what problems can we have on mars?
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For the purpose of this question, I will assume that Mars exploration is technologically feasible, but colonization has not yet been attempted.
Colonization is a poor word for what this describes, which is a technology- (rather than theft-) oriented approach to living in an uncompromising adversarial environment. In exploration, a limited duration mission is self supporting. In colonization, people are attempting to close many more loops, and to achieve basic self sufficiency with indigenous resources. The main challenge of this is that devices become exponentially more unreliable with time. So if you choose to remain on Mars, you may end up stuck in the gulf between being able to bring enough spares from Earth, and being able to make replacement parts on Mars. And, given the totality of life's dependence on technology on Mars, this is quite a broad gulf.
As a preface, living on Mars is physically possible, just as living in space on the ISS is physically possible. There is no reason why a fully prosperous, self sufficient society could not be self sustaining. The challenge is getting to the minimum viable city.
The first major challenge is power. There isn't a thing you or all your machines can do on Mars without electricity. Lots of it, reliable, responsive, transportable, etc. Some people think that building solar panels from Mars dirt closes, but I suspect each panel would need to operate for about a decade to pay for its energy cost of production. So you need another source of power, and that's obviously nuclear. Nuclear power is not such a great idea on Earth, because it consumes a huge amount of space and there are real consequences for containment breaches. Most of Mars is an irradiated death trap anyway, so building lots of space reactors and sending them to Mars is a no-brainer. Probably 1MW is around the sweet spot of design, at least with first generation spaceships.
The second major challenge, as alluded to above, is building an industrial stack tall enough to keep you alive. Our exploration vehicles will be able to make fuel, water, oxygen, and perhaps simple plastics on the surface. But on Earth, you need an industrialised country with a population greater than 100m to have the technical specialization and economy necessary to support the most difficult manufacturing. Which, in this case, includes the vital components of computer chips, rockets, turbines, filters, etc. It's not just a matter of casting thousands of steel bolts. During the early phase of the colony, specialized gear can be brought from Earth, but depending on such a remote source for a limited mass budget of stuff means that the colony will be growth constrained. On the one hand, you could design systems which require a minimum of computation. On the other hand, the resource most in demand will be human labour, which is why automation and ubiquitous computing will be necessary. It's quite likely that you can produce specialized factories which can 3D print basically anything with a population smaller than 100m, but it's not entirely clear what the minimum viable population necessary to keep everything going is. SpaceX seems to think that about 80,000 people, which is the same size as Burning Man. On Earth, a country the size of Australia, with about 22 million people, has basically no domestic manufacturing anymore, despite its relative isolation from the markets of Europe, Asia, and North America.
If technology can be developed which shrinks the industrial scale necessary to make anything, and make it quickly enough to be useful, then the gulf between exploration and viable colonization shrinks. But I think it would be unwise to unpack on the surface without a plan!
Colonization is a poor word for what this describes, which is a technology- (rather than theft-) oriented approach to living in an uncompromising adversarial environment. In exploration, a limited duration mission is self supporting. In colonization, people are attempting to close many more loops, and to achieve basic self sufficiency with indigenous resources. The main challenge of this is that devices become exponentially more unreliable with time. So if you choose to remain on Mars, you may end up stuck in the gulf between being able to bring enough spares from Earth, and being able to make replacement parts on Mars. And, given the totality of life's dependence on technology on Mars, this is quite a broad gulf.
As a preface, living on Mars is physically possible, just as living in space on the ISS is physically possible. There is no reason why a fully prosperous, self sufficient society could not be self sustaining. The challenge is getting to the minimum viable city.
The first major challenge is power. There isn't a thing you or all your machines can do on Mars without electricity. Lots of it, reliable, responsive, transportable, etc. Some people think that building solar panels from Mars dirt closes, but I suspect each panel would need to operate for about a decade to pay for its energy cost of production. So you need another source of power, and that's obviously nuclear. Nuclear power is not such a great idea on Earth, because it consumes a huge amount of space and there are real consequences for containment breaches. Most of Mars is an irradiated death trap anyway, so building lots of space reactors and sending them to Mars is a no-brainer. Probably 1MW is around the sweet spot of design, at least with first generation spaceships.
The second major challenge, as alluded to above, is building an industrial stack tall enough to keep you alive. Our exploration vehicles will be able to make fuel, water, oxygen, and perhaps simple plastics on the surface. But on Earth, you need an industrialised country with a population greater than 100m to have the technical specialization and economy necessary to support the most difficult manufacturing. Which, in this case, includes the vital components of computer chips, rockets, turbines, filters, etc. It's not just a matter of casting thousands of steel bolts. During the early phase of the colony, specialized gear can be brought from Earth, but depending on such a remote source for a limited mass budget of stuff means that the colony will be growth constrained. On the one hand, you could design systems which require a minimum of computation. On the other hand, the resource most in demand will be human labour, which is why automation and ubiquitous computing will be necessary. It's quite likely that you can produce specialized factories which can 3D print basically anything with a population smaller than 100m, but it's not entirely clear what the minimum viable population necessary to keep everything going is. SpaceX seems to think that about 80,000 people, which is the same size as Burning Man. On Earth, a country the size of Australia, with about 22 million people, has basically no domestic manufacturing anymore, despite its relative isolation from the markets of Europe, Asia, and North America.
If technology can be developed which shrinks the industrial scale necessary to make anything, and make it quickly enough to be useful, then the gulf between exploration and viable colonization shrinks. But I think it would be unwise to unpack on the surface without a plan!
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