How do you make a Martian colony self sustainable?

throw people and supplies until it becomes self sustainable on it's own.

>t. 1960s europeans as they plan to ween off of their African colonies

I swear future Mars will be the gibmedats to end all gibmedats

Well it's going to be pretty hard for that to happen if it's privately funded, which if it actually happens, it will be. Governments around the world have simply stopped giving a fuck about space.

It's piss easy!
All you need is to build a few factories:
one to make air, another one to make water, then to make food, pressurized shelters, spacesuits and the most important of all: a factory to build other factories!
Brainlets just don't get it.

You'd need an insane amount of cheap power.

Terraform it.

Once it IS self-sustaining, what form of government should it have?

The one it deserve

one some madman has actually gone and done it (the heavy lifting), governments will get very interested.

Straight and total democracy. If you don't like it, get the fuck off the planet and go find your own. We've got the technology now.

As with every technologically advanced and secular society - Communism.

Minimise nutrients and water needed to grow food ie. use aeroponics.

Send industrial components ie. create a set of fundamental manufacturing tools using all common components. This way lower priority machines could be cannibalised to fix higher priority machines in an emergency.

have at least 160 young adult people on colony. this is the rough minimum to create a viable population going forward.

put habitat underground or covered in a large amount of dirt. Long term radiation exposure sucks. If shielding is cheap and inexpensive maybe use that, but dirt is on location and plentiful, and the machinery used to get it (and thus expand the colony) is useful.

radical centrist anarcho bolshevism

>not alt-left anacho-fascist

3d printing is a thing, if shit breaks, you can print new parts

those nazi salutes tho
redpilled as fuck, I like it

Monarchy obviously, seperation from earth should get rid of this democracy lunacy.

>Martian colony

A colony means they have children and it is multi-generational. A base only has people stationed there for x amount of time, but not their entire lives and they don't reproduce there and raise a family there. Without proper gravity, infants won't develop properly if they even make it to term.

>crops exposed in a greenhouse

I hope they like mutant plants. If the sun is useful enough to allow plant growth like that then the radiation the inside of those greenhouse get will be enough to give people cancer.

Creating a closed biosphere that can provide for several hundred humans in a large underground cave is perfectly possible. Create 20-30 of those biospheres, connect them via hyperloops, and you got a completely self sustaining colony on mars that can grow and slowly but steadily terraform the whole planet.

This is all under the assumption that you can live and reproduce in 0,38g without issues. If this turns out to be problematic, there is really no point to go to Mars.

...

And how do you exactly create them, with the force of your mind?
You need refineries and mines just to have materials, and factories to build the stuff and maintain it.
To be self sufficient means you can do all of that with the people and materials you have.

(((orbital habitats))) and extraction sites on the (((surface)))

Obviously run by AIs with human figure heads pretending to be democratically chosen.

Well, the biospheres and the vacuum tunnels connecting them need to be put in place with help from the outside, but once all that infrastructure is in place the colony should be able to grow and function on its own. It should house ~10.000 people, and should have access to a wide variety of ressources. That should be enough to double its size every generation.

Same way you can build the roosevelt dam with 10 people in a few weeks.
By using imaginary productivity.

Except its a labour force of ~7000 and we are talking about ~50 years and not a few weeks.

>(((orbital habitats))) and extraction sites on the (((surface)))
user gets it. That's why asteroids and planetoids like Ceres are superior option

Whynotboth.mexicanloli

Grow food that’s capable of turning the atmosphere into oxygen. Eat the food while breathing said oxygen. Its not rocket science.

Fully automated luxury liberalism.

Living exclusively in a glorified apartment block will erode the soul of man

lots of pussy to eat, and you fuck cats to make bugs, science yaknow

Source?

oh yeah like all of those imaginary technologically advanced communist secular societies

> imaginary technologically advanced communist secular societies

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norway
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweden

>How do you make an Antarctic colony self-sustainable?
The absolute least amount of The Thing's you can get away with.

Eat your Poo

Drink your Pee

/ThreadOVER

Drill it for resources.

You can really live anywhere else.

Immediatly go full evil overlord.
Dictatorship.
Massive spiraling towers with the latest technology and because Mars is The God of War, declare war on earth and obliterate Terra from orbit. All while watching your enemies shit themselves with terror on livestream.

You can't terraform it. It's too light

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How much shit do we have to throw at it to reach 1g? Can we give it a magnetic field while we're at it?

Christ it's quicker to send a generation ship to some nearby planet.

just live in orbit and work on the surface, we can still terraform it a lot quicker if we just want earth life to live there we can reproduce in orbit and teens can start workin on the surface at like 16 or something.

It's much better this way no matter what you can throw 100,000 habitats into space and host more people than mars. Give them solar panels and eventually fusion reactors and you'll end up with more people living in space than on planets in a couple centuries.

With diversity.

>How do you make a Martian colony self sustainable?
First of all, to bootstrap things you absolutely must have a nuclear reactor. It's the only way to get the necessary power to run the industrial processes you need to process resources. Eventually solar and wind will become major contributions to your power budget, but you can't fabricate solar panels and wind turbines without plastic/chemical/metal industries already up and running. And those industries are going to need fuckloads of electricity.

Sealed reactor units can be made pretty small these days. There should be no issues fitting an entire reactor, turbines, condensers, coolant system, etc in the payload bay of a BFR. Launch an unmanned reactor ahead of the human settlers; if it crashes its not going to contaminate a colony because the colony hasn't been established yet. If it lands safely then when the colonists arrive they can finish the set-up.

With a 20MW or so available, things get a lot easier. You can run large electric (or methane/LOX) earth-moving equipment, which will make digging shelters a lot faster. It'll also allow large scale ice mining. Use said earth moving equipment to dig and transport large volumes of water ice bearing soil to a rotary kiln heated with the reactor's secondary coolant loop. Capture the exhaust gases from the kiln, condense, distill, and purify. As long as the trucks keep feeding the kiln you'll have a steady (if small) stream of new water to for human use, for electrolysis, or for industrial processes.

Next of course is the Sabatier process with cracked water and Mars CO2. You'll want to do fractional distillation of Mars atmosphere to get pure CO2, and also to extract useful stuff like argon and nitrogen which will be required for other key industrial processes. The methane, oxygen, argon, and nitrogen are all going to have to be stored as liquid. Your lander will have some small storage capacity, but you'll want to expand that pretty soon. Doing so will mean starting both a metal and plastic industry.

Hematite is found on Mars in surface deposits, but you basically can't use any terrestrial steel production methods. First of all you don't have coal or coke, so no blast furnaces. Even if you did, oxygen is too precious. Electric arc furnaces need a conductive charge (as far as I know anyway), so plasma torch furnaces are probably the best bet. This is where the argon comes in. Best thing is, is that the furnace should work for just about anything - you're not limited to steel.

Getting the core to produce a good magnetosphere may not be possible, but the moon bombardment is one the best ways to do it.

>How much shit do we have to throw at it to reach 1g?

•Earth's mass is about 5.972 septillion kg.
•Mars' mass is about 0.639 septillion kg.
•You need 5.333 septillion kg of mass added to Mars to reach 1g, theoretically.

•Total estimated mass of all the asteroids in the solar system: 0.28 septillion kg to 0.32 septillion kg
•Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system with a mass just over twice the mass of Earth's Moon. It weighs in at 0.148 septillion kg.
•The 10th largest moon in the solar system weighs in at 0.249 septillion kg and weights go down very sharply after that.

There's only 181 known moons as of 2009 I think. Adding all the moons' mass and all the asteroids' mass together would not equal enough mass to raise Mars to 1g. I don't even think you'd reach 1 septillion kg. you would need to throw an entire planet at Mars. In fact, if you slammed both Venus and Mercury (5.1955 septillion kg together) into Mars, with all the asteroids and moons in the solar system (0.151 septillion kg; 'estimated'), you should be pretty damn close to 1g. That's 5.3465 septillion kg, but only 0.6255 septillion from being the same mass as Earth (just under 11.7% from being Earth mass).

But, gravity doesn't work exactly by mass. Mars and Mercury have nearly the same gravity, but Mars has about twice the mass of Mercury.

>Thus, you can probably slam Mercury into Mars for a combined gravity of 0.755g then add the mass of the moons and asteroids to reach a number very close to 1g.

Recap:
Earth is 1g.
Venus is 0.907g
Mars is 0.377g
Mercury is 0.378g
>Mercury + Mars + all moons + all asteroids = something "close" to 1g.

If you slammed Venus into Mars and nothing else, it'd be 1.284g (100lbs of weight would feel like 122lbs?) Good luck doing either.

>numbers are probably off somewhere due to sources and calculations both being off

The metallurgy is going to be a bitch. Again, nothing terrestrial applies. I don't think anyone has attempted to smelt hematite in a CO2 atmosphere before, and who knows how lower gravity is going to affect the end product. And depending on what kind of steel you need you're going to need to locate other ores, like chromium and nickel. Stainless steel is necessary for cryogenic dewars as far as I know, so you'll need lots of chromium. It's found on Mars, but will it be near your colony site? If not, you're going to have to go find it and transport it back. Site-to-site rocket hops might be necessary.

Assuming the martial metallurgy issues can be resolved, you would need to use the older, ingot mold casting method (at least at first), because continuous casting is not going to be viable. First of all the low gravity would make the structure impractically large, and an entirely new method of cooling would have to be developed without relying on water jets or air-cooling. While the Martian atmosphere is much colder than Earth's, the extremely low density is going to mean it's less effective at cooling the steel, which mean the crust-forming process used in continuous casting is not going to work as well. You'll need to develop an entirely new open mold system that uses a closed coolant loop. It can probably be done, but ingot casting is going to be much easier for a fledgling colony. Once you have ingots, a traditional rolling mill setup should work. Just have to replace water jet cooling of the rollers with an internal water cooling loop.

Lots of potatoes.

I really think it will be better to mine high metal containing asteroids and ship it to where you need it for such things instead of trying to make in on Mars; unless you find actual veins of good ores on Mars of course. All the other problems you listed can be solved easily enough with some engineering. You'd essentially be smelting, melting, and forging in normal atmosphere pressure. With steps that require more gravity, you do them in a centrifuge type setup.

I don't know enough about organic chemistry to feel confident about plastics. I know that methane can be used to make ethylene, but I don't know about other essentials like benzene, toluene, etc. We don't really have to think about synthesizing that stuff on Earth because they're elementary petroleum products. There's so much that a self-sustaining Mars colony is going to need that we derive from petroleum on Earth. Not just materials for construction or electronics, but also consumables for water treatment.

Some stuff you could make, like ethanol from ethylene, then butadiene from ethanol, then synthetic rubbers from butadiene. I suppose there could be ways to make just about anything, but I just don't know enough chemistry to be sure. In any case, you'd need lots of energy and probably an exotic catalyst.

...

There's apparently a lot of iron ores in large surface deposits.

Holy shit. I've never a seen that before. Then there's plenty for iron needs it would seem. We need more rovers for scouting stuff like this.

Also lots of meteoric iron

jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA18387

This is Mars, not India

>if Mars does get colonized and it works there will be an entire generation or 5 making meteorite swords like their favorite jRPG characters use

legit jelly

Shit wrong photo.

nigger what

It won't let me delete the post now.

Post more from the fap folder.

>Fap folder
>Deflated balloons
>Hot n sexy

Now who could argue with that?

But then you have to start terraforming THAT.

>benzene
Synthesis of benzene from methane over a nickel(111) catalyst
pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja00205a043

I came here to jej at u.
And bulli.

That is were 90% of humanity is already living in.
Anyway with enough development you can do it spacious has you desire.

You'd still need to to have common components. If the machine which produces material for the 3d printer breaks (assuming its plausible to easily make on mars) you're fucked if you don't have spares.

>How do you make a Martian colony self sustainable?
You don't. You build an economy that increases and provides outgoing resources that pay for the resources the colony can't produce.

Make it big for a greater margin of error

D-does that mean my soul has already eroded away?

Something totalitarian, because if mandatory maintenance doesn't get done, everyone dies.

Nuclear propulsion and a lot of water

how could anyone fall for this obvious bait

the part you didn't get, obviously

I always thought pic related was an interesting perspective for the human population question.
And as someone who lived in Taipei, big ass asian cities aren't bad places to live.

farm animals

...

>eva suits for kids
wat

National socialist

This confuses me. When they say dense, do they mean that people wold be densely packed in one area? In otherwords, paris would have everyone close enough to sniff each others ass and houston has people yards away from each other?

We have all of that except the volunteer labor force and the autismbox. In socialist countries they had "voluntary labor" too. It amounts to work you have to volunteer for or be arrested for reactionary activities.

I'm pretty sure its as if the global population were to live like the citizens in the city specified.

It is using population density from other locations. Like New York city's population density is 27,000 people per square mile. So, they take all the billions of the people in the world and place them in square miles at 27,000 people per square mile. They'd obviously live in tall apartment complexes like in NYC. If you've ever walked through NYC you know how packed it is. The super city made would feel the same as NYC, but take up more land mass. Thus, on the map in all the people in the world could fit into the state of Texas, at the same time, and feel like they were living in NYC as far as how many people are around them and close to them.

For Paris it would use 21,498 people per square mile, so the super city would take up less space than the super city based on New York.

CAPTLIZM

>Arrays of solar panels.
You should be able to produce solar panels on Mars. Martian soil has silicon dioxide, magnesium oxide, and calcium oxide. With those, plus water, hydrochloric acid (Mars unforunately has excessive perchlorates) and the energy from a nuclear reactor you should be able to produce semiconductor grade silicon, though it might take several extra steps to purify it. The low gravity seems like it would be a real boon to crystal formation.

Getting the chlorine for the acid might be a bitch, as it seems like all the chlorine on Mars is locked up in perchlorates. I guess the viability depends on which is most prevalent. Some perchlorates you can just burn. Some might require bacteria that produce a specific enzyme. I guess if you want to use Martian soil to grow stuff you'd need to get rid of the perchlorates anyway, so industrial scale chlorine production is going to be a byproduct of that.

It seems the common theme with making stuff on Mars is that yes you can do it but it takes a fuckload of energy.

Recycling water and plant materials is enought, problem is you need much water...

It would be good if we could get water from Europe if there is no life water there.

what part didn't I get