Colonizing Mars

These enormous sci-fi cylinders with the inside walls covered in farms and lakes never will because it's an utterly insufficient return on the expense of resources, energy and effort, but I can see us eventually taking up residence in rotating rings or large pods on a rotating stick with a counterweight, possibly for purposes of asteroid mining.

I believe to remember that a diameter of somewhere around 450 meters is sufficient to prevent motion sickness in nearly all people based on current medical understandings, and such a station would be a minor undertaking compared to settling on a celestial body.

One idea i've had for plant growth is to avoid the use of domes since they're vulnerable to atmospheric weathering and make the people going into them and the palnts growing within have to be exposed to quite a bit of radiation. Instead of having them in domes,you build your greenhouse underground and take sunlight to it using fiber-optic cables, which are much easier to produce on mars than a large, pressure-rated transparent dome, don't expose the plants to any significant amount of radiation, and let you gain the advantage of underground radiation shielding while still being naturally lit and do not need a dedicated power-grid draining source of artificial light like if buried plants wre lit solely by LEDs. you could also modify the system with back-up LEDs if a dust-storm blocked off most sunlight for some time.

>utterly insufficient return on the expense of resources, energy and effort
Unless space to live becomes extraordinarily valuable.

Nice dub 551a by the way.

No way to know until we get there. Some things are just unpredictable. For example, the Mars base will need electronics, but we can't know what it will take to make more because some of the processes for making electronics are proprietary. We might also run into problems that cannot be foreseen.

Mars colonization is basically illegal by the planetary protection treaty. We cannot currently rule out the existence of life on Mars. As such, any human habitation on Mars would contaminate the environment and prevent us from ever knowing if there was life on Mars.

a baseless assumption

Correction: Mars colonization is basically illegal by the planetary protection treaty with the current understanding of Mars. However it is inevitable that at some point either life on Mars will be found or life on Mars will be ruled out. The only uncertainty is how much time will pass until that point.

Here is a good link for Mars composition.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_Mars

The rotating sticks become unstable and rotating tubes that are too long also become unstable. The best shape is basically a torrid. The internal structure would be like an onion, where each level would experience a different "gravity" but would make better use of space. Regardless, any spinning object with a hole in the middle may very well have lakes, trees, buildings simply as entertainment for when people come up from the lower levels.

I've been considering many things with light and growing crops. The amount of light Mars receives versus what is needed to shield out radiation means there's a point where it may not be feasible. You may get ambient light for people to see and use, but not enough for plants to grow. I feel the same thing will apply to using fiber optics due to the nature of fiber optics. They'd be fine for human use light I'm quite sure.

As for power, I think using nuclear power via RNGs would probably work well.

I agree with everything. Barring problems with gravity harming health, I think everything can be done. Otherwise, its back to spinning something in space. I think resource refining will be the biggest hurdle. As in, well there be concentrations of metals/ores high enough to replace the wear and tear on the machines that are mining, processing, and manufacturing?

Electronics design won't be a problem.

The treaty simply won't matter when you throw enough money at it.

I'd call it reasonably cautious rather than baseless. The bottom line is that we can't send settlers to other planets until we know what the changing gravity will do to the human body.

Electronics design isn't the point. We need technology to survive in space Much of the processes to produce this technology are proprietary, so we cannot plan out a self sustaining Mars base because we don't know what processes are required.

That isn't a problem since you can simply purchase that information. We aren't sending reality TV contestants up there or anything (yet).

>The best shape is basically a *toroid.
I wasn't really intending to specify how thick or thin such a ring would be. Could be more ring-like, could be more donut-like. Of course it would be a waste of space and an engineering challenge to only make it one level. You could have a number of levels of similar gravity for human habitation (around a dozen at 1g +/−10%, and then further greenhouse levels and research levels or power generation levels at lower gravity. Maybe it would even be nearly disc-like. What you can't do however are lakes in the middle because the middle will be zero gravity.

It wouldn't be the exact middle and how large it is will also determine how far away from the center the first layer would be.

Also, check this out if you've not seen it already. The station design is the best part. I don't recommend going past that.

highfrontier.com/

Oh but we need this information to figure what we need to mine in the first place to make a sustainable Mars base. For example, maybe we need a significant amount of an element that is difficult to obtain on Mars just for the tooling to produce the technology we need to survive.

I've always wondered about the composition of planets as you go outwards on an accretion disk. Generally, the most valuable elements are heavier, so you'd think that they'd comprise the outer planets more. There's a high probability that there are significantly more radioisotopes on mars than there are on earth, so nuclear power would probably be the most feasible means of energy generation.

This conversational loop should have ended when it was stated that you can purchase that information. Electronics isn't magic. If it was, China wouldn't be able to steal everyone's stuff and make cheaper versions.

Fuck the treaty, a piece of paper is not going to hold us back from our manifest destiny.

I like it

Whoops! You seem to be in violation of international law by attempting to launch shit factories to Mars. All your launch assets and ground facilities have been seized. If you attempt to launch you will receive a FREE Orbital ATK (TM) THAAD interceptor in your first stage fuel tank

Good luck with that in the face of billions of dollars in lobbying.

Yeah like people are going to spend billions of dollars lobbying to overturn a well established treaty, just to colonize mars. Where is the money in colonizing mars?

That is literally what will happen, but only if colonizing it is viable health-wise.

>Where is the money in colonizing mars?

The payoff is not dying if something happens to Earth suddenly. As is in something worse than what Mars is right now.

Are you joking? If transport can be sorted there will be loads of big companies gagging for the chance to setup or Mars, this is not to mention the massive inflow of cash that Musk or whoever else will get in the form of deposits for rides to Mars. It's all about long term investments my man.

>>The payoff is not dying if something happens to Earth suddenly
where's the MONEY in that?
>>If transport can be sorted there will be loads of big companies gagging for the chance to setup or Mars
that's just a baseless assumption

>where's the MONEY in that?

It will all be on Mars for a start. At least all viable currency.

by the time we have the technology and capability to do this we really aren't going to need planetary colonies anymore

It's not fucking baseless. Take a look at literally any colonisation effort in the history of man. It's all funded by companies looking to get in nice and early as well as private emmigration funding.

I think you misunderstood the rhetorical question, where is the profit in starting a mars so as to not die in the incredibly rare event that something happens to the earth that does not somehow take out mars?
History doesn't necessarily repeat itself. Things could be different this time due to the complete lack of basic resources like breathable air. It is still very much an assumption.

You underestimate people's want to live longer and have their children live longer on down the line. People with exceedingly long term goals who have money see things like this.

And how big is that market? And how are you going to get the money to lobby to even go to Mars before you have customers?

Due to the lack of atmosphere and complicated control systems required there will be MORE need for infrastructure and expensive works which means big money which means investments and returns.

and if there aren't people there in the first place, then there's no market for such things.

>Be Elon Musk
>Announce tickets to Mars for a deposit
>Suddenly have fucking huge cash injection to lobby politicians (Which I might add are very cheap to buy)
>Companies see massive cash injection and get a hard on providing a whole planet of infrastructure contracts
>Lobby government themselves too

Are we in the same time line? Because in my timeline, this shit is already beginning. Also, do you even know how economies work?

>And how big is that market?

All you need is one person with enough money and that has already happened.

>how are you going to get the money to lobby

Already done; PayPal.

>before you have customers?

Already lined up.

>how are you going to get the money to lobby
>Already done; PayPal.

And Amazon!

Musk hasn't started lobbying to take down the Outer Space Treaty though. Also might I remind you that Red Dragon got cancelled?
arstechnica.com/science/2017/07/spacex-appears-to-have-pulled-the-plug-on-its-red-dragon-plans/

BFR

As long as you can gather and intensify the light before it goes into the fiber it should do fine for crop growth, just have to make sure the light is still rich in different wavelengths for plant health.

It's more complex than that,but we have no reason to think mars doesn't have similar amounts of various heavy metals. indeed,gold and silver are probably a LOT easier to find on mars since it hasn't been mined for thousands of years like earth.

you are close to understanding but not quite there.

What is an economy? it's a system for giving people what they WANT. If you can make people WANT something, you can control an economy, direct it. Hate on jobs all you want, i hate his products, but by god that motherfucker could make people WANT shit. If you get people to want to go to mars then the money will follow them there and economies will grow, both internal to mars and external to earth.

Imagine if someone,a master sculptor,went to mars, used a martian rock to make a beautiful statue, and then put it up for sale here on earth at auction. It would probably sell for a half billion dollars. Why? No one needs it! But people would WANT it. That's a good example. Humans are not logical creatures. we are passionate. I KNOW mars is going to be a harsh,dangerous place of challenging work and exploration,but i would go there in a heartbeat because i value the act of exploring a new place a great deal. Giving people these values, infecting them with a mind-virus, is already happening with these very popular rocket launches.

When you start to do things like trying to concentrate light and transmit it, you start running into lots of problems with how light works.

The main thing here is what you essentially have is a really tiny window that's really thick. Instead of trying to concentrate more light into the small window, why not just make the window much wider? Well, you can, but due to internal reflection requiring a narrow fiber you can just add lots more fibers to make a larger window and omit the concentration step. Then you are back to the radiation problem again.

these things have already been made
youtube.com/watch?v=TqC4R0IcZ_k
youtube.com/watch?v=chI-bUl0s7Q

There's no reason this wouldn't work for mars, you could even bounce in extra sunlight using mirrors if you wanted. I don;t understand your objection, the radiation isn;t an issue since you can bend the cabel so there is no path for it to "leak" down into the greenhouse.

but how are you going to make that on mars? How are you even going to determine if you can make that on Mars? You can't because the manufacturing processes for fiberoptics are proprietary.

but if those things are illegal by international treaties, it's pretty fucking hard to change that.

We could, however modify our genome if we could figure out exactly what effect the low gravity had and what to do to counter it.

Stations can die pretty easy, colonization with mini colonies would also be weak, but terraforming could work.

But user, there is no copyright law on mars :P

seriously doe, it's glass nigga

>>Stations can die pretty easy
then don't have just one station, have a bunch.
>>terraforming could work
yeah in centuries time.

chinese, american, and european space agencies are getting serious about space, as are private businesses. Treaties can be rewritten.

But when would it become more valuable than poor people's lives?. Not morally, but financially

We could easily figure it out by sending long term teams of people and studying them

>fiberoptics are proprietary.

In science class in the 1980s we learned to make fiberoptics.

Now you have a radiation problem again. Also, radiation doesn't follow an fiber optic line like light does. So, having one or a couple fibers is fine, it will just absorb into the walls. It is when you have tons of them and you start poking too many holes into your shielding for them that hings become a problem.

lol Not with money it isn't.

>terraforming could work.

Please read: & >when would it become more valuable than poor people's lives?

Back when poor people were invented.

copyright is not the issue. Because the processes for making fiberoptics are proprietary we cannot currently assess what is needed to make them on Mars which is what we need to do to make a sustainable Mars base. It is not just glass. We may need certain rare elements like platinum and rhodium to work the glass at scale.(technology.matthey.com/pdf/pmr-v31-i2-054-062.pdf) What's important here is not that we need these elements, but how MUCH we need, and how much we need to replace them. We need this in order to have this thread and glass companies are not necessarily going to give away trade secrets.
>>In science class in the 1980s we learned to make fiberoptics.
yeah, but not at scale which is what you'd have to do for a mars colony

It's not just fiber optics though, it's EVERYTHING a Mars base needs. This is greatly complicated because because we don't know how much of what we need. We don't know how fast people are going to go through resources like space suits and what not and really can't know until we send people to Mars.

Well you ship all the complicated stuff there
But you can make the bulk materials on mars, the glass, the steel, the water, the methane fuel, carbon composites, rubber, oil, etc....

There is lots of stuff you don't NEED
Such as fiber optics for example.

Jesus, do you not know how anything works in business? If you need something, you buy it. If you need something designed, you pay someone to design it. If you need something someone else has designed, you pay someone to reverse engineer it or you flat out buy it.

>>Well you ship all the complicated stuff there
that's not self-sustaining

It's just part of the process, first you setup the manufacturing base for large scale, simple, heavy items so they don't have to be shipped at tremendous cost. Once that is set up then manufacturing for micro components can be organised. As far as we know, all the elements in some form are present on Mars much as they are on Earth, it is a matter of finding and extracting them. Remember Mars hasn't had thousands of years of strip mining so there should be copious resources very easily accessible.

Until there are millions of people there, you don't have the demand or the people to be running production lines for stuff like fiberoptics. Wireless will do just fine.
You are never going to be building electronics on Mars, at least for the foreseable future, because you are months away from the real market & you will always be behind manufacturers on Earth

The #1 issue faced will be developing machinery that doesn't run on proprietary hardware, software, and is customizable on Mars.

>self-sustaining

That comes later.

>Wireless will do just fine.

They were talking about using fiber optics for getting sunlight underground. A mirrored glass rod will do the same thing.

If Mars developed and produced their own standardised, modular technology with free as in freedom software I would be off this rock as fast as I can buy a ticket. I hate this non-standardised planned obsolescence proprietary bullshit that permeates every fucking device I have to deal with.

You should look into "Open Source Hardware" technologies. There's quite a few DIY wiki for such things where people share schematics and help flesh out better designs for all manner of devices and equipment. There's even one wiki dedicated to farm equipment.

oshwa.org/definition/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_hardware_projects

I agree a colony on another planet should have such a system. It would greatly help if and when things go wrong or need to be changed on the fly. Even people on Earth can make the same thing at home and give feedback and design changes.

>The rotating sticks become unstable and rotating tubes that are too long also become unstable

source for the stick? as far as I know stick is a stable shape for rotation

>As for power, I think using nuclear power via RNGs would probably work well.

RNGs are too weak, NASA is already researching Kilopower reactors for space, this concept should scale up to a megawatt, and you need a megawatt or more to manufacture enough propellant anyway

You could probably build a small scale O'neill cylinder with the hundreds of billions that a self-sustainable mars colony would cost, and there you would have 1g and you could fly it around the solar system as you please. Theoretically even strap some nuclear fusion engines on the back of that baby, and you got a generation ship to travel to other solar systems with.

this is how a realistic rotating space station looks like

Isn't there a need for an equal counter rotating weight to prevent some sorta spin?

>less than 0.4g won't be sufficient to sustain current human physiology
Why do you need 1g bones on a world with less than 1g?

It depends on how long it is, if I recall correctly. It has to do with Dzhanibekov effect/Tennis racket theorem I think, but that's probably not all.

I was thinking more along the lines of spreading out the power stations so that there's a lot of redundancy in case of failure or even general maintenance.

Because it can mean the difference between normal bones and powdery bones. There are some pretty nasty brittle bone diseases that are not solved even by living in 0g. It is pretty horrific as it sounds.

why colonize mars when we could colonize Venus

Better resource management on Mars.

Planetary protection will prevent any attempts at colonization/manned missions, and likely impose strict limits on robotic ones. They are already arming up in response to spacex's achievements.

Because you're not colonizing Venus, you're merely floating around on top of it in glorified research stations with external supplies. Unless of course you can figure out a way to robotically mine for resources on the 730 K hot surface. Even then I doubt that any human settlements would ever become completely self-sustainable, they'll probably all rely on trade of missing resources between one another.

>Planetary protection will prevent any attempts at colonization/manned missions, and likely impose strict limits on robotic ones.
Fucking nofunners. Brah you can't go there, you'll disturb the non-existent ecosystem!

Oy vey think of the rocks!

Sure thing, kid.

We, therefore, the representatives of this Martian colony, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the universe for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by the authority of the good people of this colony, solemnly publish and declare, that Mars is, and of right ought to be a free and independent planet; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the United Nations of Earth, and that all political connection between them and the planet Earth, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as a free and independent planet, have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent planets may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

not if the shape of the station is inherently stable under rotation, and short cylinders are

>six months later

>These enormous sci-fi cylinders with the inside walls covered in farms and lakes never will because it's an utterly insufficient return on the expense of resources, energy and effort,
Farms and lakes are meme from artists, "insufficient return" has no real meaning.
The objective is colonization itself, which means trying to reach self-sufficiency.
About the resources, it's not really different from building enormous sci-fi pressurized domes on mars, and if you add centrifuges to fight low gravity it's exactly what you would do in space, only in space it works better.
For example when you put in rotation the colony it will go on basically on its own, and the design is a lot simpler.
Mars offers what exactly? insufficient gravity? You don't want that.
Water? Maybe, but our solar system is actually already full of water in very low gravity.
I don't know if we will ever colonize anything outside of earth, but I'm willing to bet that if we ever will do it it won't be a planet or a moon.

But it is

Good luck with assembling habitat from nothing and making production line in zero g.

Insufficient return in supplying the self-sufficiency effort in relation to the resources invested. Space habitat farms, if anything, will look like this, not like terrestrial surface farms next to lakes.

Gee i wonder why we havent.

More space habitat farming. Proteins are important. Hakuna matata!

yum

NASA built ISS without rotating wheel to specifically study effects of microgravity on human body, not because they couldn't make it technically.