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

submitted 11 months ago by meyotch@slrpnk.net to c/technology@lemmy.world

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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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[–] RGB3x3@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

We can't breathe oxidized iron or carbon dioxide. We'd need to convert it into breathable oxygen and the mechanism would have to be foolproof and have redundancies. And that still leaves plenty of other problems.

But my main point was to everyone in this thread criticizing the authors for being pessimists. This isn't just naysaying or complaining. The authors are pointing out all of the necessary research we still have to do before a space colony can be feasible.

[–] PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

NASAs rover has already successfully tested a carbon dioxide to oxygen conversion system, MOXIE.

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/instruments/moxie/

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-perseverance-mars-rover-extracts-first-oxygen-from-red-planet/

If they can do it on a rover, it's pretty trivial to scale that up to an industrial scale.

[–] 0x1C3B00DA@kbin.social 1 points 11 months ago

MOXIE is a Scale Model for a Future Big MOXIE
To launch from Mars, a small crew of human explorers will need 25 to 30 tons of oxygen, or about the weight of a tractor-trailer! To make that much oxygen would require a 25,000 to 30,000 watt power plant. The Perseverance power system only provides about 100 watts, so MOXIE can only make a small fraction of the oxygen that a future "Big MOXIE" would need to make.

In the first link you provided, NASA themselves say we'd need a 25,000 watt power plant to scale that up. That's not trivial.

Again, what the authors are pointing out is that space colonization is probably scientifically possible, but will take a lot of research and then investment. MOXIE is a great tech demo, but its not a solution by itself.

[–] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world -2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Elon would send Neurolink Zombies to die en masse if he could.

[–] c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Hence the "if he could."

[–] c0mbatbag3l@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

Hence why it's a pointless comment.

Elon can't do it, great. Next!