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How would we colonize Mars if it was inhabited?


fredinno

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53 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

1) cities is more expensive, yes transport is cheaper but housing is far more expensive outside slums/ bad neighborhoods . Yes suburbs is more so as you want an large yard close to the city, longer away it becomes cheaper again as the construction cost for an house is less than an apartment especially the fancy ones like 5.  

While you have a salary to want a large yard, as well as most of your neighbours.
If not much people have a job to buy a large cottage with a yard, all required communications and fuel their cars to drive 100 km per day to the job and back, then the developers build budget multistorey houses, where dwellers rent the apartments.

A multistorey building with 100 flats has one roof, four walls, one set of pipes and wires, so under similar conditions it requires less money to keep, than 100 cottages, each with the same listed above.
Since Roman insulae till modern buildings. That's the main reason why it has appeared at all.

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

2) is an major benefit, however with an city with poor infrastructure its less. 

A village with poor infrastructure is even worse.

Spoiler

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1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

3) doctors / population tend to be pretty constant demand, assume the same for police too. 

While a town dwellers get enough salary to pay the doctor, and there are enough people in a town to keep a police/fire/medical post in their town.
If you have to pay them all social allowance, you will prefer to gather them together, to minimize those services.
If one house contains a population of a small town (say, ~400), then one police post can patrol several former towns at once just moving around a city block.
A fire department can protect several blocks, i.e. a whole county.
More or less with medicine, education and entertainment.

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

5) is the big one, perhaps just as important is that you will have all sort of services and entertainment close. 

Why? It's easier to make one big show which can see a whole city, than 100 comparable shows across a region.
One fireworks visible to all, one concert audible for many, wagons of drinks in one place near a storehouse, rather than sending them hudreds kilometers around.

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

this is also why unemployed stay in cities, easier to get new job and lots to do wile waiting,

Yes, and also this is exactly why youngsters mostly move from towns into cities rather than back. More opportunities, less limits.

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

they are harder to control as in way higher chance of serious crime or riots.

You just think about more or less rich towns, whose dwellers can allow themselves to choose neighbors, keep a police post, etc.. Without slums.
When in a village/small town there is no job and no money except pensions and social allowance, more or less adequate youngsters leave it for the city on any opportunity, and there stay only old people and eh....chemically challenged persons, a city is definitely better just because there are medicine and police at all.

Of course, you can point at (don't know how to say correctly) Amish, Mennonite and other towns. But they also depend on law and order, not less than others. Against armed gangs or riots the could do nothing.

Serios crimes and riots is much easier to control in a city where you can place web-camera and microphones on every trash can. Say, all known partisan/terrorist movements prefer countryside to have their bases.

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13 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Birth rates was higher, not sure if this apply anymore, not much frontier left. Probably some self selection as you want an large house if you have many kids. 
At 2100 its likely to be an lack of kids so you would probably get plenty of benefits having them here rater than at primitive conditions on Mars 
The few places with too many people would not be able to afford to ship any. 

health care would give an native population boom together with more agriculture, they would be forced to do more farming because of larger population too. 
This will be promoted both as help and to keep natives working for the colony healthy. 

Later on Mars has an benefit in that its cheaper from launch from mars than from Earth, bulk stuff its hard to make or get in space. Food, not sure if it would be cheaper to launch oxygen and fuel from Mars than from asteroids. 

 
 

 

 

I meant birth rates would be higher on Mars regardless of the species.

 

Most industry will probably be at or near earth, and Mars is harder to get off than the Moon, or a NEO.  Meaning Mars is a loss from the beginning. Some natives may be employed, like in OTL fur trade (though for speciality crops and animals instead)- but there's probably not much to do otherwise until we get the proper infrastructure and tech to cut launch costs from gravity wells sufficiently enough.

10 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

While you have a salary to want a large yard, as well as most of your neighbours.
If not much people have a job to buy a large cottage with a yard, all required communications and fuel their cars to drive 100 km per day to the job and back, then the developers build budget multistorey houses, where dwellers rent the apartments.

A multistorey building with 100 flats has one roof, four walls, one set of pipes and wires, so under similar conditions it requires less money to keep, than 100 cottages, each with the same listed above.
Since Roman insulae till modern buildings. That's the main reason why it has appeared at all.

A village with poor infrastructure is even worse.

  Reveal hidden contents

1.jpg

 

While a town dwellers get enough salary to pay the doctor, and there are enough people in a town to keep a police/fire/medical post in their town.
If you have to pay them all social allowance, you will prefer to gather them together, to minimize those services.
If one house contains a population of a small town (say, ~400), then one police post can patrol several former towns at once just moving around a city block.
A fire department can protect several blocks, i.e. a whole county.
More or less with medicine, education and entertainment.

Why? It's easier to make one big show which can see a whole city, than 100 comparable shows across a region.
One fireworks visible to all, one concert audible for many, wagons of drinks in one place near a storehouse, rather than sending them hudreds kilometers around.

Yes, and also this is exactly why youngsters mostly move from towns into cities rather than back. More opportunities, less limits.

You just think about more or less rich towns, whose dwellers can allow themselves to choose neighbors, keep a police post, etc.. Without slums.
When in a village/small town there is no job and no money except pensions and social allowance, more or less adequate youngsters leave it for the city on any opportunity, and there stay only old people and eh....chemically challenged persons, a city is definitely better just because there are medicine and police at all.

Of course, you can point at (don't know how to say correctly) Amish, Mennonite and other towns. But they also depend on law and order, not less than others. Against armed gangs or riots the could do nothing.

Serios crimes and riots is much easier to control in a city where you can place web-camera and microphones on every trash can. Say, all known partisan/terrorist movements prefer countryside to have their bases.

#offtopic

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13 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Since Roman insulae till modern buildings. That's the main reason why it has appeared at all.

I'm not quite sure what this means, but it is very likely that Roman viaducts and sewers were the only reason Rome grew to its size.  Prior to the 19th century (and probably the later half of it), cities simply couldn't maintain their own populations, the death rate was faster than the growth rate.  It wasn't until sanitation took off (presumably due to cholera, but I suspect people liked cities with the sewage removed) that urban population could grow.

And it also wasn't until about the same time or slightly later (at least the 1920s in smaller US cities) that commuter railroads were built and suburbs were possible (until then living far outside the city meant cheap land and a long walk to work).

A lot of things we take for granted are remarkably new.

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7 hours ago, wumpus said:

I'm not quite sure what this means, but it is very likely that Roman viaducts and sewers were the only reason Rome grew to its size.  Prior to the 19th century (and probably the later half of it), cities simply couldn't maintain their own populations, the death rate was faster than the growth rate.  It wasn't until sanitation took off (presumably due to cholera, but I suspect people liked cities with the sewage removed) that urban population could grow.

And it also wasn't until about the same time or slightly later (at least the 1920s in smaller US cities) that commuter railroads were built and suburbs were possible (until then living far outside the city meant cheap land and a long walk to work).

A lot of things we take for granted are remarkably new.

Rome's population was maintained by immigration. The birth rate was beaten by the death rate.

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I do like the big 'don't make this political' warning attached to what is basically a political question but never mind.

I would hope that we'd basically go all Prime Directive and leave the Martians in peace. Watch them develop, maybe learn something about ourselves in the process. 

Even with your marginally less hostile version of Mars, it's still not a great place to live. It's a long way away, it's cold, and a 'common biological ancestry' doesn't mean that the Martians and their biosphere are remotely compatible with Terran lifeforms. On top of all that you've got the ethical implications of colonising an inhabited world. So why bother?

Trade? Not a hope. Not for commodiites or raw materials anyway - there's nothing on Mars that we can't find much more easily on Earth or conceivably the Moon.
Living space?  If we're that desperate and we're assuming a situation where we have the technology and general wherewithal to think about colonising Mars, why not build cities in the desert here on Earth, supplementing our natural resources through asteroid mining, or simply being a) less wasteful in the first place and b) recycling what we have.
All our eggs in one basket, Man must leave his cradle, yadda, yadda yadda? Well Mars is gone - so the Moon it is. Much more difficult to colonise than Habitable Mars in some respects and much easier in others. More speculatively, divert a couple of decent asteroids into a safe orbit, hollow them out and presto - one giant space station. Not easy, nor cheap but again - we're postulating a scenario where we're seriously considering Mars colonisation.

So lets leave the Martians in peace. Or maybe, just maybe, visit them as tourists rather than colonists. A whole world of alien art, culture, languages etc. etc. to visit and marvel at. Because, at the end of the day, tourism, culture and art are the only items of interplanetary trade that make any sort of sense.

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9 hours ago, fredinno said:

Guys, let's get back to the topic at hand. What about who would fill up the colonies (nations, people, corporations), and how land would be 'divided'?

The question seems pretty moot.  We've never discovered an inhabited part of Mars so we would presumably simply settle the surface and not be a problem.

The only time this question would come up is if we wanted to terraform Mars.  This would likely finish off any life holding on to Mars and I believe should be avoided.  Thus leaving the question as to whether we should settle a planet with the idea that we can never terraform it.

Personally, my visions of terraforming inevitably include dumping a packet of specifically designed life forms and waiting centuries or millenia for the necessary changes (presumably with timed/and adjusted packet dumps for new "invasive" species for each step).

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1 hour ago, wumpus said:

The question seems pretty moot.  We've never discovered an inhabited part of Mars so we would presumably simply settle the surface and not be a problem.

The only time this question would come up is if we wanted to terraform Mars.  This would likely finish off any life holding on to Mars and I believe should be avoided.  Thus leaving the question as to whether we should settle a planet with the idea that we can never terraform it.

Personally, my visions of terraforming inevitably include dumping a packet of specifically designed life forms and waiting centuries or millenia for the necessary changes (presumably with timed/and adjusted packet dumps for new "invasive" species for each step).

Well, if that's the case, why settle any planet? There are other space colony options...

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12 hours ago, fredinno said:

Guys, let's get back to the topic at hand. What about who would fill up the colonies (nations, people, corporations), and how land would be 'divided'?

Who cares. Setting out to colonise an inhabited planet is such a loathsome scenario that details of how it's done really don't matter. I'm pretty sure the Martians will be ever so concerned that they're being forcibly repatriated by a Terran government backed invasion force and not by a privately funded loot and pillage operation. Likewise I'm sure it'll be a great comfort to the concentration camp inmates and/or genocide survivors that their oppressors weren't actually brought to Mars in a spacecraft built by the lowest bidder.

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12 hours ago, fredinno said:

Guys, let's get back to the topic at hand. What about who would fill up the colonies (nations, people, corporations), and how land would be 'divided'?

Prisoners, voulanteers and a cople of scientists, maybe a division of soldiers.

I am talking about this as a man who was born in a colony and knows its history.

First you need to send people who you really don't want to be on your planet.

If they die, restart until they adapt and it is finally okay to be there.

Exucute all needless prisoners.

Bring in scientists.

Bring in soldiers to protect scientists.

Have a couple of really bad situations with natives.

Kill all the natives in the place you want to build a city.

Get natives as far from you as you can.

Bring in citizens and normal people.

Let natives bend in with normal people.

Develop.

Die,because why not.

Restart.

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4 hours ago, KSK said:

I do like the big 'don't make this political' warning attached to what is basically a political question but never mind.

I would hope that we'd basically go all Prime Directive and leave the Martians in peace. Watch them develop, maybe learn something about ourselves in the process. 

Even with your marginally less hostile version of Mars, it's still not a great place to live. It's a long way away, it's cold, and a 'common biological ancestry' doesn't mean that the Martians and their biosphere are remotely compatible with Terran lifeforms. On top of all that you've got the ethical implications of colonising an inhabited world. So why bother?

Trade? Not a hope. Not for commodiites or raw materials anyway - there's nothing on Mars that we can't find much more easily on Earth or conceivably the Moon.
Living space?  If we're that desperate and we're assuming a situation where we have the technology and general wherewithal to think about colonising Mars, why not build cities in the desert here on Earth, supplementing our natural resources through asteroid mining, or simply being a) less wasteful in the first place and b) recycling what we have.
All our eggs in one basket, Man must leave his cradle, yadda, yadda yadda? Well Mars is gone - so the Moon it is. Much more difficult to colonise than Habitable Mars in some respects and much easier in others. More speculatively, divert a couple of decent asteroids into a safe orbit, hollow them out and presto - one giant space station. Not easy, nor cheap but again - we're postulating a scenario where we're seriously considering Mars colonisation.

So lets leave the Martians in peace. Or maybe, just maybe, visit them as tourists rather than colonists. A whole world of alien art, culture, languages etc. etc. to visit and marvel at. Because, at the end of the day, tourism, culture and art are the only items of interplanetary trade that make any sort of sense.

By "common biological anchestry" means came from the same homo line. :P

 

Well, that's what we might do. Problem is that there's inevitably going to be a number of people illegally migrating, or giving birth on Mars, so there should be contingency for such a thing.

Money makes the world go around, science and governments be dammed. You might be able to make a nature preserve of Mars when no one really seriously considers much of an economic use out of Mars... until of course, we get something like the OTL fur trade. Antarctica isn't likely to remain a nature preserve after the Antarctic Treaty expires.

 

All it takes for a nation to gain a monopoly on a marginally profitable Mars market is one nation that is powerful enough, that refuses to sign a UN Treaty. And there's nothing anyone can really do once that can of worms is opened.

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2 hours ago, fredinno said:

By "common biological anchestry" means came from the same homo line. :P

Oh well - they're doomed then.

I was thinking 'common biological ancestor' as in 'something based on DNA and protein'. Not totally farfetched - various precursors to biological molecules have been identified in the interstellar medium, so it's possible that DNA/protein life is fairly common simply because that's the way the chemistry goes given half a chance. Throw in a little panspermia and yeah, Martians and Terrans having a common (ultimate) ancestor isn't beyond the realms of probability.

But having such a direct homo ancestor evolve separately on Mars would be (in my opinion) stretching that probability to breaking point. Which means you've just handed the world a very large riddle. Assuming we're not going all von Daniken here and the Martians didn't migrate to Mars from Earth before recorded history began, then we're looking at some fairly sci-fi explanations.

But unfortunately, I can easily imagine a significant body of opinion holding out for a different explanation. Because the chances of Man (or something very close to Man) evolving separately on two different worlds are so vanishingly small, then surely the Martians are incontrovertible proof that Man really was made (and is made throughout the Universe) in the image of whichever Creator you happen to believe in?

And from there, the obvious next question becomes:  Do the Martians know about that Creator?

And sadly, the next question becomes: If not - why not?

And historically, pursuing that particular question has rarely ended well for the peoples being questioned.

 

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2 hours ago, KSK said:

Oh well - they're doomed then.

I was thinking 'common biological ancestor' as in 'something based on DNA and protein'. Not totally farfetched - various precursors to biological molecules have been identified in the interstellar medium, so it's possible that DNA/protein life is fairly common simply because that's the way the chemistry goes given half a chance. Throw in a little panspermia and yeah, Martians and Terrans having a common (ultimate) ancestor isn't beyond the realms of probability.

But having such a direct homo ancestor evolve separately on Mars would be (in my opinion) stretching that probability to breaking point. Which means you've just handed the world a very large riddle. Assuming we're not going all von Daniken here and the Martians didn't migrate to Mars from Earth before recorded history began, then we're looking at some fairly sci-fi explanations.

But unfortunately, I can easily imagine a significant body of opinion holding out for a different explanation. Because the chances of Man (or something very close to Man) evolving separately on two different worlds are so vanishingly small, then surely the Martians are incontrovertible proof that Man really was made (and is made throughout the Universe) in the image of whichever Creator you happen to believe in?

And from there, the obvious next question becomes:  Do the Martians know about that Creator?

And sadly, the next question becomes: If not - why not?

And historically, pursuing that particular question has rarely ended well for the peoples being questioned.

 

I dunno, the idea was that an ancient line of homo managed to build a civilization spanning the solar system, then died out from war or something, and never really recovered.

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10 hours ago, KSK said:

I would hope that we'd basically go all Prime Directive and leave the Martians in peace. Watch them develop, maybe learn something about ourselves in the process

Agreed... If there is already life on Mars, then we stay away!

Colonizing should be completely off-limits on already inhabited worlds!  

Edited by Just Jim
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16 minutes ago, fredinno said:

I dunno, the idea was that an ancient line of homo managed to build a civilization spanning the solar system, then died out from war or something, and never really recovered.

If the martians was humans or even as close genetic as us as apes it would prove alien interference. 
Having an earlier space fairing human civilization would be pretty impossible as such an civilization would leave lots of signs, everything from trash to mines. 
Some aliens who discovered the solar system and found that Mars had no intelligent life even if the same biochemistry as earth and moved some humans would be the best explanation. 
You can get single celled organisms between planets with impacts nothing more so Earth and Mars would not be related closer than 1 billion years or something. 
That evolution tend to produce humans would be another wild theory but again almost as unlikely as the ancient space fairing civilization 

This would make Mars even more interesting than just intelligent life. 

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2 hours ago, magnemoe said:

If the martians was humans or even as close genetic as us as apes it would prove alien interference. 
Having an earlier space fairing human civilization would be pretty impossible as such an civilization would leave lots of signs, everything from trash to mines. 
Some aliens who discovered the solar system and found that Mars had no intelligent life even if the same biochemistry as earth and moved some humans would be the best explanation. 
You can get single celled organisms between planets with impacts nothing more so Earth and Mars would not be related closer than 1 billion years or something. 
That evolution tend to produce humans would be another wild theory but again almost as unlikely as the ancient space fairing civilization 

This would make Mars even more interesting than just intelligent life. 

Not if they existed long enough in the past. Say, before the last ice age, and were centered on Mars, not Earth.

 

I would say that they became too dependent on technology, and just steadily stagnated until their society collapsed from pure neglect once a large solar flare came around.

 

Of course, the lack of fossil fuels would probably be a pretty big warning sign, but it would make most of OTL history go as normal until the 21st century.

Edited by fredinno
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6 hours ago, fredinno said:

Not if they existed long enough in the past. Say, before the last ice age, and were centered on Mars, not Earth.

I would say that they became too dependent on technology, and just steadily stagnated until their society collapsed from pure neglect once a large solar flare came around.

Of course, the lack of fossil fuels would probably be a pretty big warning sign, but it would make most of OTL history go as normal until the 21st century.

Origin on Mars would make it possible to hid the old civilization. 
It would however make an clear break in the human fossil record, realistically we would not be related to any multi celled animal, other animals imported with humans would also have an short fossil record and only related to humans and each others. 
Add that humans did not evolve for cold climate and low gravity. The cold one is most obvious, humans need clothing outside the tropics. 

I see how an more advanced civilization than our might collapse totally, all information is stored online is one, second would be that technology would be so advanced you could not use it as an base after the fall.
However this would leave lots of remains, look at all the junk we create lots of it would preserve far better than bones. 

Humans on Mars would anyway make it critical to understand how it came to be, an old fallen civilization would be the most critical as in how did it fail, aliens messing around would be less so. 

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8 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Origin on Mars would make it possible to hid the old civilization. 
It would however make an clear break in the human fossil record, realistically we would not be related to any multi celled animal, other animals imported with humans would also have an short fossil record and only related to humans and each others. 
Add that humans did not evolve for cold climate and low gravity. The cold one is most obvious, humans need clothing outside the tropics. 

I see how an more advanced civilization than our might collapse totally, all information is stored online is one, second would be that technology would be so advanced you could not use it as an base after the fall.
However this would leave lots of remains, look at all the junk we create lots of it would preserve far better than bones. 

Humans on Mars would anyway make it critical to understand how it came to be, an old fallen civilization would be the most critical as in how did it fail, aliens messing around would be less so. 

metal and computer parts can easily degrade. Same with plastics, wood, etc. The only parts that don't are stone-based structures.

 

Also, what if Mars is in an ice age at the moment?

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24 minutes ago, fredinno said:

metal and computer parts can easily degrade. Same with plastics, wood, etc. The only parts that don't are stone-based structures.

Also, what if Mars is in an ice age at the moment?

Cast iron, stainless steel, most other metals like copper or aluminium don't break down easy, ceramic and glass even slower, Lots of plastic and iron stuff would keep too much like bone got preserved. 
We would find signs of an ancient civilization on Mars very fast, large structures, tunnels and mines would be obvious, the martians would probably keep some items around as holy or just nice looking like an broken window would turn into gems. 

Back on earth the fact that humans did not relate to other animals would have an major impact on our view of evolution, Other animals evolved, Good created humans would be norm. 
This would be shattered then finding humans on Mars, some years later you get proof that Mars had an ancient civilization who colonized Earth then crashed, the alien did it faction was right.  

This raises the question, that killed it, could it happen to us, And the more practical can we find advanced technology they had, could it cause the fall? Will it help us against the other major powers?
Both questions are of critical security concerns, orion pulse nuclear get maximum priority, human landing on mars happen before landing on Moon. 
Extensive search for artifacts on Mars and in the solar system, national colonies on Mars as boltholes.
The colonization in 2100 is not relevant as it happened 100 years earlier. 
 

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