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Mars and Off Planet Colonization

Discussion in 'SpaceX' started by claytorj, Nov 26, 2013.

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  1. ecarfan

    ecarfan Well-Known Member

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    I see no reason not to believe that humans are not capable of adapting to living on Mars and reproducing, given adequate radiation shielding and the necessary life support systems.

    Obviously the initial cost of establishing a permanent human colony on Mars is huge. But the attraction of inhabiting and ultimately terraforming an entire planet will I think prove an irresistible lure for hundreds of thousands of people over the course of the next few centuries, and that will drive the economics of the project. The human drive to explore and expand is fundamental. It’s the reason that in just about one hundred thousand years humans settled the entire Earth just by walking (except for Antarctica). Now we have vehicles that can take us to almost any point on earth in just hours. Space is next...
     
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  2. ohmman

    ohmman Plaid-ish Moderator

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    From an observer's point of view, it seems that the initial response was a bit condescending itself.
    I don't think Mars or Venus are worth personal disagreements. They're worth respectful debate, though. I think most of us following this thread are excited about exploration, so we're likely to have more in common than most.
     
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  3. jkn

    jkn Member

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    I started to write this late yesterday, so I didn't copy ecarfans post:)

    There is no reason to believe humans could not live and reproduce on Mars, but first we have to develop and test tech enabling that. Those who are going to Mars to learn to live there, will die there. We must first learn to live (= produce energy, air, water, food and almost all equipment needed starting from mining), before going to Mars.

    I don't see how Mars colony could be economically viable. In far future tech will be cheap enough, so that people can go to the Mars simply to get empty planet to live on. For science, mining and manufacturing moons and asteroids are better. Of course there is a small possibility that Mars has life. That must be studied before first manned mission.
     
  4. KarenRei

    KarenRei ᴉǝɹuǝɹɐʞ

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    #244 KarenRei, Dec 18, 2017
    Last edited: Dec 18, 2017
    Everything discussed therein is either current technology or very near-term (and everything is referenced). If you disagree, please be more specific as to what you're referring to.

    Indeed. There's some types of deposits on Mars that might be interesting in the long term (for example, its rate of large bolide deposits seems to be higher than that of Earth), but overburden and other such difficulties make that implausible in the near term, and you'd be better off mining the easiest-to-return minerals (such as platinum group) from asteroids. Mars is also energy poor, while mining is an energy-intensive activity (with high levels of consumables). And even if you're wanting to mine high value density compounds like platinum group minerals, you can't ship them back in PPM quantities; you have to refine them, which is no simple, "easy to establish on Mars" task (also energy intensive, too); on asteroids you can just use a quench gun to shoot sintered ferrous PGM-rich raw material back into an Earth-crossing orbit for aerobraking/aerocapture.

    Venus by contrast is a natural resource treasure trove, with its (highly differentiated) surface baking minerals out of rocks and precipitating them out at different layers. Of particular interest is the extremely high deuterium ratio; around 1 1/2 percent of the hydrogen in Venus is deuterium. So in the process of producing water (from sulfuric acid and free water vapour), you produce deuterium. In the process of electrolyzing hydrogen compounds (whether water or HCl) for nighttime power storage, you separate it. And unlike most of what you might mine in a large bolide deposit (excepting platinum group minerals), deuterium has quite a high value density, and will only become a more important resource in the future. Venus also has far more abundant power (solar, wind) than Mars, which allows for doing energy-intensive activities locally. Deep space has even more energy, of course (say, an orbit closer to the sun), but it doesn't have both energy *and* mineral resources in the same place, nor a colocated naturally hospitable environment for humans (temperature, pressure, radiation shielding, etc)

    Life just makes things worse. If one believes that there may be life on Mars then the concept of colonizing it should be immediately ruled out. If you colonize Mars, you'll be bringing a nonstop stream of live, thriving microorganisms in quantities of many tonnes per year. You'll make it practically impossible to study whatever life may be there - assuming that you don't wipe it out in the process. Or if it's resilent, then you'll be bringing *it* back in large quantities.

    Venus's environment is alien enough that if there's anything living there (e.g. the carbonyl sulfide question), it won't be compatible with Earth life.

    It may be said that "well, we'll just rule out life before we colonize Mars". Well, if so then you better be prepared to wait a century or so, because it's a big planet to look in and most of the advocates for the concept that life may exist on Mars today argue that it may only exist in microclimates. And many of these may be deep underground.
     
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  5. scaesare

    scaesare Well-Known Member

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    Dude(tte)-

    He neither stated that there was uniform opinion on the matter, nor did he suggest you couldn't disagree.

    Chill. It's ok for some folks to want to go to Mars even if others want to go to Venus.

    How about: "Cool, we'll travel to somewhere other than New Jersey for the first time in 50 years... wherever we go we'll set a precedent and learn a lot for the next destination!"
     
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  6. jkn

    jkn Member

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    We are now a step closer for mining on Venus:

    http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/11/armed-tough-computer-chips-scientists-are-ready-return-hell-venus?utm_source=general_public&utm_medium=youtube&utm_campaign=vid-venus-16519

    "For 33 days, the Glenn Extreme Environments Rig (GEER) had run nonstop, simulating an atmosphere at 460°C and flooded with carbon dioxide at pressures that render it supercritical, both liquid and gas. Inside sat two microchips, pulsing with metronomic accuracy. Neudeck was running a clock on Venus, and it was keeping perfect time."

    Video of above article:


    We have deuterium in our oceans. Would it really be cheaper to fetch it from Venus? We don't need quantities of deuterium before fusion reactor. If we manage He3 fusion, we don't need deuterium any more.

    Mars is a large place to scan for life. One Mars base can only study very small area. 100 robot-labs would be much better. Those labs would need remote controllers. Earth is too far away. Permanent research station needs radiation protection, so it must be on moon of Mars. Trip from Earth to surface of martian moon and back requires less fuel than trip to the Moon and back. Travel time is a problem though.

    There is a possibility that Mars has life that is related to life on Earth. If our immune system does not recognize it, it could eat us alive. I admit that this is unlikely.
     
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  7. KarenRei

    KarenRei ᴉǝɹuǝɹɐʞ

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    At the per-kilogram prices Musk thinks he'll get with BFR, yes. Deuterium on Earth is on average 1/150th to 1/240th as concentrated as on Venus, which makes it much more expensive to produce. It's sort of like saying, "We have platinum on Earth too. Would it really be cheaper to fetch it from asteroids?"

    Helium 3 fusion is a gigantic red herring. Just to list a few of the many reasons.

    • Helium-3 fusion is far more difficult than D-T fusion, which we're still working on.
    • If we can manage to do helium-3 fusion, then we can probably also manage p-B fusion, which is even better.
    • Lunar helium-3 is actually not very common - parts per billion quantities, meaning heating vast quantities of regolith to extract tiny amounts.
    • That parts per billion helium-3 is mixed in with parts per million helium-4, meaning that you get an *extremely* diluted product
    • Unlike hydrogen, there are no chemical isotopic separation methods for separating helium isotopes, leaving you with much more expensive / bulky non-chemical means
    • Helium is much more difficult to liquefy and keep liquid than hydrogen, nor does it have any reasonable non-liquid storage mechanisms like hydrogen does. As a gas, tankage mass is many times more than the transport mass.
    • The whole supposed "purpose" of helium-3 fusion is to avoid neutronicity, but neutronicty is a much less significant problem than the high activation energies of helium-3 fusion, and is in many regards an extremely useful "byproduct". Even with the high neutron flux, D-T fusion does not create long-lived waste, as you have full control over what is being hit by that flux.
    Lunar helium-3 is a solution in search of a problem.

    I agree that Phobos and Deimois are oft underappreciated when it comes to Mars ISRU plans. They look to be similar to carbonaceous chondrites, which means probably significant fuel generation potential that's not down in a gravity well.
     
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  8. RDoc

    RDoc S85D

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    All our physiological experience with <1G has been negative. The've been no experiments with gestation of mammals in reduced gravity, much less development of young.

    Perhaps there are individuals who would be willing to experiment with their own children, and grandchildren, to see what happens, but I doubt there are very many such people. For that matter, I'm not sure they should be allowed to try. Getting informed consent from the unborn is tough.

    IMHO, if a Mars colony can't be at least self supporting within a few decades at most, it will be shut down because no nation, or group of nations, on Earth will continue to pay the billions needed to keep it going.

    We can't get it together to deal seriously with global warming, or even maintain our roads and bridges. An ill defined theoretical threat to humanity at some unknown point in the future seems much less compelling when asking for major funding.
     
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  9. ecarfan

    ecarfan Well-Known Member

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    I am not certain that such a colony will require the active financial support of any nation(s) once a reliable transport system has been established.
     
  10. ccutrer

    ccutrer Active Member

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    I think you're trying to say once it's "easy" to get to mars, the people that will pay their own way to mars because they _want_ to go will provide sufficient income to support the colony? (i.e. Elon's $500k per person -- wasn't that his goal?)
     
  11. RDoc

    RDoc S85D

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    Except that we're back to the question of how would it support itself. There's nothing on Mars that can't be done or produced much cheaper on Earth.

    If you're suggesting that tourism is going to support a Mars colony, I'm very doubtful. How is the tourist infrastructure going to be created?Thousands of people per year would have pay a lot more than $500K to go on a minimum 2 year trip, to pay for the trip and support the colony. In event of any problems during the year and a half in space, no medical evacuation flights would be possible. That alone would be a concern for a lot of people with that kind of money. There is no evidence at all that such a market, or anything like it, exists. Antarctic is the closest I can think of, and it's over an order of magnitude cheaper and 2 orders of magnitude shorter.

    If the proposed answer is free land, there's much more free land available on Earth than on Mars. It's just under the oceans. However, it would be much cheaper to develop, there's be no question if people could live there, and there are lots of economic possibilities.

    For that matter, there are several miles of water column available on Earth, not so much on Mars.
     
  12. ecarfan

    ecarfan Well-Known Member

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    I am not suggesting that.

    It’s not about “free land”, either.

    And the Earth’s ocean floor does not seem useful to me as a place for humans to live permanently, even for an enthusiastic scuba diver like me. :D

    The motivation to go to Mars is as I pointed out upthread: the human drive to explore and the need for adventure. Not every human has it, but many do. It’s what motivated early humans to leave Africa and, just by walking, spread across the entire surface of the Earth in less than 100,000 years (except for Antarctica, that took the development of ocean-going ships).

    It’s not any more complicated than that. You are welcome to disagree. But right now there are thousands of people who would enthusiastically volunteer to make the trip to Mars. Some may be naive, many may be unqualified, but many are serious and are highly qualified in terms of temperament and skills.
     
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  13. AudubonB

    AudubonB One can NOT induce accuracy with precision!

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    RDoc - are you familiar with Mr Musk's argument that we need to establish a hard drive backup? You cannot do that on earth, including either Antarctica or the ocean bottom.
     
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  14. ohmman

    ohmman Plaid-ish Moderator

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    I read @RDoc's posts as asking about the incentives to go to/stay on Mars, and I think that makes for a good question. @ecarfan makes the point that some people will do it just to be pioneers. That's probably true, but the initial folks will either need to be incredibly wealthy or privately bankrolled in terms of developing resources, etc. If the former, I don't think there's as much incentive to go. Life here is excellent for someone who is extremely wealthy. Life there would be miserable as one of the early settlers. Not saying that the pioneering spirit wouldn't tip the incentives the other way, just that there isn't going to a population made up from those takers.

    Historically, peoples have migrated due to forcing factors. Famine, tragedy, war, persecution etc. In this case, we're hoping that they will be moving solely due to the collective desire for adventure. It's a bigger ask, and it's vastly more costly than taking a ship across the Atlantic.

    Diversifying where we live is imperative, but the economics also matter. Despite the excellent philosophical arguments in favor of this type of exploration, I haven't read much about the economic incentives. That doesn't mean they're not out there (or even in this thread somewhere). Anyone care to make that side of the argument?
     
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  15. AudubonB

    AudubonB One can NOT induce accuracy with precision!

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    I, for one, am extremely skeptical of the likelihood of Mars being conducive to remunerative mining operations; my very brief arguments are as follows:

    On the plus side, Mars has the advantages of:
    • having a land area approximately equal to that of the Earth's. Subtracting Earth's oceans from its surface area and what remains is effectively identical to that of Mars
    • to the best of our knowledge and in all likelihood, Mars never has been mined
    On the minus side, Mars has the disadvantage of:
    • being tectonically quiescent for the past several billion years. Of the two most productive methods of concentrating metalliferous minerals into sites rich enough to be exploited, the sift-and-enrich grind of tectonic activity - and that being churned by the convective cells that carry material to and from crustal skin and upper mantle - is incredibly productive. But as effective as it is, it also is of such slowness as to be almost incomprehensible to humans - years needed are on the order of 10^7 - 10^9....and Mars is devoid of same
    • lacking water as an erosive, agglomerating and chemically altering medium. Of the two most productive methods of concentrating metallif....(anyone see where I'm going here??? ;). You're way ahead of me)...without the oceanic reservoir of water the Earth hosts, and its concomitant hydrologic cycle, that #2 method also is not available on Mars
    I posit that those two disadvantages staggeringly outweigh the two things Mars does have going for it. Now, this does not in any way negate the other reasons one can make a go of it on Mars; I for one have zero compunctions* about, for example, lassoing a Ni-Fe meteor (rich also in associated Au, Pt, Ir and others) and altering its orbit to crash on Mars; scoop up remains, and I understand the ability to extract CO2 and so forth for use in further exploration of the solar system. But as far as straightforward economic return? No, I don't think so.

    *such a statement subject to mankind's eventual determination that no life exists on Mars, a determination I also suspect will turn out to be the case
     
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  16. Nikxice

    Nikxice Active Member

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    At present we mere humans can throw darts at our solar system looking for answers. For those that have faith in Tim Urban's The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 1 - Wait But Why timeline, perhaps by 2030 Artificial Intelligence combined with the Law of Accelerating Returns can provide us with some convincing and feasible economic incentives for settling Mars.
     
  17. ecarfan

    ecarfan Well-Known Member

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    ”Historically”, yes. But not pre-historically, which is what I was referring to. And I mean tens of thousands of years ago when the human population was very low. But people kept moving, expanding, and learning to adapt to new environments.

    And even speaking historically, humans have been driven to explore regions of the earth not for reasons of economic return but simply because no one has been there before. Antarctica, the Marianas Trench, Mt Everest, the Atacama desert, etc.
     
  18. ecarfan

    ecarfan Well-Known Member

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    Currently Mars lacks surface water. But clearly in the past Mars had a lot of surface water, and likely for millions of years. So the process you referred to was active in the past because we can see the results of it still.

    As for the idea crashing an asteroid onto Mars for the purpose of extracting resources; I think the negative impact on the Martian atmosphere would outweigh the resource availability advantage.
     
  19. AudubonB

    AudubonB One can NOT induce accuracy with precision!

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    Martian surface water might have had the ability to perform some surficial erosive and density-winnowing preferential concentrating; this is true. As such, one might suppose some alluvial gold occurrences could be present.

    Absent the thermal dynamics demonstrated by plate tectonics, however, the quondam volcanic activity that also long ago had occurred is extremely unlikely to have been able to process, so to speak, any meaningful amounts of oceanic sediments. You can suppose some amounts of magmatic differentiation and its exclusionary elemental concentration (again, Au is a prime example), but my argument stands: no banded ironstones, no bauxite deposits, no polymathic carbonate replacement deposits, no volcanogenic massive sulfides....

    I'd not considered any atmospheric effects on flinging down asteroids! However, given the relative proximity of Mars to the asteroid belt, I could see that there might have been a higher frequency of such collisions over the aeons AND the lessened crustal churning that I bemoan above could provide a benefit when searching for same.
     
  20. ecarfan

    ecarfan Well-Known Member

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    I had to look up “quondam”. ;)
     

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