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Neal Stephenson too. In 1992, who'd have thought of a cyberpunk world where some rich dude is buying up ancient Sumerian artifacts for nefarious purposes? (Snow Crash) And yet, here we are.
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KSR wrote what was reasonably solid hard SF at the time in designing the initial colonization ship and terraforming program; the biology stuff (anti-aging and brain reset) used to help keep some characters alive for centuries was always a bit iffier. The bigger issue at this point is just that he started writing in the 80's and some parts of his science/tech have become dated since. ex the first Mars ship was build out of US and Soviet Space Shuttle external tanks, and he totally missed the last 20 years of laptops and then phones providing computers everywhere.
Caveat, it's been at least 15 years since I last read the books.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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One person is seven or eight trees’ worth in terms of oxygen. But distance from the Sun will definitely be a factor here.
Martian polar caps are mostly CO2, no luck here. Maybe there is some frozen water underground. Or you can get some water from comets if you can make them crash on Mars.
Sun will be our only energy source so electricity will power everything.
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Tomas Takac wrote: Martian polar caps are mostly CO2, no luck here.
Scientists may not have reached an agreement, or your sources may be outdated, or Wikipedias sources may be outdated: Wikipedia states, in the introduction to the "Mars" article: "The two polar ice caps appear to be made largely of water".
This is so far from my own field of expertise that I will file both alternatives under "Some say this, some say that".
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I checked Wikipedia and the permanent polar caps are made of water ice. The seasonal cover is from frozen carbon dioxide which sublimes in summer. I didn't know that. So you are right, there is enough water for a colony, but you'd need to melt it and transport to the colony in pipe I guess.
I read somewhere there might be underground deposits of water ice which can occasionally melt during summer and even flow on the surface for a while. I don't have any reference for that however.
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Tomas Takac wrote: One person is seven or eight trees’ worth in terms of oxygen.
Thanks! That directly answers one of my intial questions.
Of course this is only a microscopic fractions of the questions that must be answered to build a Mars colony - but on the other hand, the answer has a great value here on earth as well!)
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Fred Pohl's Man Plus covered most of the problems, years decades ago.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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May be an interesting read - but it is classified as science Fiction, not a science.
I pointed to "The World Without Us" because it is classified as Science (although somewhat popularized). The author (and his informants) have not take the freedom to ignore nature's laws when they are a hindrance for the progress of the story.
I haven't read Man Plus, and the book may have a general respect for scientific knowledge, but when it is labeled as fiction, you cannot be certain of it. (And, the Wikipedia article does not give any impression of this story carrying any realism. E.g. the brain is one of they body's major consumers of oxygen, and that will prevail even if you create an artificial body.)
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You're obviously not familiar with Pohl's work. He used to research more stringently than 99% of astronomers, and make up less cr@p than 100% of them.Member 7989122 wrote: the brain is one of they body's major consumers of oxygen
It also consumes (AIRI; can be checked) between 70 and 95% of all the glucose you ingest, depending on what you're doing, and harvesting monosaccharides is a tad more destructive to the plants than just letting them produce O2.
Just find a list (there are probably hundreds of instances of them on-line) of nutritional needs at the biochemical level, and you'll easily be able to roughly classify them according to difficulty.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Ever notice how there's entire flock of people who fawn over every word Elon says without thinking about what he's saying? Yeah, this is one of those cases.
All marketing. No substance.
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: All marketing. No substance.
I don't know about that. While I'm absolutely no fanboi of his, he did deliver on electric cars. And reusable rockets. And his tunnel boring machine.
Any one of these is a lot more than most of his critics may have delivered.
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He said he'd put a million people on Mars by 2050. He didn't say they'd be alive when they got there. It's probably feasible now to put samples of the cremated remains of 1 million people on a vehicle and have it soft land on Mars.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Gary Wheeler wrote: It's probably feasible now to put samples of the cremated remains of 1 million people on a vehicle and have it soft land on Mars.
If crooked politicians can vote the graveyard, why can't Elon? 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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Per Douglas Adams, send the hairdressers and phone sanitizers first .. Oh! and the politicians.
(no offence to hairdressers intended)
Live long and prosper
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Member 7989122 wrote: Can anyone put me on the right track?
420. That is the number Musk derives all his claims from.
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I do believe you are overthinking the problem.
Q: Will Musk succeed at putting even one person on Mars by 2050?
A: No
There. Thinking done.
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No objection.
Myself, I never considered to be anywhere in the neighbourhood of realism. Not by a magnitude or two. But when you meet the fanboys, you often wish you had a checklist to point to, displaying 24 main reasons why the project is completely unrealistic, each of the 24 points certified by an internationally recognized expert.
Okay, okay, I know: Internationally recognized experts don't have a clue when you try to defend your own job in the coal or oil industry; then the experts are just talking bullshit. If you are working with Ovibos moschatus[^], you do not want that work to be turned down, either. But a list of 24 well argued objections would be welcome.
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Quote: Next question: How many plants does it take to produce a ton of oxygen a day? Obviously, a huge pine tree will produce more than, say, a tomato plant. I guess that plants will have to double as both oxygen and food sources; there wouldn't be room of huge forests within that plastic bubble. Do food plants vary a lot in their oxygen prodction capabilities? With Mars being roughly speaking at 1.5 times the Earth's distance from the sun, solar radiation is at 40-45% of Earth levels; I guess that could affect the photosynthesis.
with the use of solar energy collectors and artificial lighting, Earth-like levels can be replicated or increased. but will the 'soil' support terrestrial vegetation ?.
Live long and prosper
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There's non-biological ways to produce oxygen. A few years back I got interested in recycling of CO2 back to O2, and there's multiple paths to do that. There's also other ways to get O2, like by disassociating water.
However, as raddevus pointed out about the biosphere project, making a long term viable environment is hard. The more closed, the harder.
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It takes significant amounts of energy to tear up the bonds between the C and the O2 (and the process is far from 100% efficient). It is like "paying back" the energy you gained by burning the carbon, or the hydrogen.
If you want to do that by electricity from solar panels (with an efficiency in the low 20s - most PV panels sold today are below 20%) you must cover enormous areas with PV panels. We need to calculate the size. And the energy cost of shipping them from earth - I don't think we can expect neither to find the raw materials nor to establish a production plant for PV panels on Mars.
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If you wonder how they'll eat and breathe, and other science facts, repeat to yourself "It's just PR, I really should relax."
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The real problem with this is that, in a colonization situation, you have to rely solely on all the things you bring with you, or on all the things that those things make. Generally, you're talking about a situation in which just about all the components which make up your colony are mission-critical, and there's maybe one or two backups/work-arounds for each one.
It wouldn't take much to kill the colony completely: perhaps two or three simultaneous points of failure - effectively, it's a question of when - not if - you go and kill a whole lot of colonists - perhaps all of them.
We're too used to thinking in terms of living in a relatively robust system which has multiple workarounds built into it to overcome any number of failures; in most cases, you have to actively put yourself into a lethal situation on Earth in order to get killed (statistically speaking, that is).
On Mars, you're in that situation all the time, and you have to actively keep removing yourself from it. Whole different concept.
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SciFi stories are not really meant for the stars, but for our life on earth.
A scaringly high percentage of Western humans seem to believ that if we can simplify the biology to provide us with the life forms supporting us, today, then we can make earth a much more efficient machine for supporting our lives...
Maybe thorough analyses of the vulnurability of a Mars colony can contribute to an understanding of the complex interactions among life forms on earth. You cannot just extinguish a species and clap your hands: It was predator, we are happy that it is gone! The interaction with other species is far more complex.
Biologists know, of course. They have quite good simulation models to tell what would happen if we extinguish, say, the wolf. Their problem is making the general public accept the models, and conclusions, they present. Make people understand the complexity of various forms of life we are dependent on.
I had a mental experience/breakdown several years ago when my car had a collapse, and I failed to fix it myself. That set me thinking of all the different people and professionals I depend on to survive: Car mechanics, plumbers, carpenters, electricians: What if they are not here? How would I manage? To clear up my thoughs, I started writing my own novel about such a situation: All adults aroud me have died from an unknown virus infection, but not me. What do I do now?
The scenario I painted was neither Martian nor Titan, but similar to a worldwide sprean of the Corona virus, or Black Death. I have related to that issue for years, now. One of my conclusions is that most "preppers" don't have a clue. First; What it takes to suvive without the support of a society. Then, and more significant: How to manage a new society, created from the group of people within that bunker of yours.
I think we - as a society - should spend more effort on educating the people at large, "the man in the street", in how things fit together, how they affect each other, how they interact, and how they depend on each other. Thinking back on my own school days, we wasted a lot of energy learning details of isolated system, from how to operate a sawing machine to how to solve differential equations. Teachers of today are of course trained to reject such comments, insisting that today they present it in a wider frame of knowledge. It isn't true. They just widen the scope within their own frame of reference, which is just as narrow as before. They do not extend it beyond that.
As a father, my primary teaching responsibilty was to tell that there is a whole world out there, with a lot more to be discovered. I am not yet into the granddaddy role, but if it comes, I will see my role in a similar way: Those singular pieces of information must be put into a larger framework of interactions and complexities. From my experience as a daddy, I know that kids are far more capable of handling such issues than commonly believed.
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Very good. Yes - Heinlein apparently thought so, too: "specialization is for insects," he wrote, while making his point that one should strive to be able to do anything. As a programmer, I choose to believe that the "perfect programmer" should be able to write software for anything; to do that, he has to know everything - so if the zen is in the journey, then the search for all knowledge is zen itself. Or something.
Sadly, reality is a messy, lethal, unpredictable, entropic affair, and most people are scared to death of it, thus they choose to view a sort of abridged, safe version of it in which they have a soul which lasts forever, and even death can't really hurt them - a shame, because it effectively cheapens one's life to the point of meaninglessness... and other rants.
I guess the point of all that is that you can't educate someone who's frightened enough not to want to learn... and that describes most of the population. Oh well: at least we'll never be unemployed.
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