The thing about moving to Mars is that it is pretty permanent. You get to Mars, unload, and then you probably never go back to Earth. If that sounds rough to you, don't worry about it; Mars One has already received over 200,000 applications from people who are perfectly willing to drop everything and catch a one-way flight to another world (I was one of them!). One consequence of this permanent residence, in combination with the rather vast distance between Earth and Mars (which prevents resupply), is that you need to pack a whole lot of very specific stuff onto that first spaceship. Enough to build a world.
We've already mentioned some of the things we will need to bring, but here is my Mars Packing List. Part 1 is called "Survival." These are the things a basic colony needs to just live on Mars. Having these things will not allow any growth or expansion, or even repairs, so a colony built with just these elements cannot be considered permanent.
1. People. Pretty pointless without people. One at least must be a farmer.
2. Shelter. I propose geodesic domes of lightweight, radiation absorbent polymer tiles.
3. Food for one growing season. Clearly, until farming is up and running, colonists must eat packed food.
4. Fertilizer. Mars has water, but the soil is barren. Nothing will grow without enriching it first.
5. Seeds. Can't grow food without seeds.
6. Atmosphere pumps and purifiers. Mars air is not breathable, and must be refined so we don't suffocate.
7. Electrical generators. Nuclear and solar power are ideal, since there are no fossil fuels on Mars.
8. Electric heaters. Mars is cold, and we need warm to live. So do our crops.
9. Water collecting equipment. Mars has water, but we will need to melt, filter, and collect it for use.
10. Space suits. Any time we leave shelter, and while construction happens, we will need a space suit.
And.... that's it. Really, it isn't too hard if you just want to live on Mars. The basic necessities of life are still the same: Air, water, food, shelter. Take care of that, and you will be able to survive. You might not be comfortable or particularly healthy, living in a low gravity environment on nothing but meager plant crops grown under your dome, never going outside. But, you will be able to live.
That is, until any of your ultra high-tech space age camping gear breaks down. Then, you will very rapidly die. So, Part 2 of the list is called "Maintenance." It includes the things you will need to maintain a colony indefinitely, but not to expand. A colony including these elements could be considered a permanent colony, but will not be able to terraform the planet.
1. Mechanical, electrical, and computer repair technicians or engineers. So, again, people.
2. Mechanical repair equipment. Grinding, gluing, welding, cutting, and fastening gear, etc.
3. Electrical repair equipment. Soldering irons, insulating tape, wire cutters, etc.
4. Computer repair equipment. Diagnostic computers, programming interfaces, soldering irons.
5. Substantial stockpiles of spare parts for EVERYTHING. Motherboards, dome tiles, transistors, etc.
6. Duct tape, for obvious reasons.
The list above is vague, because the myriad technology needed to do everything from filtering air to fertilizing soil, to protecting people from UV rays will probably require myriad specific replacement parts and repair tools. But, the most important element is undoubtedly technically skilled individuals. It would be stupid to send people to a planet where broken machines would mean everyone dies and not send someone who knows how to fix the machines. I personally wouldn't feel safe without someone who could just build the machines from scratch! The point is, I am not a specialist in any of the areas where specialists would be needed, and therefore any exhaustive list I create will probably be flawed. Better to let the experts tell you what they might conceivably need than to send what you think would be useful, and have something be missing when you need it.
But, while all this equipment adds a lot of weight to the spaceship, it isn't really that bad compared with the expense of hauling huge loads of fertilizer, and food for all passengers for about a year on world. And it is absolutely nothing compared to what comes next, because the next section of the list, Part 3, is called "Expansion." These are the items required to make a colony that has the potential to replicate itself, spread, and eventually terraform all of Mars, and populate it with humanity.
1. People. Minimum of 160, all breeding age, and virile, and all of whom love kids and want lots.
2. Mining equipment for all types of minerals. Dump trucks, back hoes, drills and crushers.
3. A multi-function ore refinery and metal forges. Must be able to isolate and process every type of metal.
4. An algae farm. Algae produces oxygen, and is useful as fuel, plastic, even food.
5. An algae refining plant, to make bioplastics and biopolymers.
6. Spacesuit factory. So we can go out and play.
7. Copper wire (or other conductor) manufacturing facilities.
8. Geodesic polymer tile factory. So we can make new domes for new homes.
9. Air purification equipment factories. So that the new homes can make their own air.
10. Solar panel manufacturing facilities, from raw materials to final product.
11. Computer components manufacturing capability.
12. We'll need to make motors. Probably electric ones.
13. We will need a very large, steel-working 3D printer. The kind that can print dump trucks, drills...
This list is by no means exhaustive. It is designed to include several of the most important industrial capabilities that a new Mars colony will need if it is to be able to grow and populate the planet independent from Earth's native populous, and particularly to do so at a rapid rate. This is the hard part of the program, because the means of production are usually heavy, bulky, and hard to fit on a spaceship.
By comparison to the third phase, everything else is pretty cheap and easy to fit. A group of five or ten people could form a homestead on Mars and live indefinitely as long as they started with the right basic equipment, had several sets of spare parts, and the people included at least one farmer, and at least one person with specialized knowledge of the technology that kept everyone alive. But, to actually cover the world with people we would need to either carry, or be able to produce in situ, all of the infrastructure that we currently have on Earth to support a space age industrial society. That's an entirely different proposition. It is also exactly what we need to do.
Monday, November 18, 2013
Sunday, November 10, 2013
Things to do in Space
Well, it has been a while, hasn't it? I got distracted after last post, with a variety of things, such as moving back to America, starting a business, and finding a new job.
Also, I went into detail and worked out as much of the math as I could for the launch tube concept I mentioned in the last post, and concluded that it is very possible. It would cost around 3 trillion dollars, using current market prices (realistically, it is a lot closer to 2 trillion, because of economies of scale), it would require building a ramp in Texas up to about 45,000 ft, with a total volume roughly that of Lake Michigan. It would require its own dedicated power plant(s), and the highest angle that would be safe to achieve would be 9 degrees. 60 degrees was way off in my earlier post; it would kill you outright. 9 degrees would make the last ten seconds on the track very uncomfortable at up to 8 downward Gs, but most people can handle it without passing out. So, it's expensive to build, and probably not a pleasant ride.
But, it would work. And afterward, the a trip to orbit would take about 5 minutes (not including the time to board or clear spaceport security), and cost about the same as an intercontinental plane ticket (assuming a high number of daily launches, so that labor and maintenance costs can be distributed between a large number of tickets). Divide the cost across 20 years of construction, and it comes to $150 billion per year, which is only about 1/3 of the annual US military budget. So, basically, we could simply downsize the military by a third, stop involving ourselves in local wars on the other side of the world, and employ the soldiers we send home as construction workers on the project, and we have both the labor force and the funding to accomplish the job. And, in a mere 2 decades, we can have built the largest structure ever created by man, and opened the solar system to exploration and colonization by humanity.
If the cost is still a deterrent in anyone's mind, then consider the sheer value of asteroid mining. When earth was formed, the very vast majority of heavy metals (iron, gold, platinum, uranium, etc) were drawn into the earth's core, by gravity. Think simply of magma; it's a liquid. In a liquid, denser materials sink. So, it makes sense that planets have very dense cores of heavy metals. It also makes sense that the surface, and indeed every part of the planet except the core, should all be depleted of those same metals. Geologists believe that the very vast majority of precious metals and iron in the Earth's crust were actually deposited there long after the planet's formation. By asteroids.
Which leads to an interesting conclusion: asteroids deposited all the precious metals human society has been using for the last ten thousand years by smashing and scattering them across the whole world. So, what would mining be like if the asteroids weren't scattered? The short answer is: easy. Asteroids are usually rocky, or gravely masses. The rocky ones would need to be drilled, but the gravel ones are essentially floating piles of pre-gathered, ultra-rich ore, ready for refinement. In both cases, the gravitational pull of most asteroids is so low that a human worker (not that we will actually use human workers) would be able to lift about 1800 Earth lbs. of rock, and feel it as 60 lbs. of force on Ceres, which is the largest asteroid. On most asteroids, the gravitational pull is so slight that it isn't a matter of how much we can lift, it is a matter of whether or not we can keep from leaping into orbit accidentally. Light gravity poses a few challenges, but in an industry like mining, having nearly weightless rocks is a really big advantage.
So.... How much ore are we talking here? Well, Planetary Resources, a company founded specifically with the goal of going into space and mining asteroids, found a metallic (M-class) asteroid called 3445 Amun.
It is about a mile in diameter, and at current market prices, it contains platinum, cobalt, golf, and iron ore valued at roughly $20 trillion. One asteroid could pay off the entire US national debt, and have 4 trillion left over for my space train, and a city on Mars. And that is just one. The Catch: "at current market prices." Flooding the Earth's supplies of precious metals would send the markets into a massive spiraling crash, and the asteroid would not be worth nearly that amount if it was mined and returned to Earth all at once. The trick is to control supply so that demand remains high, like De Beers did with diamonds (which is defintitely worth the time to research; sinister corporate shenanigans at their best).
That said, since some individual asteroids are thought to contain more iron than has ever been mined in all of history by all of mankind combined, there is real potential to make construction materials and precious metals cheaper than sand. When an economy reaches that point, it is a short step from an elemental economy, where the only things people need to pay for are skills and services. And the best part, from my perspective, is that most of this stuff is already in space. Meaning that we don't have to escape Earth gravity to get it there. This means that to start building cities in space, all we need to launch are is the equipment to mine, refine, and put ore to use. Orbital factories, with asteroid mined materials, could forge an entire space infrastructure without needing to worry about lifting things from Earth. Once that happens, colonizing Mars will be no big deal (realistically, colonizing Mars will already have happened). We will have mastered our solar system. That's worth it, I think.
Also, I went into detail and worked out as much of the math as I could for the launch tube concept I mentioned in the last post, and concluded that it is very possible. It would cost around 3 trillion dollars, using current market prices (realistically, it is a lot closer to 2 trillion, because of economies of scale), it would require building a ramp in Texas up to about 45,000 ft, with a total volume roughly that of Lake Michigan. It would require its own dedicated power plant(s), and the highest angle that would be safe to achieve would be 9 degrees. 60 degrees was way off in my earlier post; it would kill you outright. 9 degrees would make the last ten seconds on the track very uncomfortable at up to 8 downward Gs, but most people can handle it without passing out. So, it's expensive to build, and probably not a pleasant ride.
But, it would work. And afterward, the a trip to orbit would take about 5 minutes (not including the time to board or clear spaceport security), and cost about the same as an intercontinental plane ticket (assuming a high number of daily launches, so that labor and maintenance costs can be distributed between a large number of tickets). Divide the cost across 20 years of construction, and it comes to $150 billion per year, which is only about 1/3 of the annual US military budget. So, basically, we could simply downsize the military by a third, stop involving ourselves in local wars on the other side of the world, and employ the soldiers we send home as construction workers on the project, and we have both the labor force and the funding to accomplish the job. And, in a mere 2 decades, we can have built the largest structure ever created by man, and opened the solar system to exploration and colonization by humanity.
If the cost is still a deterrent in anyone's mind, then consider the sheer value of asteroid mining. When earth was formed, the very vast majority of heavy metals (iron, gold, platinum, uranium, etc) were drawn into the earth's core, by gravity. Think simply of magma; it's a liquid. In a liquid, denser materials sink. So, it makes sense that planets have very dense cores of heavy metals. It also makes sense that the surface, and indeed every part of the planet except the core, should all be depleted of those same metals. Geologists believe that the very vast majority of precious metals and iron in the Earth's crust were actually deposited there long after the planet's formation. By asteroids.
Which leads to an interesting conclusion: asteroids deposited all the precious metals human society has been using for the last ten thousand years by smashing and scattering them across the whole world. So, what would mining be like if the asteroids weren't scattered? The short answer is: easy. Asteroids are usually rocky, or gravely masses. The rocky ones would need to be drilled, but the gravel ones are essentially floating piles of pre-gathered, ultra-rich ore, ready for refinement. In both cases, the gravitational pull of most asteroids is so low that a human worker (not that we will actually use human workers) would be able to lift about 1800 Earth lbs. of rock, and feel it as 60 lbs. of force on Ceres, which is the largest asteroid. On most asteroids, the gravitational pull is so slight that it isn't a matter of how much we can lift, it is a matter of whether or not we can keep from leaping into orbit accidentally. Light gravity poses a few challenges, but in an industry like mining, having nearly weightless rocks is a really big advantage.
So.... How much ore are we talking here? Well, Planetary Resources, a company founded specifically with the goal of going into space and mining asteroids, found a metallic (M-class) asteroid called 3445 Amun.
It is about a mile in diameter, and at current market prices, it contains platinum, cobalt, golf, and iron ore valued at roughly $20 trillion. One asteroid could pay off the entire US national debt, and have 4 trillion left over for my space train, and a city on Mars. And that is just one. The Catch: "at current market prices." Flooding the Earth's supplies of precious metals would send the markets into a massive spiraling crash, and the asteroid would not be worth nearly that amount if it was mined and returned to Earth all at once. The trick is to control supply so that demand remains high, like De Beers did with diamonds (which is defintitely worth the time to research; sinister corporate shenanigans at their best).
That said, since some individual asteroids are thought to contain more iron than has ever been mined in all of history by all of mankind combined, there is real potential to make construction materials and precious metals cheaper than sand. When an economy reaches that point, it is a short step from an elemental economy, where the only things people need to pay for are skills and services. And the best part, from my perspective, is that most of this stuff is already in space. Meaning that we don't have to escape Earth gravity to get it there. This means that to start building cities in space, all we need to launch are is the equipment to mine, refine, and put ore to use. Orbital factories, with asteroid mined materials, could forge an entire space infrastructure without needing to worry about lifting things from Earth. Once that happens, colonizing Mars will be no big deal (realistically, colonizing Mars will already have happened). We will have mastered our solar system. That's worth it, I think.
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