Colonising Mars and a meme I found

[YNM]

4 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

Animals are an extraordinarily wasteful form of food production.

Depends on how you do them.

[Cassel]

19 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:

Instead, you'll be constantly moving animal waste from one point to another.  And you'll still have lag in the system because just like "green waste", the animal waste takes time to process.  And as a special bonus prize - by raising animals, you'll simply throw away as much as 80% of the nutrition value that you could have had by using the plant material directly.

Animals are an extraordinarily wasteful form of food production.  A Mars colony cannot afford that level of waste.
 

Did you read what I wrote earlier in several posts? What exactly would you lose?

Quote

Says the guy who is proposing the most wasteful form of protein production humanly possible.

Most proven. In contrast to the sci-fi solutions that you propose :-)

Edited October 6, 2018 by Cassel

[Cassel]

One more thing.

We have absolutely 0% success rate in creating closed environments, which are intended to last in the form of zero growth.

If our ancestors decided that they would stay in one cave and continue to consume the minimum that can be found around this cave, then we would have been extinct for a long time.

But we have 100% success rate in expansion. Never a city or country even tried to create a community that was only supposed to last and not develop. We have thousands of years of experience in creating structures that are intended for growth and expansion.
We also have to design a base on Mars or another planet in that way.
Its purpose must be growth, so if you have machines that will provide you with more than 500kg of micronutrients and 26t of other raw materials for hydroponic farm, you should not think how to start recycle it, only how to use what is waste from this farm to expand your base.
The simplest thing that comes to mind is breeding animals, which in turn will also give some waste, which can be further used as natural fertilizers to create a larger area of crop for animal feed.

Expansion is the only way to survive, because, as I wrote earlier, perpetual motion machine is non-existent, so recycling is dead end.

If there is a need for recycling somewhere, it means that the product has not been fully used or has been poorly designed and wastes raw materials.

Edited October 6, 2018 by Cassel

[Green Baron]

3 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:

We aren't colonizing anywhere on Earth where there isn't an economic incentive to do so.

That is one reason. The other is that people actually have to retreat from areas where overgrazing and water depletion cause desertification. It leads to instabilities and all that. Programs by the authorities to contain the losses are essentially fruitless.

But all in all, i think it becomes clear that even on earth building a larger population in an arid environment is doable only with huge efforts, a technological apparatus and constant inflow from outside.

And, as @tater wrote, that is still a paradise compared to Mars.

Edited October 6, 2018 by Green Baron

[KSK]

Hang on a minute. Haven’t you just described a recycling process? Take the waste from one farm, use it for raising animals and then use their waste to create more crop land. Or, if you don’t have the rest of the infrastructure set up to create that extra cropland, you could equally well use that animal waste to return nutrients to your first farm.

I agree that a 100% closed environment isn’t possible. Putting arguments based on perpetual motion machines to one side, a colony is going to require an external source of energy and/or will consume resources to generate energy. Likewise there will be inevitable mass losses to the environment that will need to be replaced. 

Similarly, unless you start positing some pretty far out sci-fi scenarios (such as nanoassemblers or using living organisms for absolutely everything), there will come a point where recycling isn’t feasible and additional raw materials are required. 

As other folks have pointed out on this thread, in the end it boils down to economics. If I need another kilogram of raw material (doesn’t matter which raw material we’re talking about) then I need to consider whether it’s cheaper to get that material from an off-world source, to obtain it from a Martian source or to obtain it via recycling. Cheaper in this context isn’t necessarily referring to a financial cost, it could be an opportunity cost too.

Given the challenges of developing an entirely built infrastructure where doing anything outside that infrastructure requires technological assistance (even digging up a kilo of regolith requires machinery or an EVA suit), I think that recycling will be the most attractive option in many cases.

TL: DR. Just because recycling everything isn’t possible that doesn’t mean that recycling as much as you can is a bad idea.

Edited October 6, 2018 by KSK

[kerbiloid]

16 hours ago, YNM said:

Have you ever seen the flowers on them ? Grass isn't attractive to flying insects.

Were you ever herding the rabbits?

Spoiler

Clover and burclover are highly significant grasses to feed various animals.
(Yes, I'm aware that clover needs not bees but bumblebees.)

7 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:

We aren't colonizing anywhere on Earth where there isn't an economic incentive to do so.

And so Mars isn't.

5 hours ago, Cassel said:

... large living organisms ... the benefits we have gained from breeding such organisms have always been greater.

An axiomatic assumption based on historical habits.
The bigger animals just have some advantages in primitive agriculture, and they spend less food due to lesser surface/volume ratio.

5 hours ago, Cassel said:

The fact that we ate something for millennia and does not hurt us means that it is a proven food and we can safely use it in an unproven environment, such as the base on Mars. In the meantime, you suggest using unproven food in an unproven environment, if something goes wrong and people will get sick, you will not know if it's the fault of food or the environment.

How long do the Europe and Asia eat potato, tomato, corn, sunflower?
Btw the first two belong to the highly toxic nightshades family.

5 hours ago, Cassel said:

deer on Mars. If such a large mammal has a problem with reproduction on this planet, there is a good chance that we will have similar problems there.

I like the idea to send a pair of deer to Mars by the first BFS.

5 hours ago, Cassel said:

There was a film "Atlas of Clouds" in which people fed on such a paste.

I like that part of this movie very much (except the forced idea of the girlocide and girlsploitation, of course), as that virtual reality + artificial designed food absolutely exactly match my vision of the coming (and personally desired) future.
Btw just think how many variations will get a cuisine using a basic paste and combinations of additives. 

5 hours ago, Cassel said:

And from an economic and scientific point of view, why is it not our main source of food yet on Earth? And yes, because it is unproven and very expensive.

Because the first synthesamburger has been fried just in 2013.
And obviously requires several decades to get a mature technology. But Mars isn't going to get colonized sooner.

5 hours ago, YNM said:

5 hours ago, DerekL1963 said:

Animals are an extraordinarily wasteful form of food production.

Depends on how you do them.

Any way. It's like gravity losses to launch into orbit. The slower it grows - the more it eats and spends.

P.S.
Probably the thread would be titled "Martian downshifting", this would disambiguate a lot.

Edited October 6, 2018 by kerbiloid

[YNM]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Were you ever herding the rabbits? 

Nah, we herd water buffalo.

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The slower it grows - the more it eats and spends. 

Endless content-rich fluid production.

Edited October 6, 2018 by YNM

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

1 hour ago, YNM said:

Endless content-rich fluid production.

A centrifugal boosting? THat's wise.

 

[KSK]

Switching topics a little, I've been doing a bit of reading up on perchlorates, since they've been identified as a component of Martian soil and are toxic, so being able to get rid of them would be helpful for a Mars colony hoping to utilise Martian soil for anything.

Turns out that magnesium perchlorate (a signficant perchlorate in Martian soil) undergoes thermal decomposition to magnesium oxide, oxygen and chlorine. That chlorine can then be reacted with water (possibly obtained from drying the perchlorate before decomposition since magnesium perchlorate is likely to be found in one of several hydration states) to form hydrochloric acid.

Carrying out that process in bulk would require some care but it might be a useful way of decontaminating Martian soil using nothing but water (used to rinse the perchlorate out of the soil) and heat, and generating three useful materials in the process. Magnesium oxide is a refractory ceramic, hydrochloric acid is generally useful for all sorts of chemistry (if all else fails use it to make salt to cure that deer meat. ) and I don't think I need point out why oxygen would be useful.  

[kerbiloid]

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/242525435_Perchlorate_on_Mars_A_chemical_hazard_and_a_resource_for_humans

Quote

Perchlorate (ClO 4 −) is widespread in Martian soils at concentrations between 0.5 and 1%

 

[KSK]

Nice article - thanks! I particularly liked the emergency oxygen generator.

For a colony, using the actual bacteria rather than the purified bacterial enzymes might be more useful because the bacteria will replicate themselves, thus saving the colonists the trouble of acquiring purified enzymes. But yeah - I like that concept a lot for decontamination. Hose down the suits of returning EVA crews, use bacteria or enzymes to treat the perchlorate containing run-off. I leave the engineering details as an exercise for somebody else.  

If something goes wrong and the bacteria need to be re-established then thermal decomposition could be a backup system but I think the bacteria, with their lower energy use, would be a better primary system.

Martian dust would still be nasty stuff but it looks like it could at least be a manageable problem.

 

Edited October 6, 2018 by KSK

[Cassel]

On 10/6/2018 at 2:28 PM, KSK said:

Hang on a minute. Haven’t you just described a recycling process? Take the waste from one farm, use it for raising animals and then use their waste to create more crop land. Or, if you don’t have the rest of the infrastructure set up to create that extra cropland, you could equally well use that animal waste to return nutrients to your first farm.

What I described was an idea for an exposition, and recycling would be to use the waste to feed the hydroponics farm, but recycling also consumes space and energy, so in this case, it is unlikely to be profitable. That means more benefits can be obtained by expanding.

[Cassel]

On 10/6/2018 at 3:13 PM, kerbiloid said:

An axiomatic assumption based on historical habits.

The bigger animals just have some advantages in primitive agriculture, and they spend less food due to lesser surface/volume ratio.

I understand that you are undermining the experience and knowledge we have acquired in the past and you are saying that new unproven ideas are a better solution.
Where did the idea that something that had not been checked, nobody had eaten it for a year, would replace normal food?

On 10/6/2018 at 3:13 PM, kerbiloid said:

How long do the Europe and Asia eat potato, tomato, corn, sunflower?
Btw the first two belong to the highly toxic nightshades family.

And we have several centuries of experience in feeding on these plants. Sci-fi ideas with cultured cells are not tested even for a year, let alone a few generations to be sure that they do not cause defects in children.

On 10/6/2018 at 3:13 PM, kerbiloid said:

I like the idea to send a pair of deer to Mars by the first BFS.

I would send 6 young deer, 2 male, 4 female. Immediately after birth and examining their health condition on Earth, I would hibernate them, just as NASA is testing astronaut hibernation. In this way, you could examine several things at once, and a young organism that does not know Earth's gravity should adapt to Mars more quickly.

On 10/6/2018 at 3:13 PM, kerbiloid said:

I like that part of this movie very much (except the forced idea of the girlocide and girlsploitation, of course), as that virtual reality + artificial designed food absolutely exactly match my vision of the coming (and personally desired) future.
Btw just think how many variations will get a cuisine using a basic paste and combinations of additives. 

Because the first synthesamburger has been fried just in 2013.
And obviously requires several decades to get a mature technology. But Mars isn't going to get colonized sooner.

 

If people planning to build a base on Mars will use such sci-fi ideas as you do, this base will not be built in 50 years, because no one will agree to eat for a few years something that is unproven.
I write all the time about plans using proven technologies, where tomorrow you can start packing your rocket equipment.

[kerbiloid]

32 minutes ago, Cassel said:

I understand that you are undermining the experience and knowledge we have acquired in the past

I'm afraid all that knowledge could be transferred from an illiterate peasant to his illiterate son in several years during the lunch time between the plowland works. (That's exactly how it was being ancested).
And even it became obsolete on industrial revolution.

As well as secrets of stone masonry were no more required once they achieved a steel manufacturing and concrete buildings.

That's what has killed the medieval guilds and opened the way to the capitalism.
If you have money you can hire enough workers and several engineers, and they will build a city and produce things without the guild ancient voodoo, just by brutal force of coal, steel, concrete, and steam (later - also electricity).

The same with agriculture. When you have an agronomist, veterinarian, and animal technician, you don't need proverbs and signs to understand what to do.

That's why 200 years ago "90%" of population were feeding other "10%", and vice versa - now.

32 minutes ago, Cassel said:

And we have several centuries of experience in feeding on these plants.

Centuries ago these plants were just edible toys. XIX century made them a thing.
And don't forget that in XIX they even didn't have a periodic system, so were still doing voodoo without clear understanding. Later the things began running faster.

32 minutes ago, Cassel said:

I would send 6 young deer, 2 male, 4 female.

I would send 2 rabbits. If all runs OK, on the arrival to Mars they would have 20-30 of them. On arrival to Earth they would need an additional BFS for the herd of rabbits.

They can eat the rabbits unlike the deer, because there will be new rabbits every week.

32 minutes ago, Cassel said:

I would hibernate them, just as NASA is testing astronaut hibernation

Somebody just told about the unproven technologies.

32 minutes ago, Cassel said:

If people planning to build a base on Mars will use such sci-fi ideas as you do, this base will not be built in 50 years

Probably the deer would significantly force the process.

32 minutes ago, Cassel said:

because no one will agree to eat for a few years something that is unproven

One shalt not name M-to and B-er in vain, but you got the idea.

Edited October 8, 2018 by kerbiloid

[KSK]

4 hours ago, Cassel said:

What I described was an idea for an exposition, and recycling would be to use the waste to feed the hydroponics farm, but recycling also consumes space and energy, so in this case, it is unlikely to be profitable. That means more benefits can be obtained by expanding.

Short answer

Why not both? At our current technology levels neither growth nor recycling alone is going to be a one size fits all solution to a Mars colony's needs.

Longer answer

Expanding consumes space and energy too. As does replacing anything that you're not recycling. It'll be a balance for the colonists - recycle nothing and they'll be using time and resources to replace their losses that could be put into expanding. Likewise, if they try to recycle everything, they could end up devoting too much time and resources that could be more usefully spent on replacing their losses or expanding.

As a deliberately stupid example, consider a hypothetical air maintenance system. Oxygen is produced from water by electrolysis. Carbon dioxide is absorbed using lithium hydroxide canisters. Every second week, someone replaces the spent canisters with fresh ones and chucks the spent ones out of the airlock.

In principle it could work. But you (the colonists that is - not you personally) are using up water to make new oxygen and using up lithium hydroxide (plus whatever other materials are in your canister) to make new carbon dioxide scrubbers. You're also wasting a lot of carbon by locking it up as lithium carbonate and throwing it away. Unless you're obtaining your new canisters from off-world, you're also spending time and resources in digging up and processing new raw materials (which may not be particularly abundant or easy to obtain) to make them on-site.

Given all of that, it would seem more sensible to figure out a way of turning carbon dioxide back into oxygen (or at least using it to make something useful) than to set up an elaborate and inefficient lithium carbonate production line.

Conversely, as a more interesting example, consider the paper that Kerbiloid linked to on the use of bacterial proteins to get rid of perchlorates. My first thought was that using the bacteria themselves (cultured on Mars) would be more efficient than using purified protein. But it may well not be, certainly not in the short term. Culturing bacteria on Mars requires resources and may not be particularly easy - not all bacteria are amenable to culturing. On the other hand, a kilogram or two of purified proteins would last an awful long time (the proteins are catalysts so aren't used up directly during the perchlorate treatment reactions, although they'll degrade over time), and a kilogram or two of protein isn't too much mass to ship out from Earth. Likewise, manufacturing those proteins on Earth isn't dirt cheap or trivial but neither would it be a ridiculous cost in the context of setting up a Mars colony.

Thinking about it in more detail, I'm not at all sure what the better answer is here.

As I said, it'll be a balance. It'll make sense to recycle some resources, no sense to recycle others, and others you could make a case for either way. That balance will also shift as the colony expands and develops. My gut feeling is that recycling will eventually prove to be more efficient for most things, your gut feeling seems to be that expansion will be the better option. There, I think, we'll have to agree to disagree.

Edit:  First paragraph corrected to 'neither growth nor recycling alone...' Hopefully this was clear anyway. 

Edited October 8, 2018 by KSK

[Cassel]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

I'm afraid all that knowledge could be transferred from an illiterate peasant to his illiterate son in several years during the lunch time between the plowland works. (That's exactly how it was being ancested).
And even it became obsolete on industrial revolution.

As well as secrets of stone masonry were no more required once they achieved a steel manufacturing and concrete buildings.

That's what has killed the medieval guilds and opened the way to the capitalism.
If you have money you can hire enough workers and several engineers, and they will build a city and produce things without the guild ancient voodoo, just by brutal force of coal, steel, concrete, and steam (later - also electricity).

The same with agriculture. When you have an agronomist, veterinarian, and animal technician, you don't need proverbs and signs to understand what to do.

 

And you again about his skewed vision of capitalism.

If the knowledge conveyed by these illiterates was wrong then this wonderful industrial revolution could not take place, because the illiterate would not be able to produce enough food to feed their own families and all those people in cities.
The industrial revolution took place due to the sudden increase in population in cities, and that means that someone who provided them with food had good ideas.

Although I agree that capitalism was the cause of this change, it did not happen in cities, but in the villages. Food production has grown due to the fact that noble estates have been divided, and smaller entrepreneurs (landowners) have begun racing who will produce food better and faster. There was real capitalism, not in factories in cities that were more like forced labor camps for teenagers (the cheapest workforce then).

This revolution is nothing more than the exploitation of women and children. Women were used to give birth to 5 or more children, which led to their death. Then the man found a new wife with whom he had more children. A woman (stepmother) caring for the well-being of her children, the oldest children from the previous marriage sent early to work, eg in factories, and the youngest were servants in her new home.
It is thanks to this that these families have grown so fast in wealth, but if you see the situation today, every woman has 1-2 children, then we are going back and soon we will return to feudal times where is many poor families. And where we have new guilds in the form of a corporate monopoly ruled by the new nobility in the form of wealthy owners of these guilds.

 

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That's why 200 years ago "90%" of population were feeding other "10%", and vice versa - now.

And how is it today? 99% is feeding 1%? We went in a better direction or worse?
 

Quote

Centuries ago these plants were just edible toys. XIX century made them a thing.
And don't forget that in XIX they even didn't have a periodic system, so were still doing voodoo without clear understanding. Later the things began running faster.

There is a difference between eating something that native Americans ate for hundreds of years, and eating something that yesterday was bred in a laboratory.
 

Quote

I would send 2 rabbits. If all runs OK, on the arrival to Mars they would have 20-30 of them. On arrival to Earth they would need an additional BFS for the herd of rabbits.

They can eat the rabbits unlike the deer, because there will be new rabbits every week.

The only question is whether the resources you can get from the rabbit are just as useful as those of larger animals such as deer?

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Somebody just told about the unproven technologies.

I am sure that we have long experience in maintaining patients in a few months' coma and feeding them food.

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Probably the deer would significantly force the process.

It is better to conduct experiments on deer than on children and after a few failed pregnancies state that we missed something.

Quote

One shalt not name M-to and B-er in vain, but you got the idea.

As I wrote earlier, there will always be some uneducated (being uneducated does not mean being stupid, sometimes intelligent people are taught wrong things), stupid or poor (being poor does not mean being stupid) people who will do anything for money.


edit:

I think that corporate employees are in a worse position than illiterate farmers. Such a farmer could always pass on his experience to his son, because he had the entire production process in mind, and a corporation employee can not do it. Once he is barred by this contract, and second thing is he do not know the whole production process, he is taught to do simple tasks.
That's why your child will start from scratch, you will not give him your experience.

Edited October 8, 2018 by Cassel

[YNM]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

secrets of stone masonry were no more required once they achieved a steel manufacturing and concrete buildings. 

We still do them, esp. on reconstruction/restoration rework. And it's not too difficult to think of.

We just don't build anything large and new from them because it'd be a waste of material, much like trying to purify steel  using standard air (rather than pure oxygen).

3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

medieval guilds

Worker's union. Same stuff.

3 hours ago, Cassel said:

That means more benefits can be obtained by expanding. 

As much benefit as you could have if you had recycled. (the expansion itself requires other resources that doesn't come from the plants - don't think you can make pressurized greenhouses from the various plant fibers and what have you.)

Also, not sure why it has gone to talks of political ideas.

[Cassel]

1 hour ago, YNM said:

As much benefit as you could have if you had recycled. (the expansion itself requires other resources that doesn't come from the plants - don't think you can make pressurized greenhouses from the various plant fibers and what have you.)

Also, not sure why it has gone to talks of political ideas.

Machines capable of extracting raw materials and building the base are already in place.

It depends on how you define politics, if it is economics + social structure, then this topic of building a base on another planet must also contain elements of economics and social structure. What will be social structure depends on the technology used in that base, because it is always technology forces the social and economical organization.

I'm still wondering if anyone thought about producing spacesuits from leather?

[KSK]

Speaking of stone masonry...

https://phys.org/news/2017-04-simple-no-bake-recipe-bricks-martian.html

TL: DR.  Making small test bricks which are stronger than reinforced concrete by moderate compression of simulated Martian soil (as in pressures created by a decent blow from a hammer). Popular Mechanics has a similar article pointing out a number of caveats. If it does work though, I think there's something rather appealing about using one of our oldest construction techniques to build Mars habitats. Not to mention its potential simplicity - it really doesn't get a lot simpler than hitting dirt with a hammer.  

And from the same site:

https://phys.org/news/2016-03-tomatoes-peas-harvested-mars-moon.html#nRlv

Again, some obvious caveats, and currently the crops being grown are thought to be inedible due to heavy metal uptake. An interesting work in progress though, given some of the commentary on this thread!

 

Edited October 8, 2018 by KSK

[YNM]

1 hour ago, KSK said:

Making small test bricks which are stronger than reinforced concrete

In compression, bending moment or tension ?

Spoiler

 

 

[KSK]

From the actual publication rather than the pop-sci articles:

“Upon a high-pressure compression, Mars-1a particles form a strong solid at ambient, with resultant flexural strengths exceeding that of typical steel-reinforced concrete or many in situ resource utilization (ISRU) created materials formed by adding binders.”

So I’m guessing it’s as strong in compression and bending? No idea about tension but if you want to dig into the details, the article is here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-01157-w

Or search for Martian brick nature.

[KSK]

6 hours ago, Cassel said:

I'm still wondering if anyone thought about producing spacesuits from leather?

It's not that hard to look these things up you know.

Early space suits featured leather boots and leather-palmed gloves. More interestingly, the Strizh-ESO suit was apparently intended to have a leather outer layer. The Strizh suit was intended for Buran pilots and I think it's safe to say that the Strizh-ESO suit would have been used by particularly badS Buran pilots since the leather layer was intended to "protect the pilot from the enormous heat generated during a supersonic free-fall from the stratosphere."

On the other hand, leather isn't particularly elastic, so I wouldn't imagine it would be much good for making the inner, pressure maintaining layer of a spacesuit.

[Green Baron]

These are the longest bootstraps i have ever seen. I can almost hear them swearing at T+20 in the capsule because of an open strap.

:-)

[YNM]

2 hours ago, KSK said:

flexural

It's definitely interesting, although given the test hasn't been done with standardized speciment sizes (ASTM C78 or C293 depending on apparatus) I'd take the result with a fair amount of salts.

[KSK]

6 minutes ago, YNM said:

It's definitely interesting, although given the test hasn't been done with standardized speciment sizes (ASTM C78 or C293 depending on apparatus) I'd take the result with a fair amount of salts.

Oh definitely. The Mars simulant they used was also chosen for chemical similarity - there's no guarantee at all that its microstructure (which is quite important here  ) will bear any resemblance to actual Martian soil. On the other hand, you can just imagine the conversation over the radio from the first space travellers tasked with doing the actual surface experiment:

"Negative, Capcom. We're not building a sandcastle - we're running an extended version of the In-situ Construction and Building Material Evaluation Experiment."

12 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

These are the longest bootstraps i have ever seen. I can almost hear them swearing at T+20 in the capsule because of an open strap.

:-)

Maybe cosmonauts can haul themselves up by their own bootstraps?

 

Edited October 8, 2018 by KSK