MIT Study Finds Fault With Mars One Colony Concept 269
MarkWhittington writes The Mars One project created a great deal of fanfare when it was first announced in 2012. The project, based in Holland, aspires to build a colony on Mars with the first uncrewed flight taking place in 2018 and the first colonists setting forth around 2024. The idea is that the colonists would go to Mars to stay, slowly building up the colony in four-person increments every 26-month launch window. However, Space Policy Online on Tuesday reported that an independent study conducted by MIT has poured cold water on the Mars colony idea. The MIT team consisting of engineering students had to make a number of assumptions based on public sources since the Mars One concept lacks a great many technical details. The study made the bottom line conclusion that the Mars One project is overly optimistic at best and unworkable at worst. The concept is "unsustainable" given the current state of technology and the aggressive schedule that the Mars One project has presented.
Practice colony in Antarctica first? (Score:5, Insightful)
Antarctica is the closest environment to Mars that we have. Maybe we should try to get a self sustainable colony there using the same materials we would send to Mars?
Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first? (Score:5, Insightful)
Except there's oxygen and water in Antarctica, and those would presumably be some of the biggest challenges.
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You can breath pure oxygen perfectly fine, especially when you lower the atmospheric pressure. On Mars, it would make total sense to breath pure oxygen at 1/5 earth atmospheric pressure. It's also what mountain climbers use to compensate for the pressure drop.
The real issue is fire danger - anything combustible might spontaneously catch fire, so all materials in such environment would have to be fire-resistant. That, or you must wear a helmet all day.
A good example of this is the American vs Russian space t
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If you're going to live 24:39/7 in a 100% oxygen atmosphere, you might also want to shave (all the parts) and do everything you can to avoid oily skin. When (not if) the flash fire comes, you really don't want to provide any fuel for it with your body.
Low pressure pure O2 (Score:2)
"The real issue is fire danger - anything combustible might spontaneously catch fire, so all materials in such environment would have to be fire-resistant."
As Grissom, Chaffee and White would testify
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Their issue was the pure oxygen at sea level pressure.
pure oxygen at 1/5 pressure is still a high density compared to sea level pressure of 15 lbs / sqIn.
Something closer to 1 lb / sqIn would be the right density to prevent any flash up and provide our normal Oxy saturation provided you have a way to balance or remove CO2 from the container.
Do read "How to colonize the Galaxy in 8 easy Steps."
It's still relevant today even with the changes in technology in the last 20 years.
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Oddly enough, according to the article, one of the criticisms of the project is that there will be too much oxygen, not the lack of it. They plan on growing their own food, which means the plants will need to intake CO2. There will not be enough humans / animals to convert oxygen into C02. Over time, 62 days according to the article, the amount of oxygen will go up and the plants will die off, and with no food source the humans will die.
Maybe it's a stupid suggestion... (Score:2)
But wouldn't periodical burning of something made mostly out of carbon fix that, at least until enough humans arrive?
I'm not saying it has to be a bonfire or even a candle lit dinner... but a small object, burned in a burning chamber of some kind?
And hemp grows anywhere, right?
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Mars has lots of water in the same sense that earth has lots of gold. Getting water on Mars is not just a matter of digging a well or picking up large, pure ice chunks off the surface. It's more akin to industrial mining.
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Two words: Ice cap.
We know that Mars has large chunks of solid water on the surface - depending on your chosen colony site collecting more water could very well mean just stepping outside with an ice axe and chopping a block out of the glacier.
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Nope. Those chunks of ice in the ice caps are actually dry ice (CO2), not water. To get to the water, you have to dig down a ways for it, and it's mixed in with dust and iron oxide.
Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first? (Score:5, Insightful)
And how do you replace the drill bits? How do you keep your drilling machine moving - are you making all of its its consumable / wearable parts? How do you get the materials to patch leaks in your pipes as they arise, fix your broken valves, fix your pumps, and a whole host of other issues? How do you produce the power to melt the ice in a sustainable manner? If its nuclear, how do you refine the fuel? If it's solar cells, how do you make them to replace them when they break? If it's heliostats, how do you make the control electronics and the motors?
And for every one of those things, how do you make the raw materials for them, and the hardware that makes it. And for each of those raw materials, how do you make its raw materials and the hardware that makes it? And for each piece of hardware... you get the picture. Modern human technology is built on IMMENSELY large intermeshed technology trees. Sure, with a huge multi-hundred-billion dollar research project to compress it down you might be able to bring it down to say 1% of its materials / parts, but it's still going to be a massive technology tree.
And of course, you have to find all of the base elements on Mars, in quantities that can justify mining. And of course they're not going to all be next to each other, so better get started on your highly efficient planet-wide transportation system.
And yes, efficiency really, really matters, every step of the way. If your solution to something is to use some Super Universal Plasma Centrifuge Refiner to separate out elements from ore and some Super Universal Molecular Assembler to make whatever chemical you need at a rate of a few grams an hour, and some Super Universal 3d Printer to print out whatever pieces of whatever spare part of whatever type every few days, and a Super Universal Assembler of robot arms that can put anything together, and to feed this whole chain you've got the planetary-wide mining and transportation system and extensive power and consumables needs and part wear, then you're on an irreversible downward slope. And the equation gets way harder once you throw humans into the equation because their needs are just so great. The simple fact is, you not only have to reproduce Earth's tech trees, but you need to do it efficiently.
The scale of the challenge of true indepence from Earth is such that I really have trouble envisioning achieving anything even close in the next several hundred years. Now, spare part imports and the like, while producing your own food, water, oxygen, and maybe a couple types of bulk construction materials cast into a couple commonly needed standardized forms? That may be more acheivable. But you're still going to need heavy rockets shooting up parts and hard-to-produce raw materials to you at regular intervals, or your "colony" will enter an irreversible downward slope, and "human willpower" from the doomed colonists isn't going to conjure up, say, a couple tons of neodymium or a self-sustaining CPU manufacturing facility.
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Great post. I would only like to emphasize that we don't have to build a 100% self-sustaining colony from the first launch, and that a Mars base is not a closed environment. So, two comforting factors:
1. Importing even only a few small key components (like CPUs or nuclear fuel) can cut a huge part of that tech tree you mentioned, until the local capabilities are improved.
2. We still have a whole huge planet there. It may not have all the same resources we have on Earth, so optimal technological processe
Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first? (Score:5, Interesting)
And of course they're not going to all be next to each other, so better get started on your highly efficient planet-wide transportation system. (...) doomed colonists isn't going to conjure up, say, a couple tons of neodymium or a self-sustaining CPU manufacturing facility.
Just remember that a lot of that is due to economic efficiency, not because the resources aren't available locally or because there weren't other material choices or simpler technology that would have gotten the job done. You don't need to ship 14nm CPU process technology, if you could replicate the 3200nm, ~20k transistor technology of 1978 you'd have an 8086 chip that is still a decade more advanced technology than what got us to the moon. Instead of neodymium you could probably use a gas laser or iron magnet for most applications, using only common elements. When we look at how we could build a Mars outpost using our most advanced technology and materials it's from our perspective here on Earth where the sourcing and manufacturing is cheap and easily available while the delivery is extremely expensive. If you flip that around to say what's the lowest tech, most easily sourced and versatile alternative they could do locally it might turn out that the must-have part of our tech tree isn't that big after all.
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It should also be pointed out that most people respond to such criticisms by saying "But past explorers on Earth did it"! The thing is, humans are adapted to live on Earth. In some locations you don't need any technology whatsoever to live. On most others, usually the minimum is is no more complicated than something along the lines of the ability to make rudimentary clothing and and make some variety of handmade weapon or trap.
Advancing technology increases one's odds of survival, increases an area's carryi
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If the goal were to simulate and test the feasibility of a long-term Martian outpost, that shouldn't be too hard to replicate. Mars has the necessary elements, just not as easily accessible as on Earth.
Create an isolated, pressurized base where the only source of oxygen comes from internal systems, not outside. Place a "factory" by the outpost that pulls in water from the environment at the same rate as it would on Mars (obviously it would discard most of it); crack some of the water to get the necessary ox
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Harder to test would be the problems caused by low gravity, lower atmospheric pressure and increased radiation. Well, for the latter I guess we could just open the ozone hole for them again ;-)
Low atmospheric pressure would be easy enough to test with a (de)pressurized base on earth but then again on mars presumably you could
pressurize the colony to the same pressure as earth.
Increased radiation is also easy enough to test if you really wanted to. There are plenty of sources of radiation from tanning beds to radon to
radioactive waste. We have already done plenty of those experiments (intentionally or unintentionally) on earth and pretty much know the
outcome of those.
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They could, y'know, "pretend".
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I think that's the point. To see if you can colonize a *less* hostile environment
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Except there's oxygen and water in Antarctica, and those would presumably be some of the biggest challenges.
So it should be easy. We should require anyone who wants to move to mars to spend 5 years in antartica.
Antartica is a cake walk compared to mars. My guess is that a majority of those people wouldn't make it
five years and might reconsider their desire to go to mars.
Re:Practice colony in Antarctica first? (Score:5, Insightful)
Even better idea: if someone wants to go to Mars, we let them.
Hell, it's not like it's any skin off your nose if someone goes to Mars, unless they're expecting you to pay for it.
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And despite all those advantages in Antarctica, we've only be able to establish seasonal colonies in the continent, and those have been entirely dependent on re-supply from outside for almost all their basic needs. And in Antarctica resupply is a infinitesimal fraction of a cost of what it would be in Mars.
Prove to me that we can establish a permanent, self-sufficient settlement in Antarctica first, and then we can consider Mars.
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Antarctica has a different set of problems, mostly tied to horrendous cold and weather. Mars has virtually no atmosphere, making both of those a non-issue for anything that generates heat locally. Insulate a habitat from the ground and you'll probably need to start dumping the buildup of body heat before long. And those 400mph winds during a Martian windstorm still have less force behind them than a 3mph breeze on Earth: 99.3% lower air pressure also means 99.3% less wind pressure.
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Not really - there's plenty of water and CO2 on Mars, and plants are pretty good at converting those into oxygen without the help of any high technology.
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Not really. Antarctica is bitter cold and has horrendous weather. Mars meanwhile is more "termperatureless" due to the near-lack of air, insulate yourself from the ground and you're essentially in a giant vacuum thermos. It also has negligible weather other than occasionally "dusty" thanks to that same lack of atmosphere. A 400mph wind may gradually sand-blast exposed surfaces, but there's substantially less force behind it than a light breeze on Earth. And our rovers have pretty well established that t
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Sunlight intensity is about 44% of what is is on Earth, and temperatures average around -55C (-67F). On the other hand at only 0.7% air pressure you're essentially in a giant vacuum thermos, you only need to insulate from the ground.
An equatorial Mars base would likely have a water issue though, while building near ice cap would give you all the water you need. You wouldn't get as much sunlight, but a handful of nuclear reactors would probably be better suited to powering a growing colony anyway.
"Finds Fault" is faulty reporting (Score:5, Insightful)
This is how good science is supposed to work, peer review to find faults and ongoing refinement until certainty is attained.
If this was not a challenge it would not be Science.
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Mars One was the furthest thing from science as possible. It was a religious event.
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How do you know this? I've browsed their site a bit and I don't see any mention of religion anywhere.
I don't doubt you, just would like to understand what you mean if you can provide a link or something...
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Thanks, that explains it and your metaphor is spot on. I did initially read it literally and thought you meant they were Mormons trying to go to space. Was waiting to read their first ship would be called the Mayflower or something :-)
Now that I think about it I think I just came up with an acceptable plot for a SyFy Channel movie of the week!
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The difference is that the Americas were *profitable* - all those natural resources ripe for the pillaging from people who didn't even have steel knives, much less gunpowder. Meanwhile Europe had already largely strip-mined itself and had a huge population of downtrodden poor jumping at the opportunity to sell themselves into servitude harvesting those resources in return for the chance to eventually claim a plot of land for themselves.
Mars and the moon meanwhile have, for now, negligible resources of val
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Of course, just because it is challenged, doesn't mean it is science.
Then that means... I'm science!
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Huh? Colonizing Mars is not science. It's engineering.
Now, peer review is also a good idea in engineering, but so are things like detailed design specifications, planning, prototyping, feasibility studies, etc.
These are areas in which Mars One is severely lacking.
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Except this is engineering, not science.
Engineering is by inclination more conservative than science. That's because the failure of an engineering project is more catastrophic than the failure of a hypothesis, which after all is a result. But ultimately, after the engineer has done all he could to resolve competing priorities of cost, schedule, safety etc., it's whoever is bankrolling a project that decides to pull the trigger. The Apollo program was incredibly dangerous; more money and time might have mit
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That 25 seconds of fuel was landing fuel. If they ran out before landing, they would have pushed the abort button and shot back into orbit with the takeoff fuel allocation. Now I don't know if this was automatic, or if the launch fuel physically separated (to absolutely prevent using it for landing), so that could have been a factor also.
Something More Modest (Score:5, Insightful)
Something More Modest (Score:2, Insightful)
While its much easier to get to the moon, it doesn't provide nearly the resources or environment that Mars would. The moon has wild (and long) temperature swings, a very long day/night cycle, no atmosphere & limited resources. Mars has some atmosphere, a more stable (if cold) temperature & a eartlylike day/night cycle. For example a greenhouse, on the moon it would require a LOT of support equipment, lighting for the long lunar night, significant power generation/storage, an large heating/cooling
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Well, I'm fully convinced that Mars is a much better colonization candidate than the moon, but I think you may overstate things a bit. Yes, you've got plenty of water and CO2 that can be converted to air and plants, but if you want to go the inflatable greenhouse route we may need some really impressive plants: even if the dome filters out the UV they'll still be exposed to a steady diet of high-energy EM and particle radiation, and there's no way to shield against that while still allowing sunlight in. H
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You know, the Moon's right there (*looking around briefly*), somewhere. The same template could be applied to establishing an observatory on either of the poles in one of those nice, permanently shady craters. It would be a lot cheaper, a lot safer and arguably add a great deal more to science. Is the Moon no longer sexy enough to capture people's imagination?
Exactly. I see two major advantages to a Moon base.
1) You have the ability to re-supply them on a reasonable schedule when you inevitably discover they need critical item X or they're all going to die.
2) People can come back so it doesn't have to be a one way trip.
If you want to go to Mars a Moon base should be a pre-requisite as a proof of concept to make sure your system actually works. Sure the environment is slightly more challenging but it doesn't compare to the challenge caused by the distance and gra
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It does seem that way, but Mars has it's own advantages:
- Readily accessible water (but that's possibly also available in a couple places on the moon)
- Lots of CO2 delivered to your doorstep, 25 hours a day.
- The fact that plants are really good at turning those two into food, oxygen, and construction material.
- a 25 hour day versus the 708 hour lunar day (which would render solar power largely useless, and make outside operations challenging during the two-week long night.
- smooth, weather-worn sand instea
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Yeah, but the moon is going to explode in 2049, as a giant space chicken (or something) hatches from it.
Re:Something More Modest (Score:4, Informative)
Then we found out about the 450C sulfuric acid clouds, the molten tin lakes and the almost solid atmosphere...
It's pretty nice at 50km up [wikipedia.org] though...
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Even dumping the entire asteroid belt on it wouldn't make that much difference, the total belt mass is estimated at only about 4% of the moon's. Tides would get slightly stronger, but I doubt it would be enough to substantially disrupt anything - the tides have been weakening since the moon was first formed and started spiraling away from us, a 4% mass increase would only set the escape back by 2% of the moon's current distance, which would set the fading of the tides back about 200 million years.
While I will agree the Mars One Concept... (Score:2, Insightful)
probably is too optimistic, I truly call into question the opinion that we couldn't make a colony on Mars work with our current technology. Especially if we went nuclear for the initial energy supply it should be possible to put together a ship, or series of ships to land all the necessary supplies to produce a subterrainian habitat suitable for a small human colony, as well as enough supplies and technology to allow them to manufacture the rest once they are there (minus perhaps circuitry and other 'advanc
This is news? (Score:2)
Mars One is HUGELY optimistic. Optimism is great as a general life trait, but its a terrible way to design things.
To quote Sir Arthur Clarke... (Score:5, Interesting)
"If an elderly but distinguished scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right; but if he says that it is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Granted, this study is supposedly more than a one man's rant, but I'm afraid that the room for assumptions is too big to guarantee an unbiased conclusion.
It is now Mars One team's move to provide a good rebuttal. So far, Bas Lansdorp's response [spacepolicyonline.com] is inadequate:
...while he welcomed the students' analysis, his company does not have time to respond to all the questions it receives from students and "the lack of time for support from us combined with their limited experience results in incorrect conclusions."
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limited experience results in incorrect conclusions.
I bet those stupid kids haven't even been to Mars!
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But he isn't saying it's impossible. He's saying that the current plan is insufficient, and you can ask the residents of the lost colonies in colonial USA.
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I think experience in places like the McMurdo station in Antarctica is that you need massive supplies. The only realistic plan would be to send literally hundreds of tons of materials together with robots to do prep work before the first permanent resident planted foot on the surface of Mars.
Not impossible by any means, but one or two orders of magnitude harder than the Mars One Colony makes it look like.
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There's possible and there is practical. While we're on the cusp of it being possible, it'll be a long time before it is practical.
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Stop that stupid clarke quote forever please (Score:2)
I highlighted you what's the problem with the quote. It is big honking ad hominem. Judging an opinion on the age of whom did it is wrong. You have to look at the argument. And if the argument are based in ground science then so be it, unless you disprove the science the argument stands. It does not matter if the scientist is young or old.
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Your point is very logical.
My point was that it is sometimes hard to prove something impossible, because there are innumerable, sometimes unexpected, ways to approach the implementation. I picked that quote as a quickly recognizable meme with a similar message that saves people some processing time, because they already met it and considered it. Please don't take it literally. The elderly scientist obviously does not apply in this context.
The MIT study does not seem to raise any fundamental reasons (lik
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Argumentum ad logicam.
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Romanes eunt domus
Mars One lacks a great many technical details (Score:2)
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Do _we_ need to take it seriously? If _they_ can get it funded and moving then good on them.
Well, they are basically conning people out of their money to try and get this project moving as they have no good plan or potential to do what they say. The entire thing seems to be one big crowd funding campaign with no option but failure. They're never going to get their project funded and moving in anything like its current state and I would say _we_ probably should inform people of that.
Too much oxygen? (Score:4, Insightful)
“If crops grown on Mars are the only food source, they will ‘produce unsafe oxygen levels in the habitat’ resulting in the first crew fatality after about 68 days due to ‘suffocation from too low an oxygen partial pressure within the environment,’ the consequence of a complex series of events stemming from overproduction of oxygen by the plants.
It seems like an over-production of oxygen on a planet with an abundance of atmospheric CO2 would be a solvable problem. Hasn't this been faced by every grow experiment ever performed in space?
One of the criticisms of the astronauts in the mood landing program was that we quit just as we were getting good at it. Right now we're not even working at developing long-duration space missions. We're not going to solve the problems until we start putting experiments and people up there to start working the bugs out.
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Exactly. I didn't understand this part. If there really was too much it seems like it would be a simple
enough solution to either let in some co2 from outside, vent the excess oxygen out, or a combinition
of the two. Assuming you had proper ways of measuring the concentration of oxygen and co2 then
getting the right balance seems relatively straightforward.
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It seems like an over-production of oxygen on a planet with an abundance of atmospheric CO2 would be a solvable problem. Hasn't this been faced by every grow experiment ever performed in space?
I really wouldn't call Mars' atmosphere much of an abundance. In a lab on Earth, the average Mars atmospheric pressure is considered a medium vacuum. We can get gas out of it but it will take a lot of pumping and energy to do so.
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but the study claims that they would be unable to vent ONLY the oxygen and would be forced to vent nitrogen as well
It's too bad we don't have any experience with binding oxygen to other chemicals.
There's a whole planet full of rusty soil to be had - I don't get why anybody is advocating for a sealed-ecosystem as if they're on a space station.
not Holland (Score:2)
The country is called "The Netherlands", not "Holland".
Go to Mars to die (Score:2)
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Mars One is a TV-show (Score:5, Informative)
Mars One is a commercial TV-show. The goal is to make money for the producers. The entire project is financed by making television about the endeavor. Actually reaching Mars and building a sustainable colony there are secondary goals. The project can be a succes without ever launching a single rocket, as long as people are willing to pay for the show that is produced around it.
Although I'm a bit cynical about the probability of reaching Mars I think the idea of financing a spacemission by selling TV is pure genious. The landing on the moon is one the highlights of 20th-century television. If so many people want to see it there must be an opportunity to make money.
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Wait... (Score:2)
...you're suggesting a project announced to great fanfare on the web might not be realistic or even possible?
But...they have a website!
(Anyway, I'm sure the process of tearing their plan apart was actually a fairly interesting engineering exercise.)
Unreputable? (Score:4, Interesting)
With all that BS at the bottom, it casts doubt in my mind on the actual article.
Not Just Mars One (Score:2)
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It is largely about Mars One and their timeline. For example, they assume Falcon Heavy to be the largest available transport, while SpaceX Raptor engine and Mars Colonial Transporter may become available shortly after the Mars One projected dates.
It is impossible to imagine every possible approach to build a Mars Base, so it is logical that they evaluate a specific plan.
They also make a lot of assumptions, for example: "If crops grown on Mars are the only food source, they will produce unsafe oxygen lev
Re:Not Just Mars One (Score:4, Interesting)
The big problem is all the rocket jocks think that getting to Mars is hard part and they have the idea that since biology and ecology are "soft" sciences that those are just details that will work themselves out. Until someone starts a long term self-sufficient colony on someplace like Antarctica, its really hard to take an Mars colonization plan seriously.
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Plants don't need sunlight, they just need light. Scientists and engineers (Michael Massimino, the engineer who fixed the Hubble, praised it) who have been in space say they see nothing unrealistic about Andy Wier's The Martian. [wikipedia.org] Michael Massimino, the engineer who fixed the Hubble, praised it. You can light your plants with electric lighting. The problem would be how to generate the electricity.
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"Unsustainable" in the case of a Mars colony means "you run out of supplies and die when the earth based supplier stops delivering." Part of that is just that self-sustaining human-supporting ecosystems are a hard problem. Your conjecture that it's an impossible problem is hard to validate. Maybe you're right, but how are we supposed to tell that?
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self-sustaining human-supporting ecosystems are a hard problem
So, wouldn't it be prudent to set-up such an environment here on earth, run tests with human inhabitants, and then carry over that experience into building a Mars colony?
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We've done that, multiple times in fact - I believe Biosphere 2 was the first large-scale attempt, and they were mostly successful despite being hamstrung by the limitation of operating as a closed system - a limitation that a Mars colony would not have. After all Mars has massive reserves of water and CO2 readily available, which plants can turn into all the air and biomass you want, and cellulose can be converted to a number of extremely versatile construction materials. Include sand and eventual mining
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I believe Biosphere 2 was the first large-scale attempt, and they were mostly successful
Would you really consider Biosphere 2 to be a success? Yes, the people in there survived for however long it was, and certainly it was a radical new attempt at facilitating sustenance of an intelligent life-form like ours, but there was a failure in advancing the idea further, and while similar, it is quite different from a Mars habitat.
Mars has massive reserves of water and CO2 readily available, which plants can turn into all the air and biomass you want, and cellulose can be converted to a number of extremely versatile construction materials. Include sand and eventual mining operations for trace elements and you're well positioned to not only survive but grow and prosper.
I don't think growing crops there would be easy. Pollination is a big problem, and having to live on an algal diet won't be easy. Plus, there are the usual phytopathologica
Partial pressure (Score:3)
Nope, wrong again, you're really not very good at this game. I'd suggest at least double-checking Wikipedia before you try to impress others with your knowledge: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]
Partial pressure has nothing specifically to do with humans, it's simply the fraction of the total pressure attributable to the gas in question - basically the pressure you would have if you magically removed all other gases from the volume in question. And it works out to be total pressure times the percentage of
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"Unsustainable" in the case of a Mars colony means "you run out of supplies and die when the earth based supplier stops delivering." Part of that is just that self-sustaining human-supporting ecosystems are a hard problem. Your conjecture that it's an impossible problem is hard to validate. Maybe you're right, but how are we supposed to tell that?
It is up to you to prove (your "validate") that self-sustaining colonies anywhere outside the Earth are possible. You prove the positive, not the negative. Oth
Re:S[pace colonisation (Score:4, Funny)
Thetproblemrwithespaceacolonizationdisiyoutcan'
There's much better ways to colonize the written word than spaces. Try page margins, there's lots of room and they don't interfere as much with legibility.
Re:S[pace colonisation (Score:4, Funny)
Try page margins, there's lots of room and they don't interfere as much with legibility.
Tried that, I had a great proof of this colonization concept, but this margin was too small to contain it...
Re:Not just MIT (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Not just MIT (Score:4, Insightful)
To be fair, Musk most likely realizes that societies tend to need a "big idea" to focus on long term investments.
Re:Not just MIT (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why this conflation of space and science? We stopped sending people to the bottom of the ocean too, where are the Aqua Nutters?
James Cameron went to the bottom of the ocean [deepseachallenge.com] just 2.5 years ago.
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What "science and technology" are behind Mars One?
I know you're trolling, but it's really a pretty impressive list. The technology for the communications system, for example, already exists and is in use around Earth and Mars, though they plan to bolster that. We have spacesuits that would work on Mars as-is, though they'll probably want to create Mars-specific ones that reduce the bulkiness and make it more flexible (we're already doing this, by the way, look up NASA's Z-2 suit and Dava Newman's Bio-Suit). We have done lots In-Situ Resource Utilization
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