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.
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
We could absolutely do it
Every exploration into hostile environments heavily relies on goods and services imported from the rest of Earth. Biosphere 2 is as far as I know still the only time we ever tried to actually build a completely independent ecological system, but that was 30 years ago, in a non-hostile environment, only run for a short amount of time, still had tons of problems and would still be missing a lot of stuff to be truly self sustaining for long time periods (e.g. no industrial facilities).
I mean, Biosphere 2 failed because it was started by a cult that mismanaged the shit out of it, then Steve Bannon took over and outright killed the company. A lot of the really crazy shit that happened was a result of corporate power struggles. The first Biosphere experiment lasted two years and is considered overall a success, probably because Steve Bannon wasn’t there.
Before it collapsed, they actually did one better over the previous experiment and achieved self-sufficiency in food production. Colonists would need equipment shipped in until a manufacturing supply chain could be set up locally, but mostly Biosphere 2 serves as a cautionary tale of letting Steve Bannon and cults run things.
Even the claims of stir craziness were kind of overblown. They got evaluated, everything they experienced was consistent with everything that was known about long-term isolated group environments. They’re a rough experience.
It was a fine enough experiment in the early 90’s, but there are incorrect assumptions about how it would apply to space travel. For one, the Biosphere project is considered a “failure” because they set themselves the goal of creating a completely self-contained bubble that needed no outside inputs, and yet at various points systems in the sphere needed repair and replacement, which is completely normal and absolutely what would happen in space. No space company worth anything would let a mining colony collapse because a carbon scrubber broke and “hAhA yOu NeEd oUtSiDe InPutS tO kEeP lIviNG JuSt LiKe tErReStRiAl cOloNieS.” No, they’d ship in a new scrubber and keep the line moving.
Every exploration into hostile environments heavily relies on goods and services imported from the rest of Earth.
These would be the problems that are currently being worked on prior to manned Mars (and to a lesser extent, lunar) missions.
We absolutely will not be shipping containers of food to Mars. That’s absurd.
We absolutely will not be shipping containers of food to Mars.
We absolutely will be. You have no concept of the amount of energy and resources needed to feed a single human being on Earth for one meal, let alone a whole colony on another world without a breathable atmosphere and possibly toxic dirt for an indeterminate time. Farming under the best of conditions is extremely energy consuming, then there’s the need to either import hardware from Earth that is specially made for Mars or go old fashion and do a lot of it by hand. There is no where else in the solar system where you can just throw seeds at the ground in large enough quantities and feed whole cities. I do homesteading, my dad tried to be totally self sufficient foodwise when I was a teen. Guess what? Turns out that’s really, really hard to do. And that’s under the ideal conditions of Earth.
But you didn’t have NASA level technology. There is a lot you can do to increase food production using less space if you’re willing to pay the upfront and energy costs.
I do homesteading,
Lol no wonder you know so little about this
I disagree, I believe we would ship containers of food to Mars in the early days. Just like we do for mcmurdo in Antarctica.
It’s doubtful we’d ship past the initial landing and support phases, which was my point. It’s likely we’d send several ships out for any permanent presence, but 18 months is just too long and too much investment between trips.
If you send say 20 people to Mars, let’s do the math. An average person requires approximately 2 to 3 lb of food per day. 18 months = 6,500 days x 20 people = 131,000 pounds of food, or about 65 tons. You could probably drop the weight significantly by freeze drying it and recycling the water.
In any case, 65 tons isn’t a whole lot - that’s about what, half of a starship payload? Zubrin’s a case for Mars likewise discussed the need to bring all of your food supplies over with you.
Now over many years you could build up enough buy a waste and build a recycling system to start recycling to buy a waste in a greenhouse, but we don’t know how viable like greenhouse on Mars will be for growing food. It’s likely going to have to be more of a grow lab/vertical farm setup. Very energy intensive.
Doesn’t the outer space treaty place similar restrictions on mars?
AFAIK it only prevents weaponization of space.
It also prohibits countries from claiming sovereignty, and it actually used the Antarctic treaty for inspiration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
Which is not to say that it’s exactly the same situation as Antarctica, but the treaties are more similar than you might assume.
Yeah it’s just that the sheer scale of planetary colonization kind of makes this a problem for the year 4,000 or so.
It prohibits countries from claiming sovereignty over territory beyond Earth, but the colonies themselves can still be sovereign. Assuming the treaty continues as it is it just means that countries won’t be able to draw borders around vast lifeless regions on Mars or the Moon and claim jurisdiction over them, they’ll still be able to build cities there and the cities will be theirs to control.
Treaties like these lapse or get amended over time as the realities of life make them obsolete, though. I expect that once there are cities on Mars there’ll be borders as well.
illegal
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 and lack of exploitable resources, meaning a lack of capital. There’s no shortage of capital for the modern space age.
exploitable resource
Yeah… because Antarctica lacks water. And wind energy. And some of the most protein-rich waters on the planet.
Poor, poor Phony Starks… imagine being held back by legislation they could easily bribe into non-existence if they wanted!
Because Antarctica lacks water
We’re not exactly hurting for water
And some of the most protein-rich waters on the planet.
This doesn’t require building a civilization of any sort
We’re not exactly hurting for water
This doesn’t require building a civilization of any sort
I guess you’re the kind of fantasist that believe they invent food at the supermarket, eh?
California is a localized problem, as all water shortages are, because we live on a fucking water planet.
Fishing does not require supermarkets. It requires driving a boat to where fish are, then driving home.
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.
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.
Luckily, that’s one field where we’ve made a lot of progress, we won’t need even close to one hundred years.
I’ve been hearing this “we need a new renaissance” spiel since the 80s. It really sounds like “I’ve got no ideas, so I’ll distract with mentioning a time that is revered for it.” to me nowadays.
“We need a new renaissance” is a dog whistle for “we need a white culture (Rome was a good example) to dominate and destroy the societies adjacent to it again, so that while they are recuperating, rebuilding and repopulating, we will assert our white cultural dominance and leverage that to impose our ideals and religion into every facet of other cultures and then call it a renaissance”.
Notice how you never read about the Islamic renaissance or anything from India, Asia or Africa, or even South American native cultures when “renaissance” is mentioned?
Give me a break.
Maybe some use as dog whistle but I am not. The color or creed of the people who were around during periods of progress is irrelevant to me. I care about the progress.
And Rome had more people of color in positions of power and influence than we can even dream of today. However they did have slaves. Lots of white, Germanic slaves. Google it and chew on that while you think about your accusations of racism.
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.
Once there’s a fully space-based supply chain up and running using materials from the asteroid belt, I strongly question the utility of a Moon colony. Any resource you could find on the Moon that would be necessary to get us out there would also be available in the asteroid belt, and once there’s a pipeline of extraction, processing, and manufacturing in space, there’d be no reason to make an extra stop on the SURFACE of the Moon except to drop off resources for people already living there. It’d be an economic atavism at that point.
Now, using planets and moons for their gravity to park space stations and perform slingshot-type maneuvers, that makes a lot of sense. But we’re all still so stuck in our 20th century imaginations of space colonization being like, idk, settling the Plains but on Mars we can’t think through what a space-based economy would actually look like.
The book’s exploration of what cIty oN mArS would look like is insipid at best. If people settled Mars for some insane reason, it would look like the Expanse – miserable, desperate, nobody lives on the surface, and as soon as the space based economy hits a certain point of development it would be pointless and everyone would realize it. You might have rich people building vacation homes there for the views, that’s it.
Why tf would you figure out how to cope with Lunar and Martian regolith when you could just not?
Gravity is kind of necessary for long term human health though, at least until we figure out a way around that…
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.
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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.
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.
“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.
“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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe, I try not to jump to conclusions based on my speculation on others’ thought processes.
And that’s fine, but don’t assume that’s what people do. You do you. I wouldn’t say otherwise if he hadn’t been explicit about it.
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.
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I’m sure the planet will be fine. It’s the inhabitants that will suffer.
Because the life that formed from this planet is somehow not part of this planet?
Do you even know how much stuff has lived and gone extinct on this planet? This is just a brief snapshot in time.
And at any other snapshot in our planets history, the life that grew on it would still be part of it.
Surprised someone did’t beat you to it
