A City on Mars: Reality kills space settlement dreams
3 years ago by meyotch to c/technology
A book review on the latest Weinersmith creation. It’s true, there is so much we don’t know.
Just throwing this out there on this forum because missing technology is the problem that kills the dream of Mars, according to the authors.
One of the things standing in the way of an"civilization" on Antarctica is that it's illegal to build a civilization on Antarctica. We could absolutely do it, assuming we were willing to fight a war and the resources were worth it
They would ship in a new scrubber but could they? We have to assume that a colony might need to self subsist for long periods, at least as long as Biosphere 2 was running, because of the practical considerations in shipping replacement parts to Mars.
Biosphere 2 is a great story and I wish there were more follow ups. They tried to set up favorable initial conditions and then seal the hatch. They found that the environment inside shifted and became inhospitable. The crops they planned on didn’t all sustain. Then they called it all off.
What if they had allowed the biosphere to keep shifting until it found its equilibrium point, and then set about finding advantages in that? Crops that would sustain in that?
An iterative process could build on mistakes and learnings. A one-shot, naive, all-or-nothing attempt where your starting conditions have to be just right… no wonder that it failed, but where was the next iteration? Why give it all up instead of tuning? I know it’s about money, but I wish someone with money cared enough to keep this thread going.
That's not why it failed:
"The vast majority of Biosphere II was built out of concrete, which contains calcium hydroxide. Instead of being consumed by the plants to produce more oxygen, the excess carbon dioxide was reacting with calcium hydroxide in the concrete walls to form calcium carbonate and water."
In any case, it is still in operation.
Every exploration into hostile environments heavily relies on goods and services imported from the rest of Earth.
These would be the problems that are currently being worked on prior to manned Mars (and to a lesser extent, lunar) missions.
We absolutely will not be shipping containers of food to Mars. That's absurd.
We absolutely will not be shipping containers of food to Mars.
We absolutely will be. You have no concept of the amount of energy and resources needed to feed a single human being on Earth for one meal, let alone a whole colony on another world without a breathable atmosphere and possibly toxic dirt for an indeterminate time. Farming under the best of conditions is extremely energy consuming, then there's the need to either import hardware from Earth that is specially made for Mars or go old fashion and do a lot of it by hand. There is no where else in the solar system where you can just throw seeds at the ground in large enough quantities and feed whole cities. I do homesteading, my dad tried to be totally self sufficient foodwise when I was a teen. Guess what? Turns out that's really, really hard to do. And that's under the ideal conditions of Earth.
This is one of those things that will need baby steps.
— using local water and dirt are probably a minimum for any non-trivial stay
— yes we really need to be able to grow our own food, at least if we want to scale up from a temporary base for a handful to something larger or more permanent. Again, this is one of the things we probably need to go there to find out: is it possible to grow a lot of our own food?
I disagree, I believe we would ship containers of food to Mars in the early days. Just like we do for mcmurdo in Antarctica.
It also prohibits countries from claiming sovereignty, and it actually used the Antarctic treaty for inspiration.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty
Which is not to say that it’s exactly the same situation as Antarctica, but the treaties are more similar than you might assume.
illegal
Oh, right... that is what has stopped the Phony Starks from building capitalist Utopia in Antartica - it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that it's utterly inhospitable to human civilization at all.
exploitable resource
Yeah... because Antarctica lacks water. And wind energy. And some of the most protein-rich waters on the planet.
Poor, poor Phony Starks... imagine being held back by legislation they could easily bribe into non-existence if they wanted!
That’s a good point. There is at least as much to learn from Antarctica as from Mars. Maybe less maybe more, but certainly more relevant since it’s on Earth. Plus easier to get to than Mars. Yet we can’t scrounge up enough to keep a larger presence there.
Sometimes I can’t shake the feeling that we are living in another dark age. We need a real renaissance to shake it.
We need a real renaissance to shake it.
One of the mandatory precursors to that is a major Hundred Years war that kills lots of people and displaces even more.
Luckily, that's one field where we've made a lot of progress, we won't need even close to one hundred years.
I've been hearing this "we need a new renaissance" spiel since the 80s. It really sounds like "I've got no ideas, so I'll distract with mentioning a time that is revered for it." to me nowadays.
"We need a new renaissance" is a dog whistle for "we need a white culture (Rome was a good example) to dominate and destroy the societies adjacent to it again, so that while they are recuperating, rebuilding and repopulating, we will assert our white cultural dominance and leverage that to impose our ideals and religion into every facet of other cultures and then call it a renaissance".
Notice how you never read about the Islamic renaissance or anything from India, Asia or Africa, or even South American native cultures when "renaissance" is mentioned?
i mean shoot, mars is actually kinda worse than the moon in some ways. Like, the worst of both worlds except 'worlds' pertains to 'celestial bodies in general'. You have the same ultrafine toxic razor sharp dust that gets everywhere, sticks to everything, and destroys mechanical joints on contact, but on MARS it gets blown around by dust storms that blot out the entire sky sometimes for months or years on end, whereas on the moon it only redistributes and resettles due to electrostatic repulsion (due to solar radiation).
Mars' atmosphere is just thick enough to be a hassle for creating risk of burning up on reentry but still too thin to reliably drag-brake so you end up having to thread a much more annoying needle with respect to approach velocity, whereas on the moon it's just straight up active thrust descent every time you're landing.
In both cases, living on the surface is a sucker's game and the only viable option would be to tunnel down beneath into the regolith where a sufficient rock barrier will block enough of the solar and cosmic radiation to not drastically shorten your lifespan.
Furthermore the energy cost to get a payload from earth to mars is LITERALLY ASTRONOMICAL whereas escaping the moon's relatively weak gravity well to reach almost anywhere else in the solar system (including mars) is dwarfed by the oomph it takes to climb out of the earth's gravity well in the first place alone.
I'd go so far as to say that a mars colony would never be viable until and unless we have a viable lunar colony
but make no mistake, a lunar colony is mandatory if we ever want to explore the rest of the solar system or not have all our eggs in one basket as a species. the moon is practically MADE OF the infrastructure we'll need across the entire solar system,some assembly required. The amount of Aluminum and Silver waiting for us in that silicate regolith will be instrumental, especially because smelting and building up there will be drastically cheaper than manufacturing shit down here and then having to carry it ALL THE WAY UP ALL OVER AGAIN.
and like, that isn't even factoring sending any of what's produced back to earth, because even that might be a waste of effort when everything we could ever BUILD outside our gravity well is worth more being up there just by virtue of the fact that we didn't have to pay through the nose to SEND IT.
Gravity is kind of necessary for long term human health though, at least until we figure out a way around that...
The most not caveat is we don’t know how much gravity is how necessary. We know that microgravity in orbit is too little and not really sustainable. Is gravity on the moon enough more for long term health? Is that on Mars? That’s just two of the questions we can’t know until we get there
So you build spinning space stations instead of settlements on the martian or lunar surface. Likely close to the same material cost, if not cheaper, while allowing us to actually choose the amount of gravity to generate. We don't know if martian or lunar gravity would even be sufficient to avoid negative health affects.
You do realize that Martians abandon Mars because the protomolecule opens up worlds that are already habitable, so terra forming becomes pointless? It has nothing to do with infrastructure or economy, Mars is supposed to be an eventual second home, not a place to mine. They leave because interstellar travel becomes a reality before Mars becomes viable.
Unless we discover that Charon is actually a Mass Relay, Mars is the best possible second place for humans.
Titan is too cold and the atmosphere would require a full changeover, and the Galilean moons are constantly bombarded with radiation, Venus could support a floating colony but thats tenuous at best. Mars is basically it, if we can develop the tech to turn it into a reasonable place to be.
But gravity may be useful in many applications. We don't really know how to effectively manufacture many things in microgravity at the moment. The moon would still be important for early space infrastructure.
Edit: In addition, the moon will be useful for mining and resource extraction for a long time, most likely, due to its proximity to earth and size.
The gravity problem is also best solved away from the surface of any celestial bodies. Massive spinning space stations would be much more pleasant to live in in almost every way. Unless a planet or moon has a good reason to land on it (e.g. material to be mined) it makes much more sense to simply build a habitat away from the gravity well and build smaller work camps on the surface that can be supported by the main habitat(s).
The problem is that such space stations are very complex to build and maintain, and can more easily catastrophically fail. It's certainly an option, but it may not be worth it.
Of course, all of this is speculation, but my point is mostly that if we don't have sufficiently advanced space construction capabilities, surface habitats and infrastructure on the moon may be preferable.
It is also about the same delta-V to go from the surface if the earth to the surface of the Moon OR Mars. At least Mars has water.
Do not colonize other planets. They suck. They have all the downsides of space habitats (needing sealed environment, etc), while also adding more (breaches now let in toxic dust instead of vacuum, cannot control gravity via spin, etc).
Just build O'Neil cylinders. If you can't do that, maybe work on stabilizing the ecosystem we evolved to live in. Nowhere will ever be better than here, folks.
Lol
The whole concept behind colonizing a planet is to be able to exploit the resources.
Which you cannot do with an O'Neal Cylinder. Since you have to manufacture it yourself.
There is so much about the cylinder concept that hasn't been thought out, it's just an insane undertaking even if it could all work. It started as a joke, but hey maybe one day someone will prove it to be a better reality.
Is anyone really thinking we just need to reach Mars, then immediately set up a colony? No, reaching there is obviously only a first step, but once we can reach it, we can try things to see if we can live there. For myself, I’ve been saying we need to hurry up and reach Mars because we have like 100 years of work before we can establish a colony so let’s get started
I don't disagree that having a self sustaining population of humans somewhere other than earth will be an important milestone.
But a much more pressing milestone is a the first self sufficient population, which I don't see mars supporting
We don’t know if a self-sustaining population is possible anywhere other than Earth. However we know lack of gravity is one issue we don’t have a workaround for. Mars is the only “large” gravity we can possibly reach with our current level of technology
If we’re going to get anything useful out of mining (other than just building material), it’s going to be incredibly sparse. I think we need to start asap working on robotic mining vehicles to wander around collecting and refining useful stuff. By the time we send people, we ought to have spent years collecting tankfuls of oxygen and water, caches of refined ores, piles of bricks and pavers (maybe even sheds/garages), maybe even sheets of crude solar cells, miles of wire.
Navigation and communication will be crucial, so we need to lead with a constellation of gps/communications satellites so no matter where you are, you know your location, can reliably contact your base, and even all back to earth. We’ll want many automated weather and seismic stations that need to send a flood of data somewhere
"We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard." -JFK
Space is inhospitable to human life, but look at the countless inventions and benefits we've gotten from exploring space, the moon, etc. Humanity will continue to grow, learn, and try new things regardless of what the pessimistic Weinersmiths believe.
Im a little bit disappointed, i was expecting things that where only possible because of research made in space, not things that were developed because NASA thought they were needed for astronauts.
Edit: seeing the reaction, sorry if my disappointment disappoints you. We can very well use this argument to justify war
"We can't do metric, there's just so many road signs, and I'm tired" - every American, today.
Nobody is going to live on Mars until letting it out on Airbnb is profitable
That was a very interesting read. I've always been a bit skeptical of people who say we'll be living in space or colonizing other planets in the near future. I definitely want to read their book.
Also, this made me laugh:
And do you really want to create a group of hungry, disgruntled miners that are also able to sling very large rocks at the Earth?
That said, slinging large rocks back to Earth is the only way I can see them returning whatever they mine and that doesn't sound like a great plan either.
That's where they get you.
Is someone actually proposing that we're simply going to dump would-be colonists on Mars with a shovel and some O2 tanks then wave goodbye? Like, no shit we still need to work things out but that just means it's unknown, not impossible.
This book seems unnecessarily pessimistic. I don't know why I would spend money on doomscrolling, Kindle Edition.
Plugging our ears and going “NYAAAAAA” isn’t going to help. We need pragmatists to ask hard questions to cover all the bases, and force us to anticipate problems. Being aware of potentially fatal issues isn’t “doomscrolling”.
The authors aren’t saying that we should never, ever try to colonize Mars. They’re only saying that there are a LOT of questions to answer before we try.
You don't think all the scientists and engineers working around the world on this problem aren't aware of the potentially fatal issues? The last thing they want is to be the reason people die in space.
Elon Musk talks a lot of shit, but the actual scientists are busy considering the real problems, dangers, and solutions to getting to and colonizing Mars.
You don’t think all the scientists and engineers working around the world on this problem aren’t aware of the potentially fatal issues?
Scientists catalog what we know and don't know and try to chip away at the list of things we don't know. The whole point of the book and this article is that there is way more stuff we don't know than we realize and most discussion of space colonization tends to forget the parts we don't know.
The article even pointed out some very showstopping issues:
No one has been conceived in low gravity, no fetuses have developed in low gravity, so we simply don’t know if there is a problem. Astronauts experience bone and muscle loss and no one knows how that plays out long term
I was shocked to learn that no one really knows how to construct a long-term habitable settlement for either the Moon or Mars. Yes, there are lots of hand-wavy ideas about lava tubes and regolith shielding. But the details are just… not there.
For instance, supposedly space will end scarcity… and yet, any habitat in space will naturally have only a single source of food, water, and, even more urgent, oxygen, creating (perhaps artificial) scarcity.
Space colonization may happen, but it's incredibly doubtful that it'll happen in our lifetimes.
Mars is actually full of oxygen. The surface is covered in oxidized iron, and trillions of tons of carbon dioxide makes up its atmosphere. Plus all the ice.
Elon would send Neurolink Zombies to die en masse if he could.
Jesus Christ you people really have no idea how space works, do you?
The guy can't just send up his own spacecraft anymore than Lockheed Martin and Raytheon can declare war on Russia.
SpaceX sells spacecraft to NASA for them to use in the same way LM sells F-18's to the Navy for them to use. At no point in time does Elon just get to unilaterally send civilians to Mars even if Starship was fully capable.
Everything SpaceX craft do in space is under the charter and dictation of NASA, and at the current point in time, exclusively for government/military missions. Not his own flights of fancy.
Which is why you don't hear NASA going "yep we're good to go! No scientifically obtained issues to worry about!" Also sometimes you have to answer the questions through physical experimentation, which is why we send science teams before we send spacecraft full of colonists.
Books like this fall under the same grouping as those who hate Elon Musk so much that they have to also think space travel is dumb/bad as well because they can't remove the douchebag from the field his company operates in.
Space colonization is the future, it doesn't matter if it's ten years or a thousand. We are going to leave this planet. Case closed. The earth will not sustain us forever even in our wildest renewable energy/living fantasies.
Did we even read the same article?
A City on Mars ends with a kind of call to action. The point is that we have a tiny space station, and we have the potential to build a lot of experimental facilities on Earth where we can investigate some of the practical problems. Let’s get the biology and engineering right before we send people to Mars.
The authors aren’t against colonization. They’re against hasty, uninformed, reckless attempts.
hasty, uninformed, reckless
very musk lol
The point of books like this is to underline areas where we're still woefully ignorant to guide future study. This isn't just complaining. It's taking stock of what we still need to learn.
Unfortunately on lemmy its only purpose is so people can circle jerk about how dumb Musk is for wanting that to be the end goal of SpaceX hardware.
books like this fall under the same grouping as those who hate Elon Musk so much
you really should read it, this characterization is bullshit.
Your comment seems to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the actual people/money that would be involved with any space colonization attempts. They'll do exactly an equivalent of the ridiculous things you describe to expend the least amount of resource to secure the most profit in strip-mining natural resources from these places.
Yeah, there's a lot we don't know and a lot we haven't figured out yet. And it's definitely a tough nut to crack. But concluding from that, that is impossible is dumb. Everything is impossible until somebody goes and does it.
For instance, supposedly space will end scarcity… and yet, any habitat in space will naturally have only a single source of food, water, and, even more urgent, oxygen, creating (perhaps artificial) scarcity.
Huh? Sure, if we forget absolutely everything we ever knew about reliability engineering.
Take air, for instance. If you're considering a community on the scale of a town or city, expect that it will be naturally divided into smaller physical units, corresponding to smaller social units in the community. Rather than having one big air supply for the whole "town" — which can fail or be sabotaged, creating an existential risk for the whole community — it'd likely be much safer to have small air systems for each household, neighborhood, commune, or other unit. You probably have to have them anyway for emergencies.
Infrastructure for distributing the air once it gets to the settlement is one thing. At least for now, though, Earth is the only place to get oxygen in life-sustaining quantities, which is the single source they're talking about.
Maybe you can posit harvesting oxygen from mineral oxides, hydrolyzing water if you can find it, or capturing an ice asteroid. Whether you split every atom of oxygen you breathe out of rust or lift them out of earth's gravity, let alone doing both for redundancy, it's orders of magnitude more energy and complexity than growing potatoes in Antarctica.
At least for now, though, Earth is the only place to get oxygen in life-sustaining quantities, which is the single source they’re talking about.
If we're talking about space colonization then "at least for now" doesn't apply any more.
There are vast quantities of oxygen available everywhere in the solar system. Extracting it is really not hard. There's a technology demonstrator generating oxygen on Mars right now. If you're arguing against space colonization because you're assuming that every bit of resources the space colony uses will have to be sent there from Earth, you're completely missing the basic concept of space colonization.
I often find that technological pessimists are imagining some very specific flawed scenario and then arguing about how that scenario is terrible or impossible, rather than arguing about the technology in general. Often the best way to debate them is to start by getting them to clarify exactly what scenario they're thinking of, the limitations of their argument will usually become quite apparent just by doing that.
Just finished the trilogy last week. Amazing books, a bit dry at times but overall a very enjoyable read about what the politics and technology might look like to terraform and colonize Mars.
No fetuses have gestated in low gravity. That sounds like something we could do animal trials on.
But wow, getting a live sheep into space, and fed, and exercised, and cleaned, all for months… that alone is a big undertaking. Just to get a single data point that’s about another species.
Everything I’ve ever seen about plants indicates that they grow abnormally in zero g. Life is complex and made up of many different chemical processes. All it takes is for gravity to have an effect on one of them and life goes awry. It’s humbling how fragile we are, how narrowly adapted when it comes right down to it. I remember learning that we can’t share most viruses with pets because their bodies are a few degrees of temperature off from ours. I thought wow, viruses are not very robust if they are attuned to living in such a very narrow set of conditions. But honestly we’re no different.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Unfortunately for the Weinersmiths, they actually asked questions like “how would that work, exactly?” Apart from rocketry (e.g., the getting to space part), the answers were mostly optimistic handwaving combined with a kind of neo-manifest destiny ideology that might have given Andrew Jackson pause.
The Weinersmiths start with human biology and psychology, pass through technology, the law, and population viability and end with a kind of call to action.
Apparently, nuclear weapons-wielding countries won’t react negatively to private citizens claiming large bits of space.
The magical thinking is more apparent when you realize that it is believed that encountering the vastness of space will make humanity ultra-altruistic, while still being good capitalists.
In a more realistic take on how societies function when there is only one source for the vitals of life, the Weinersmiths draw on the experiences (positive and negative) of company towns.
The point is that we have a tiny space station, and we have the potential to build a lot of experimental facilities on Earth where we can investigate some of the practical problems.
The original article contains 900 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Mars has no magnetosphere so it's very hard to have a breathable atmosphere.
The moon's barely got gravity, and our bodies need it.
A space station would be a good start so long as it spins so we can have the semblance of gravity.
No one knows if you can turn a profit mining asteroids.
If mining techniques reach the same level of advancement as on Earth? I don't see why not. I also don't see why bother to send ore back other than to pay-off some initial investment.
(One of) the biggest obstacles in space is leaving Earth's gravity well, so sending mining machines to the asteroids would be interesting. Then maybe move the ISS to a La Grange point instead of destroying it, use it as a base to turn that ore into a spinning space station.
Mars has no magnetosphere so it’s very hard to have a breathable atmosphere.
I don't know why this has become such a common talking point about why colonizing Mars is hard, it really has no significant impact.
For starters, it's only meaningful for terraforming. Regular realistic colonization involves setting up domes or tunnels, none of that's affected in any way by Mars' magnetosphere or lack thereof.
As for terraforming, the lack of a magnetosphere means that Mars will "leak" atmospheric gasses due to solar wind sputtering over periods of time that are short on geological scales but are vastly longer than anything a human civilization will care about. If Mars were to magically have an Earthlike atmosphere appear on it today it'd be millions of years before it became unbreathable by this process. The human species has only existed for a tenth that long, and our civilization has only existed for a hundredth of that. If anyone still cares a million years ago they can just top the atmosphere back up again by whatever method they put it there in the first place.
Or, if you really have your heart set on that magnetosphere, build one.
The level of automation necessary for manufacturing in space is going to be very close to removing humans from the process entirely. Taking it that one step further and having robots manufacture robots would eliminate all the issues with keeping flesh-and-blood human bodies alive.
Honestly I sometimes think the best legacy humans can hope for is giving birth to AGI. Machines would be much better suited to forming a solar or galactic civilization than biological entities ever would be. If we're lucky, humans or meta-humans would still be around as what essentially amounts to pets.
Yes you can. Self publishing is surprisingly easy.
I suppose it depends on how good of a writer you are.
Some writers can say things we all know so well that it's like we're finally understanding it for the first time. Some writers have a knack for delivering facts or prose with the perfect dose of humor; it's not what they say, but how they say it that is valuable.
I suppose the question of what merits a book has is more complicated than just "does this book push the envelope of human knowledge", huh?
Sometimes books are valued for their original informational content alone. Sometimes books are valued for conveniently anthologizing disparate works. Sometimes books are valued for the entertainment quality of the writing. This is a book which endeavors to offer information and context about a hot topic to a general audience in an informative but entertaining way. I can guarantee that you've spent over $30 on something less valuable.
I have a couple of books by Zach Weinersmith and they are entertaining and interesting.
I believe you're missing the point of this book. I also believe you're being a bit of a prat. I don't know, however, if those two things are connected.
I had some Elon-stan dude being adamant that it would be safer to colonize Mars because what if the apocalypse happened on Earth? I asked him what an event like that would look like and he said a giant asteroid. I linked him to a wiki page outlining major crater impacts on Mars to get him started and he never responded. I'd like to think that he learned a valuable lesson in astronomy but I can never be too sure.
That's silly. The asteroid point isn't that Mars is somehow asteroid-proof, it's that having a presence on multiple planets prevents any one single planet-destabilizing disaster from causing our species' extinction.
Right, but his thought process was that Mars was somehow immune to asteroid impacts and that made it safer. Like, he hadn't considered that a single unfortunate event was possible. It's ironically safer here on Earth but thought this planet had nothing going for it.
The point isn't whether or not it could happen, the point is that it hadn't crossed his mind and was jumping in with two feet at the idea.
Maybe, I try not to jump to conclusions based on my speculation on others' thought processes.
The point isn't that Mars is somehow less vulnerable to asteroid impacts than Earth, it's that asteroids aren't likely to hit Earth and Mars at the same time.
He thought they didn't happen on Mars for some reason and that he wanted to colonize it to hopefully abandon Earth altogether because we have apparently no hope here whatsoever and the planet isn't salvageable anyway.
I don't wanna go to Mars
What kind of brainwashed idiot does
It's all a lab rat life in jars
They branded the dream of ages
Because the life that formed from this planet is somehow not part of this planet?
And at any other snapshot in our planets history, the life that grew on it would still be part of it.
Surprised someone did't beat you to it
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It's not missing technology that kills the (pretty silly) idea of "Mars colonization" - it's missing ecology.
They can't even maintain functioning civilization in Antarctica... yet they "dream" of doing so in a place that's hundreds of times more hostile to human life.
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