
Books like this fall under the same grouping as those who hate Elon Musk so much that they have to also think space travel is dumb/bad as well because they can't remove the douchebag from the field his company operates in.
Space colonization is the future, it doesn't matter if it's ten years or a thousand. We are going to leave this planet. Case closed. The earth will not sustain us forever even in our wildest renewable energy/living fantasies.
Your comment seems to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the actual people/money that would be involved with any space colonization attempts. They'll do exactly an equivalent of the ridiculous things you describe to expend the least amount of resource to secure the most profit in strip-mining natural resources from these places.
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.
Infrastructure for distributing the air once it gets to the settlement is one thing. At least for now, though, Earth is the only place to get oxygen in life-sustaining quantities, which is the single source they're talking about.
Maybe you can posit harvesting oxygen from mineral oxides, hydrolyzing water if you can find it, or capturing an ice asteroid. Whether you split every atom of oxygen you breathe out of rust or lift them out of earth's gravity, let alone doing both for redundancy, it's orders of magnitude more energy and complexity than growing potatoes in Antarctica.
At least for now, though, Earth is the only place to get oxygen in life-sustaining quantities, which is the single source they’re talking about.
If we're talking about space colonization then "at least for now" doesn't apply any more.
There are vast quantities of oxygen available everywhere in the solar system. Extracting it is really not hard. There's a technology demonstrator generating oxygen on Mars right now. If you're arguing against space colonization because you're assuming that every bit of resources the space colony uses will have to be sent there from Earth, you're completely missing the basic concept of space colonization.
I often find that technological pessimists are imagining some very specific flawed scenario and then arguing about how that scenario is terrible or impossible, rather than arguing about the technology in general. Often the best way to debate them is to start by getting them to clarify exactly what scenario they're thinking of, the limitations of their argument will usually become quite apparent just by doing that.
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy is a must-read.
Just finished the trilogy last week. Amazing books, a bit dry at times but overall a very enjoyable read about what the politics and technology might look like to terraform and colonize Mars.
No fetuses have gestated in low gravity. That sounds like something we could do animal trials on.
But wow, getting a live sheep into space, and fed, and exercised, and cleaned, all for months… that alone is a big undertaking. Just to get a single data point that’s about another species.
I wonder what is known or not know. I’ve read about experiments with lower plants and animals but not what the results were, nor whether we’re ready to try more complex life
Everything I’ve ever seen about plants indicates that they grow abnormally in zero g. Life is complex and made up of many different chemical processes. All it takes is for gravity to have an effect on one of them and life goes awry. It’s humbling how fragile we are, how narrowly adapted when it comes right down to it. I remember learning that we can’t share most viruses with pets because their bodies are a few degrees of temperature off from ours. I thought wow, viruses are not very robust if they are attuned to living in such a very narrow set of conditions. But honestly we’re no different.
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.
The original article contains 900 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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.
Mars has no magnetosphere so it’s very hard to have a breathable atmosphere.
I don't know why this has become such a common talking point about why colonizing Mars is hard, it really has no significant impact.
For starters, it's only meaningful for terraforming. Regular realistic colonization involves setting up domes or tunnels, none of that's affected in any way by Mars' magnetosphere or lack thereof.
As for terraforming, the lack of a magnetosphere means that Mars will "leak" atmospheric gasses due to solar wind sputtering over periods of time that are short on geological scales but are vastly longer than anything a human civilization will care about. If Mars were to magically have an Earthlike atmosphere appear on it today it'd be millions of years before it became unbreathable by this process. The human species has only existed for a tenth that long, and our civilization has only existed for a hundredth of that. If anyone still cares a million years ago they can just top the atmosphere back up again by whatever method they put it there in the first place.
Or, if you really have your heart set on that magnetosphere, build one.
The level of automation necessary for manufacturing in space is going to be very close to removing humans from the process entirely. Taking it that one step further and having robots manufacture robots would eliminate all the issues with keeping flesh-and-blood human bodies alive.
Honestly I sometimes think the best legacy humans can hope for is giving birth to AGI. Machines would be much better suited to forming a solar or galactic civilization than biological entities ever would be. If we're lucky, humans or meta-humans would still be around as what essentially amounts to pets.
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.
Yes you can. Self publishing is surprisingly easy.
Sometimes books are valued for their original informational content alone. Sometimes books are valued for conveniently anthologizing disparate works. Sometimes books are valued for the entertainment quality of the writing. This is a book which endeavors to offer information and context about a hot topic to a general audience in an informative but entertaining way. I can guarantee that you've spent over $30 on something less valuable.
I have a couple of books by Zach Weinersmith and they are entertaining and interesting.
I believe you're missing the point of this book. I also believe you're being a bit of a prat. I don't know, however, if those two things are connected.
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.
That's silly. The asteroid point isn't that Mars is somehow asteroid-proof, it's that having a presence on multiple planets prevents any one single planet-destabilizing disaster from causing our species' extinction.
Right, but his thought process was that Mars was somehow immune to asteroid impacts and that made it safer. Like, he hadn't considered that a single unfortunate event was possible. It's ironically safer here on Earth but thought this planet had nothing going for it.
The point isn't whether or not it could happen, the point is that it hadn't crossed his mind and was jumping in with two feet at the idea.
The point isn't that Mars is somehow less vulnerable to asteroid impacts than Earth, it's that asteroids aren't likely to hit Earth and Mars at the same time.
He thought they didn't happen on Mars for some reason and that he wanted to colonize it to hopefully abandon Earth altogether because we have apparently no hope here whatsoever and the planet isn't salvageable anyway.
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
It's not missing technology that kills the (pretty silly) idea of "Mars colonization" - it's missing ecology.
They can't even maintain functioning civilization in Antarctica... yet they "dream" of doing so in a place that's hundreds of times more hostile to human life.
One of the things standing in the way of an"civilization" on Antarctica is that it's illegal to build a civilization on Antarctica. We could absolutely do it, assuming we were willing to fight a war and the resources were worth it
Doesn’t the outer space treaty place similar restrictions on mars?
Oh, right... that is what has stopped the Phony Starks from building capitalist Utopia in Antartica - it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it's utterly inhospitable to human civilization at all.
That’s a good point. There is at least as much to learn from Antarctica as from Mars. Maybe less maybe more, but certainly more relevant since it’s on Earth. Plus easier to get to than Mars. Yet we can’t scrounge up enough to keep a larger presence there.
Sometimes I can’t shake the feeling that we are living in another dark age. We need a real renaissance to shake it.
One of the mandatory precursors to that is a major Hundred Years war that kills lots of people and displaces even more.