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A City on Mars: Reality kills space settlement dreams (arstechnica.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

118 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I’m sure I’ll never actually get to it, but I want to try to check this out next after the current book that’s taking way too long to read.

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