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So 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.
I'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.
I 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.
There's no earthly reason to make people live in the Atacama, but then again, there's no reason to send people to Mars, either.
So 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.
Technically the sole inhabitants of Mars are robots so you're not too far off.
mhh 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…
This is because of the square-cube-law. Basically, muscle strength is proportional to cross-sectional muscle area, while muscle weight is proportional to volume. So when you take e.g. an insect and start scaling it up, it gets heavier faster than it gets stronger, thus strength relative to weight decreases.
But: I'd seriously doubt that wasps can mine more than an excavator.
Let's take e.g. a Caterpillar 300.9D excavator (weighing 950 kg, same as about a million wasps). That excavator can lift 100+ kg with every swing of the bucket, so if you assume the wasps dig 30x their body weight, the excavator beats the wasps if it can dig more than 300 buckets in one day. That sounds easy - there are 480 minutes in an 8 hour working day, and a bucket each minute is very doable. And on Mars you'd have it fully robotic running 24/7.
The 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: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8985151
I 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.
The Antarctic is a poor analogue, since it has abundant water and food. The Atacama desert might be a better one. There's no earthly reason to make people live in the Atacama, but then again, there's no reason to send people to Mars, either.
I'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.
Semiconductors are one of few products that are so value dense ($/kg) that you can ship them from Earth for a reasonable marginal price. It's everything else with a long production chain (or very large upfront costs, like mining) that's infeasible to do on Mars without 1M+ people.