Five Cites on Mars? Architecture Studio Releases Its Plans (euronews.com) 108
Five cities on Mars, home to one million people? That's the vision of architecture studio ABIBOO, which has drawn up designs based on the latest scientific research — and created an impressive three-and-a-half minute video to showcase it. "According to the architecture company's analysis, the construction can start by 2054," reports EuroNews, "and it could be built by 2100 — that is — when the first community could start living there..."
"Water is one of the great advantages that Mars offers, it helps to be able to get the proper materials for the construction. Basically, with the water and the Co2, we can generate carbon and with the carbon, we can generate steel," says Alfredo Muñoz [founder of the architecture studio]. The architecture company plans to use exclusively Martian materials for the construction...
The Mars city project is part of scientific work organised by The Mars Society and developed by the SONet network, an international team of scientists and academics.
ABIBOO envisions "vertical cities" with large green spaces powered by solar panels, with inhabitants surviving on a plant-based diet from the greenhouse-grown crops (which also produce oxygen). The communities would be connected by elevators and tunnels, "all built into the side of a cliff to protect inhabitants from atmospheric pressure and radiation."
Muñoz argues that rather than repeating earth's mistakes of damaging the planet, careful planning can "try to minimize or ensure that new colonizations on other planets happen sustainably."
The Mars city project is part of scientific work organised by The Mars Society and developed by the SONet network, an international team of scientists and academics.
ABIBOO envisions "vertical cities" with large green spaces powered by solar panels, with inhabitants surviving on a plant-based diet from the greenhouse-grown crops (which also produce oxygen). The communities would be connected by elevators and tunnels, "all built into the side of a cliff to protect inhabitants from atmospheric pressure and radiation."
Muñoz argues that rather than repeating earth's mistakes of damaging the planet, careful planning can "try to minimize or ensure that new colonizations on other planets happen sustainably."
typo in headline (Score:1)
Re: typo in headline (Score:2)
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You must be new here.. people usually only comment on articles when the editors actually get it RIGHT.
Potatoes? (Score:2)
We'd obviously be growing potatoes, right?
Re:Potatoes? (Score:5, Insightful)
We'd obviously be growing potatoes, right?
Can you grow potatoes at the Vostok Research Station on the central Antarctic Plateau?
It is warmer than Mars, has more water, more annual sunshine, and has actual air. Let's build a city at Vostok that can sustain a million people before we try to do it on Mars.
Once the Martian cities are built, what will be the basis for their economy? The Martian lithosphere is nearly identical to Earth's, so there is no metal they can mine and export. There is no crop they can grow and nothing they can manufacture that can't be grown or made far more cheaply on Earth. So how will they pay for the constant stream of imports from Earth that the Martian civilization will require?
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The reality is, once we are capable of building a city on Mars we will be capable of building a city on another world around another star, a habitable world. Mars will do it's duty as quarantine and launch base. Anything goes wrong it can go wrong there and not on Earth. So missions to the stars will launch from Mars and return there as well, starports all over the earth a delusion. From earth to the moon and moon to mars and mars to the stars and the same coming back. Try to go straight to earth and you li
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The nearest star is 40000 times as far away as Mars. There is no conceivable way of trading materials to an interstellar colony. Even if we found a habitable planet (which Mars is certainly not) any colonization attempt would require an enormous commitment of resources with no conceivable payback.
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I'm sorry to quench your optimism, but "No", on so many levels. The supply lines and communications lags to reach Mars are outrageous, there is _no_ physical supply line to any other solar system.
Standing water does not exist on Mars: there's apparently some subterranean water, but that's expensive and dangerous to tap. If water is our limiting factor, Europa would be better with its icy surface and subglacial melted water.
Europa [Re:Potatoes?] (Score:2)
Europa would be better with its icy surface and subglacial melted water.
Just a quick note, Mars has plenty of frozen water; no need to go to Europa. If it's specifically liquid water you want, yes, Europa has an ocean under the ice, but "under the ice" means 15 to 30 kilometers straight down, through cryogenic ice that's cold enough to be essentially rock. For comparison, the deepest hole ever drilled on Earth is Kola Superdeep Borehole, 12.26 kilometers, and took 20 years to drill.
https://europa.nasa.gov/europa... [nasa.gov]
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The Martian water is underground. That presents a mining problem not present on Europa, where simply collecting solar energy will melt surface water. Europa presents fascinating opportunities for ice-based architecture not present on Mars.
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And oh, yes: Europa gets cracks in its surface from tidal flexing. It might be dangerous to mine close to those cracks, but I'd expect the chemically somewhat distinct interior water to be far more accessible near those cracks. much as lava and ores from igneous rock are more accessible near volcanoes on Earth.
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Some of the Martian water is underground, but not all of it. Entire cliffs apparently made of the exposed edge of an ice sheet have been found. Then there's the actual liquid water in subglacial lakes that has been found. Of course, the covering of those subglacial lakes is water ice. Quite dirty ice, but ice all the same. Collecting solar energy will melt that too, and the concentration of the available solar energy is much higher than on Europa. Most of this water will need to be cleaned of perchlorates,
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Its not craze to think enough food could be grown indoors
Sure, they could build a nuclear power plant and use the electricity to grow wheat under LEDs.
But they aren't going to export wheat back to earth. Food is an extra expense, not a net source of income.
So how do the colonists pay for imports? What is the basis for the economy?
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Given that the earliest colonists will be forced to develop a whole lot of new technologies, probably the major export of mars would be intellectual property. As has been pointed out, nothing manufactured on mars could be profitably exported to earth. Peddling licenses doesn't require expensive transportation of physical goods.
You're putting a lot of smart people in a challenging environment. Likely, they're going to develop some interesting technologies learning to cope with it. Eventually, they may hold e
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So how do the colonists pay for imports? What is the basis for the economy?
Exotic tourism for the very rich is a possibility. Entertainment is another. There might be a market for broadcasts of low gravity sports, for example. TV shows and movies shot on Mars also. Art and craft items might also have a market. There would be a certain cachet in owning items produced on another world that could translate into a price high enough to justify the export costs. Mars water? Mars steaks? Mars coffee? Those might have some potential. That may not be enough to run an entire colony on, but
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The South Pole has nitrogen. Mars, not so much.
Atmosphere of Mars is 2.8% Nitrogen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
You don't need terribly much to grow plants. Nitrogen is not going to be a limiting resource.
Re: Potatoes? (Score:2)
Plants require huge amounts of added nitrogen on earth. And The Martian atmosphere is 1% the pressure of earth so you have to divide that 2.8% by 100 so there is 2600 times more nitrogen in a Cubic meter of earth atmosphere then there is an a Martian one.
Re: Potatoes? (Score:2)
So that is 1/3 of a gram of nitrogen per cubic meter Mars atmosphere. You need to add 136Kg of nitrogen per acre of potatoes here on earth. So just over 400,000 cubic meters of Martian air. That is provided you can find a process that can harvest 100% of nitrogen.
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Turns out compressing gas is a very well developed process. The bottleneck would be the Haber-Bosch process. I'd suggest growing peanuts.
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We'd obviously be growing potatoes, right?
Can you grow potatoes at the Vostok Research Station on the central Antarctic Plateau?
It's not allowed I guess. There is McMurdo station on Antarctic with about 1.6k people stationed there, however Antarctic continent has very stringent protection, practically requiring that nothing can be left, as all the trash has to be taken back, also what's the point of doing this there, when for quite less money food can be delivered.
On Mars on the other hand once we can make it self sufficient it would be an enormous boost for humanity survival and expansion beyond Earth, just the sheer Mars gravity a
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They do have a hydroponic greenhouse at the south pole to give at least a little bit of fresh food during the winter months when the base is disconnected from the rest of the world.
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Good point, but the key word is "... a little bit of fresh food ...", they don't have to rely on it, because the food is delivered during summer - it's less expensive.
Unless something terrible happens here on Earth I believe people will set up settlements on Mars eventually.
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Once the Martian cities are built, what will be the basis for their economy?
Tourism, obviously.
Even if Mars had some industry to offer that Earth doesn't, its scale would be too small to make it economically viable. The cost of transportation between Earth and Mars alone is somewhere between 20,000 and 2 mio. per kg (depending on which estimate you trust, because yes, that is the span of estimates I found on a quick search). Whatever you mine has to be very rare and valuable to justify just that, let alone the cost of mining. And it has to be in enough demand that the market doesn'
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Mistake in your math - you've assumed transport costs are the same between Earth -> Mars, and Mars -> Earth; going Mars->Earth is significantly cheaper due to the lower gravity.
If your transport vessel that's going interplanetary doesn't land on earth - then the delta V required to go back to Mars to complete a round trip is fairly low; and you can knock a few orders of magnitude off the costs. The big cost in rocketry is escaping Earth's gravity well.
That isn't to say I disagree - I think mining i
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True, and less atmospheric drag and all that. It might be considerably cheaper to go Mars to Earth - but there aren't any numbers for that. So with the two-orders-of-magnitue spread between the estimates, I still think that the lower end is probably somewhere in the right ballpark for the reverse trip.
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The delta-V required to get from Mars surface to Earth (with aerobraking) is about half that of the outbound trip, but the economy of payload per dollars spent doesn't scale at all linearly with delta-V. Earth-to-Mars is pushing against the limits of what can be done with current rocket technology so it's roughly infinitely expensive: it costs billions to land anything at all on Mars from an Earth-surface launch. Earth is a terrible place to launch rockets from! In comparison, a launch from Mars can be done
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Since we're talking about something meant to occur a hundred years from now, one might also assume spaceflight will be more affordable by then.
That's where the 20,000 per kg figure comes from, if I remember correctly. It was a Space X estimate for the future.
A Mars colony of this size would have to be designed to be entirely self-sufficient and not dependent on supplies from Earth once completed.
My argument, exactly.
It would have its own internal economy based on extracting resources for its own use, with little economic connections to Earth.
So Heinlein was right, that a space colony will be more like a wild west frontier with slightly advanced technology (but without any high tech, because it'll be limited to what you can manufacture locally).
The only things worth shipping would be expensive refined items like medicine and electronic components, and people.
People aren't worth shipping. We know how to manufacture them locally. The process is time-intensive but otherwise trivial. It does take people out of the workforce temp
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more annual sunshine
Full-spectrum LED's, powered by ye olde RTG.
Next fucking question.
Need a reactor [Re:Potatoes?] (Score:2)
Full-spectrum LED's, powered by ye olde RTG.
RTGs are inherently pretty low power; you really want a nuclear reactor here.
Fortunately, small nuclear reactors for space are now being tested. https://www.nasa.gov/press-rel... [nasa.gov]
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A project like this can't be built with purely capitalist motivations - it will depend on idealistic rich people sinking vast amounts of wealth into it without a clear return on investment beyond getting their names in the history books. If there's ever to be a million-person colony on Mars, it must be self-sufficient and not require "a constant stream of imports from Earth". It will have to survive on its own internal economy, growing as the colonists extract resources from the planet. This is an absolute
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Actually, the large majority of it has had less differentiation than on Earth, so there is likely to be less in the way of significant concentration increases in interesting elements. So mining economics on Mars is going to be a very different thing compared to Earth. For examples,
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A very good question. I think there is an answer, but I doubt it is economically viable: Manufacturing that would be destructive to Earth's environment could be conducted on Mars.
As I said, I doubt it would be viable, but mining for "rare earth" minerals would provide the feedstock for the manufacturing. *shrug*
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Once the Martian cities are built, what will be the basis for their economy?
Retirement communities. That 1/3 gravity would be pretty sweet for people at the end of their lives. We'd probably need a space elevators so they could get there without a lot of g-forces.
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GOP will only fund it if they're clearly either only male or female. [shethepeople.tv]
Why though? (Score:2)
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Are people getting paid to come up with this science fiction? If so, how? Who is giving them money?
They are doing it for publicity. Millions of people are likely to read about these designs and watch the video.
Most of these people would have otherwise never heard of ABIBOO.
The video is mostly a talking head and panning static images. Most likely it was slapped together in a week by a few skilled artists. So if they get even one new client out of this, their effort paid for itself.
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It's simple:
1. Write a catchy but unrealistic "prediction" about the future
2. Surround it with click-bait ads of busty ladies
3. Horny lonely males click the ads
4. Profit!
No question-marks necessary.
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Colonies on Mars is a stupid idea. We still don't have one in Antarctica, which is far more attractive. Or the bottom of the ocean.
But the science bases in Antarctica can serve as a model for bases on the Moon and Mars. It is a nice place to visit, but people are sure happy to leave when their 6-month rotation is up.
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John Campbell, the editor of Analog magazine, used to pay them. Robert Heinlein's various stories of the Space Patrol, Podkayne of Mars, and the Stone family were treasures of my youth. His stories inspired many engineers and scientists of many nations who helped create the space program.
I'll urge people interested in the adventure of interplanetary life to read his stories, and to learn about the physics and engineering to go with it, before undertaking such a large scale project.
socialist utopia? (Score:2)
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Blankets (Score:1)
Way easier to just give the natives blankets
How do you "Damage Mars" (Score:2, Interesting)
Muñoz argues that rather than repeating earth's mistakes of damaging the planet, careful planning can "try to minimize or ensure that new colonizations on other planets happen sustainably."
Mars is a dead planet. It has no atmosphere you could add applicable pollution, no plant life you can kill (maybe some microbes quite a ways underground). It has no indigenous peoples you can ruin, no animals to hunt to extinction...
So what exactly would it take to "Damage Mars"? What would that even mean?
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So what exactly would it take to "Damage Mars"? What would that even mean?
If you can think of it, they promise not to do it.
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Oh, I'm sure humans will find creative ways.
Dream On (Score:4, Insightful)
I saw videos like this 30 years ago for people in space, on the moon, and on Mars. This looks all the same. The same glossing over the troublesome details, like the amount of tonnage you will have to boost from Earth to Mars and just how you will get to a sustainable ecosystem.
Most of all there seems to be no business case here. Sure living on Mars might be cool but there has to be some economic return or people won't do it.
And it isn't clear that if you are going to do it why wouldn't a better place to start be on the moon. It is easier to get to, closer to the sun for energy, and easier to build huge enclosures due to the lower gravity. Mars has an atmosphere which helps but it is hardly less of a harsh outdoor environment.
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An even better place would be ... right here? Practice making a dome and living within our means? Will probably need the dome in 20 years anyway.
Nar, too revolutionary!
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Fair call. I would suggest that earth movement is a trivial problem comparatively.
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By active, I meant more than just seismically. We also have more problems here due to biological and chemical activity that have to be addressed when constructing the lining of the underground environments. I don't think we've found the limits of how far down the biological activity goes. And, though Mars is believed to have large amounts of underground water, it would still be nothing like here. We'd also have more volcanic activity meaning more regions with sulfur issues underground. It is also likely tha
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I don't really see it. Sure, there are issues that are in one place but not another, I see the ones we have here as easier to solve, plus there is always a backup plan for Earth. On Mars, stuff goes wrong, everyone dies.
We have buildings that sway in earthquakes, we don't need to dig that far down, which avoids the heat problem. We understand the biology (mostly) of terrestrial activity, and can account for it. We have refrigerators with zero moving parts that should last indefinitely, powered from heat alo
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An even better place would be ... right here? Practice making a dome and living within our means? Will probably need the dome in 20 years anyway.
Nar, too revolutionary!
What makes you think that's not already been done?
TLDR - 30 years ago a sealed environment was created, and eight individuals spent two years living inside it, growing their own food, doing basic science, etc. The project was not without problems, but since identifying problems was part of the purpose of the experiment it could definitely be described as a partial success. The second attempt at the same facility was ended early due to both financial issues, as well as sabotage.
Whether or not those 'planning
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Pfft. Reposting to fix my mangled link...
An even better place would be ... right here? Practice making a dome and living within our means? Will probably need the dome in 20 years anyway.
Nar, too revolutionary!
What makes you think that's not already been done [wikipedia.org]?
TLDR - 30 years ago a sealed environment was created, and eight individuals spent two years living inside it, growing their own food, doing basic science, etc. The project was not without problems, but since identifying problems was part of the purpose of the experiment it could definitely be described as a partial success. The second attempt at the same facility was ended early due to both financial issues, as well a
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I knew it had been done, but it didn't NEED to be done then, plus advances in material science etc have made it a different landscape now. (pun intended)
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Mars 38% gravity. Day is a little longer than 24 hours. Water, water everywhere. CO2+H2O= rocket fuel.
The Moon 17% gravity. Day 28 times too long. Water in isolated areas. Yes you can make a rocket fuel from water but hydrogen is much harder to handle than methane.
Even a thin atmosphere moderates night time temperatures and makes the required suit to go outside simpler on Mars. Mars can hypothetically have the air pressure boosted and even a little more would remove the chances of explosive decompre
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95% CO2.
One way of looking at it is if we wish to 'fix' climate change on Earth we can look to our Martian colony for inspiration in terms of carbon dioxide scrubbing.
Economically, however...
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Yes. Reminds me of picture-books I read as a child. Except for the "mobile communicators", basically nothing came true.
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There are some disadvantages to the Moon. The days and nights are very long, and the soil isn't good for growing anything. In terms of becoming self sustained it's probably harder to do on the Moon.
The low gravity makes construction and access easier, but isn't ideal for humans. The lack of an atmosphere is also an issue for radiation exposure.
If the goal is a self sustaining habitat then Mars is probably a better option, even if the initial start-up is harder.
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Mars is another planet, not a satellite. The driving philosophical idea behind expansion to other planets is to safeguard our species against a catastrophic disaster that would wipe us all out here on Earth. Something big and immediate enough to make that happen despite all the tech we have now has a reasonable chance to also impacting the Moon, in some way.
The Moon would be a good start for experimentation and trials, though. Definitely get it to work on the Moon first before you shoot it to Mars only to f
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The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs wouldn't have made any difference to the self-sustaining moon colony. But yeah, Mars, lets go.
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That asteroid may be survivable for us even today. Not the billions of us, but a few millions - enough to repopulate the planet.
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I couldn't see millions surviving. You would have to already have your underground sealed bunker with all the tech, water, seeds and other things you would need put aside.
Assuming the asteroid hit on the other side of the planet, you could at least then get to your bunker. If the asteroid hits remotely in your neighborhood, you likely won't live.
We don't know how long the sun would be blocked out by all the dust. Temperatures would likely go down quite a bit and growing anything not under an artificial ligh
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You would have to already have your underground sealed bunker with all the tech, water, seeds and other things you would need put aside.
There are quite a few cities that are located far above anything that water would reach, even in the largest global Tsunami (e.g. https://www.worldatlas.com/art... [worldatlas.com]) so even a planet-killer sized asteroid would do no immediate damage to a billion or so of us.
So yeah, dust and blocked out sunlight is the main issue. But even the Chicxulub (dinosaur-killer) event only blocked out the sun for a few weeks or months. Sunlight was REDUCED for a much longer time, and the ecosystem collapsed - but many plants surviv
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The top soil on the moon is known to be "sharp". It damaged the suits of the people that walked there much more than should be expected.
These are very well padded suits, yet required repairs after moonwalks. So, not sure how well (permanent) steel constructions would hold up on the moon's surface.
How deep the top soil layer on the moon is, I don't know (and too lazy to look for that kind of information). While you are correct about the moon being closer to Earth and Sun, the complete lack of atmosphere and
Cites? (Score:2)
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Hey he finished proofreading the first word and figured the rest of the submission was fine
Now accepting condo pre-purchases? (Score:3)
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The structures in the video are built into a clffside, so they are fairly well shielded from most of the sky. The video did not really go that much into actual structure of each living area, but I imagine the sleeping areas would be deeper into the structure. Standing right in front of the windows they depict would probably give you the highest exposure, but I imagine most people would not spend a lot of time each day right in front of the window, and there would be alerts during solar events, etc.
This totally ignores Mars gravity, temp, industry (Score:1)
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>If people are going to live there they need more than Mars' 0.38g, that means massive rotating habitats.
We don't actually know that... which is a worse problem, in my opinion, since it could be figured out (or at least great strides made) with a relatively inexpensive orbital experiment or two with small mammals in a centrifuge.
One centrifuge with compartments at distances to generate 1.00g, 0.38g, and 0.17g. Have mice up there long enough to reproduce at least once and have that second generation reac
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Do humans need more than a fraction of one G to survive, and especially to breed successfully? It's a fascinating question, and has never been really explored for bearing children or raising them.
Venus is easier to colonize (Score:3)
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Hey, nice to see somebody is paying attention.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/cita... [nasa.gov]
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You go to Venus, pretty much everything you need comes from Earth. You're never going down to the ground due to the heat, pressure, and caustic atmosphere.
Floating cities on Venus are a pretty but pointless dream that will never happen. The benefits of such things would be the natural near-Earth gravity and the plentiful solar power. Almost everything else is a huge negative.
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Great idea. First: try building a floating city on Earth first.
The whole reason a Venus floating city floats is that Venus has a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere. Unless you're proposing to switch the atmosphere of Earth to Carbon dioxide, this doesn't fly.
It comes down to atmosphere regulation and parts (Score:4, Informative)
If I remember the correctly the issue came down to being able to maintain the atmosphere inside the dome/complex/colony. The critique boiled (This is the two sentence boil down of a 50-60 page critique) down to complex ending up in and over-oxygenation scenario, then needing additional nitrogen to offset the over-oxygenation and within a couple of months running out of spare nitrogen to keep the atmosphere human compatible and eventually the entire site collapses and everyone dies.
The technology needed to correct this is a reliable way to capture the oxygen out of the air, in a relatively low power environment. Humans can do it on earth, but you normally need a cryogenic plant and a distillation tower that is several stories tall in order to accomplish this, and a way to store liquid oxygen safely for extended periods of time, this is a non starter. This is a technology that would have to be refined, miniaturized and designed to operate on Mars.
Plus for the short to medium term (decades) all supply parts would have to be provided by earth. And that means having 18 months worth of parts on site all the time. And as larger things wear out, all of those parts have to be able to be shipped out to Mars. The MIT critique (which shredded the atmosphere regulation) seriously addressed the parts plan and shredded that as well, to the point of saying every ship that was going to be going to Mars would be more that 50% parts by weight and any new things that went out would increase the parts requirements in the future.
All of these plans so far don't seem to get the fact that "sustainable manufacturing" (or what ever buzzword they want to stick in here) on Mars is a huge logistical undertaking. Prospecting, mining, smelting, refining and machining iron is a huge logistical train by itself. Then add additional materials after that (copper, silicon come to mind). And each of these are incredibly energy intensive. Steel is even worse.
If the organizers of the current pipe dream actually want this to succeed. They have to reduce the parts complexity and simplify the supply chain. One type of machine screw instead of twenty. One circuit board that can run everything. One screen type and size across the board. One type of switch. This simplifies the number of parts that have to be stocked, stored and inventoried. that and have a nuclear generator for power, and figure out how to build a logistics supply chain to mine and smelt iron in a low power environment.
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http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1... [mit.edu]
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For people who are interested, here is the MIT assessment of the Mars One spheal. I expect this critique could be easily updated br scratching out "Mars one" and replacing it with the current project name and the critique would still stand. http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1... [mit.edu]
Nice analysis. However, note that this is a critique of a low cost proposal which had been sold with the statement "No new major developments or inventions are needed to make the mission plan a reality."
The conclusion of the paper you cite was not that it couldn't work, the bottom line was: "Technology development towards improving the reliability of life support systems, the TRL of ISRU systems, and the capability of Mars in-situ manufacturing will have a significant impact on reducing the mass an
There were a couple of big stop items (Score:2)
The biggest hurdle the Mars One had papered over was not having a mission ready cryogenic system for the trapping and reprocessing of the excess oxygen (and most other gases) in the complex. As they said in the report, this is readily available technology on earth, but no one has developed one for space flight or use on Mars. Until this technology is proven ready to go for space flight, this is a hard stop item.
And while the report doesn'
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And that means having 18 months worth of parts on site all the time.
3D printing. Financed by bitcoin. Supervised by an AI.
Solved.
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Funny how obvious most of this is. Upon watching the video, my first thought on the acres of solar panels and extensive constructions visible was "to make this happen, you have to be able to build it on Mars. So when do they start talking about the mining industry they are going to set up?"
It's really painfully obvious that even on Mars, any colony needs to be able to run by itself after an initial bootstrap, or the whole thing is but a dream.
Steel? (Score:2)
"with the carbon, we can generate steel" Huh? Steel requires iron. I am not a geologist, but my impression is that iron ores like we have on Earth are unlikely to exist on Mars. Whether there are other ways to economically obtain iron on Mars, I don't know. So how are they going to make steel?
Unless they mean steel figuratively, maybe graphene.
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Iron is pretty common on the Martian surface (part of the reason it's "the red planet"). The "blueberries" that were found by MER were hematite nodules. Smelting it to Iron (and eventually converting to steel) will be the hard part.
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Iron is pretty common on the Martian surface (part of the reason it's "the red planet"). The "blueberries" that were found by MER were hematite nodules. Smelting it to Iron (and eventually converting to steel) will be the hard part.
It's even easier than that. Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity rovers have, all three of them, driven past hunks of nickel-iron just sitting on the surface, several of them weighing in at multiple tons. Apparently all you have to do to find metallic iron on Mars is to drive around and pick it up.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com]
A "studio". (Score:1)
Translation, artsy-fartsy architectural drawing people wildly extrapolating something that'll never be built due to the realities of the situation.
I mean, look at 2001, now look at the only orbital habitate for the human race in 2021.
That utter stupidity again (Score:2)
Even if climate change in the very worst version hits us, this dirtball will still be massively more hospitable than Mars can be in the next 1000 years or so.
Mars: As easy as colonizing Antarctica ... (Score:2)
Except you can't breathe the air and you're bathed in lethal radiation. No problem!
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Except you can't breathe the air and you're bathed in lethal radiation. No problem!
Yet they still keep talking about it. Star Trek thoughts? They could go anywhere in the Universe and it's just wonderful.
We'll never make it. Leftists are trying to deep 6 the world as we know it.
Radiation. (Score:1)
Life on Mars (Score:2)
Mars ? Stupid...1st, build on (Score:1)
Build it on the Andean Plateau first. (Score:3)
Really try it there. You try Antarctica but solar would not work well at the poles. It would be cheaper to build in the Andean Plateau If things went wrong you can open it up to normal air and not kill a bunch of people and work out the bugs. Think if it as BioSphere 3. Biosphere 2 taught us that we did not know how to make a biosphere so time to try again.
doubters should stand aside (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Right now I'm fine with robots doing the exploring.
Plentiful (Score:2)
There is no shortage of stupid.