Living on Mars: The Stuff You Never Thought About
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Re: Living on Mars: The Stuff You Never Thought About
#2mhh if only someone owned a rocket company AND a boring company.
Re: Living on Mars: The Stuff You Never Thought About
#3mhh if only someone owned a rocket company AND a boring company.
I think we need biologically inspired robots. Have you seen a ground digger wasp (Eastern Cicada Killer)? They can mine many times their body weight in hard soil each day.
Landing pods on the surface and then covering them in regolith is going to call for heavy machinery. A boring machine is also heavy machinery. These cost an enormous amount to get to Mars. But insect-like robots over a large timescale could do the work at a lower cost.
Re: Living on Mars: The Stuff You Never Thought About
#4Very cool article! It will certainly be interesting to see how we get around these hurdles. The most interesting one to me was definitely the lack of being able to electrically ground anything, we will definitely have to design newer electrical motors etc to get around that!
Re: Living on Mars: The Stuff You Never Thought About
#5I've thought about a lot of things... think of the massive supply chain that would be needed to build semiconductors, for example. Or even something simple like... cheese. There's a reason Musk estimated that a million people would be needed for a fully self sufficient colony.
Re: Living on Mars: The Stuff You Never Thought About
#6mhh if only someone owned a rocket company AND a boring company.
I think we need biologically inspired robots. Have you seen a ground digger wasp (Eastern Cicada Killer)? They can mine many times their body weight in hard soil each day. Landing pods on the surface and then covering them in regolith is going to call for heavy machinery. A boring machine is also heavy machinery. These cost an enormous amount to get to Mars. But insect-like robots over a large timescale could do the…
insects also reproduce to account for death, requiring food sources, which there are none of on Mars
Re: Living on Mars: The Stuff You Never Thought About
#7mhh if only someone owned a rocket company AND a boring company.
I think we need biologically inspired robots. Have you seen a ground digger wasp (Eastern Cicada Killer)? They can mine many times their body weight in hard soil each day. Landing pods on the surface and then covering them in regolith is going to call for heavy machinery. A boring machine is also heavy machinery. These cost an enormous amount to get to Mars. But insect-like robots over a large timescale could do the…
sure, we'd need: digging, shoveling, flattening, sintering robots etc.
but surely we could send 1 boring machine (a small one about 2 meter wide) and bored a shaft straight down, for the first base.
Re: Living on Mars: The Stuff You Never Thought About
#8I remember a talk by a NASA guy that a first try would be to land some people with limited supplies on the Antarctic and let them live autonomously for a few years. He said before we go to Mars we need the ability to do this easily.
Re: Living on Mars: The Stuff You Never Thought About
#9So basically Mars would be a prison, with robots doing most of the work. Might as well just send the robots and leave the humans on Earth. If people want to live in a cave they can do that here.
Re: Living on Mars: The Stuff You Never Thought About
#10The lower gravity than Earth bit sounds like the most debilitating thing about Martian colonization. One of the reasons why I think Venus cloud cities would be a better long-term bet for baseline humanity: