A City On Mars

[kerbiloid]

Suddenly, the Martian colonists will found themselves for the rest of their lives at the training camp in Polar Antarctics, mining the resources 24/7 for synthetic food and recycled water, living in the Martian-like barracks, being sure that they are on the Martian polar cap, and there is no way back, no communication except e-mail, and they are brave colonists rather than slaves.

[DDE]

11 hours ago, KSK said:

Unless a state actor decides to get involved with this, I would have thought that the selling part almost goes without saying? I can't see SpaceX for example (not ragging on them specifically for this, but they seem like the only outfit that will be capable of shipping people to Mars in the near future) letting people book flights on their spacecraft free of charge out of the goodness of their hearts. Not outside of marketing stunts anyway.

Well, the tickets to there may be free or near-free.

Life support and return tickets will not be.

[monophonic]

11 hours ago, tater said:

If I were working on Mars as a plan, I'd build a space station with a couple Starships tethered, and spin them up to 0.38g and raise some animals, breed them, etc, and see how it goes. Otherwise send the human exploration teams (adults would would want to go anyway, even if just to visit), and raise animals as part of the research. The early colony dev missions build infrastructure, and raise mammals to test for bone loss, etc. This lasts enough synods to get good data before people talk about having kids on Mars.

So you do advocate the no rush plan after all. Musk, and thus by extension SpaceX (as he is the CEO and majority shareholder) has been quite explicit about skipping all that research and going for the mass emigration phase as soon as they can build enough Starships.

[kerbiloid]

Mayflower was carrying ~100 humans. Is Starship?
Jamestown lost 440 of 500 in the first winter. Any Indians on Mars?

Btw, Salem... The Martian gravity is ~0.4 of normal. Can the rope even be effective against a witch?

Questions, questions...

[darthgently]

2 hours ago, monophonic said:

Musk, and thus by extension SpaceX (as he is the CEO and majority shareholder) has been quite explicit about skipping all that research and going for the mass emigration phase as soon as they can build enough Starships.

I'm going to need to see some citations for this.  Not saying he hasn't said this, but I've not come across it in a few books about him and many interviews.  But maybe we interpreted something differently

[SunlitZelkova]

9 hours ago, darthgently said:

I'm going to need to see some citations for this.  Not saying he hasn't said this, but I've not come across it in a few books about him and many interviews.  But maybe we interpreted something differently

I already listed some examples earlier.

On 11/14/2023 at 8:05 PM, SunlitZelkova said:

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1110329210332053504?s=46&t=Jd73T2beq0JLNtwTy1uR5A

Musk has literally said the city will be complete by 2050.

https://www.inverse.com/science/51291-spacex-here-s-the-timeline-for-getting-to-mars-and-starting-a-colony

And SpaceX’s chief Mars development engineer has said they won’t start off with a base, but with a town. Musk has said it will only be 10 years before the town would be established after the first crewed Mars landing.

Note that he began these proposals in 2019, before Artemis was planned. Musk had no plans for research on the Moon, and certainly not enough on Mars to determine if people can live there.

Musk has also said he wants to die on Mars. If he has Starship working after a few development flights, an uncrewed Mars development mission has flown, and rapid reuse is perfected, there is nothing to stop him from his “1,000 ships in each transfer window” plan. He expects a million people to be sent to the planet over the course of roughly 20 years.

Now you can say “Well that’s just Elon time/talk”, but the fact remains he does say these things, regardless of whether they are realistic or likely or not.

[tater]

11 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Jamestown lost 440 of 500 in the first winter. Any Indians on Mars?

Switching to my usual "not a Mars bro" hat, comparisons with terrestrial human migrations is always pretty funny. The least hospitable part of the Arctic or Antarctic, is a far, far better place to live than anywhere on Mars. There is virtually no useful analogy to be drawn from any such movement of people historically on Earth as a result. Your ship ends up on a hostile lee-shore on Earth, and you can get out, and try to survive. Might be hard, but you don't die gasping for breath in a couple minutes, either. Europeans finding themselves on foreign shores facing natives with nothing more than stone age tech—just arrived someplace where people who had stone age tech could live for many generations. In many cases places where it's possible to be left naked, and still survive (obviously the natives already know all the tricks to do so).

Nothing is habitable off Earth except in built environments.

If they really want anything like mid century, they need to send the robots soon to start building.

[darthgently]

46 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

I already listed some examples earlier.

Now you can say “Well that’s just Elon time/talk”, but the fact remains he does say these things, regardless of whether they are realistic or likely or not.

 

46 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

I already listed some examples earlier.

Now you can say “Well that’s just Elon time/talk”, but the fact remains he does say these things, regardless of whether they are realistic or likely or not.

But in none of that does he say with no research.  I still think it is PR talking though.  He wants to stir the pot.  And clearly it is working.

Edited November 20, 2023 by darthgently

[SunlitZelkova]

3 hours ago, darthgently said:

 

But in none of that does he say with no research.  I still think it is PR talking though.  He wants to stir the pot.  And clearly it is working.

There’s not a lot of research that can be done in 10 years from building the base. It’d be like going from Apollo 11 to a full fledged Moon colony in 1979.

It seems like we would want to spend more time looking at the effects of living on another planet on human bodies before settling down there.

Artificial gravity would eliminate that need, but Musk seems hell bent on surface colonization despite not knowing if it is feasible.

[kerbiloid]

Iirc, the SpX Martian ship project was originally called "Colonial Transport".

What makes one think, that the colony is Mars, rather than Earth, providing the Martian city of the Extraterrestrial Lords with cheap expendable labour force from the overpopulated Earth?

[darthgently]

5 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

but Musk seems hell bent on surface colonization despite not knowing if it is feasible.

Seems.

[darthgently]

9 hours ago, tater said:

 

If they really want anything like mid century, they need to send the robots soon to start building.

It is interesting that the Tesla robot has been spec'd with the explicit design constraint that is should have human proportion and pattern and be able to function in an environment designed for humans.  This would give it a larger market on Earth, but would also make huge sense if used to build off world habitat for later arriving humans

Also, it occurs to me that while 100 humans would not do well packed like sardines in a SS, 100 humanoid robots in a SS would be simply good cargo loading methodology 

Edited November 21, 2023 by darthgently

[darthgently]

Imagine being able to watch live stream (with obvious signal delay) video from visual system of a Tesla robot engaged in building infrastructure on another world. 

Imagine being able to lease a robot to go on an autonomous hike in the hills of Mars?  How much would Bezos pay from his anonymous account for that? 

What NASA and other contracts could these robots fulfill if they had a modified Cybertruck handy?

Imagine watching through a robot's eyes as the first tunnel boring machine is landed and unloaded.

Again, I favor orbitals for humans for the foreseeable future, but as tater has pointed out there is no reason to limit use of robots on the surface in prep for the long term.  Maybe even terraforming time scales.

From Mars orbit, humans could have near real time control of a robot

[kerbiloid]

The real-time means a human presense at Mars, due to the light speed delay.

[tater]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The real-time means a human presense at Mars, due to the light speed delay.

For watching, yeah, but you'd be seeing real time on Mars, even if delayed 3-22 minutes.

8 hours ago, darthgently said:

It is interesting that the Tesla robot has been spec'd with the explicit design constraint that is should have human proportion and pattern and be able to function in an environment designed for humans.  This would give it a larger market on Earth, but would also make huge sense if used to build off world habitat for later arriving humans

I think it's is primarily for being a useful product on Earth, but yes. The software will not care if the robot is humanoid, or a bulldozer, frontloader, whatever, either. Optimus runs a version of FSD.

[darthgently]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The real-time means a human presense at Mars, due to the light speed delay.

Yeah, that is why I specified signal delay and also that humans orbiting Mars could have near real time control of a bot (assuming a good enough Marslink constellation were in place).  For the leasing for a hike, the person on earth would plan a path then the robot would execute it autonomously 

26 minutes ago, tater said:

8 hours ago, darthgently said:

 

I think it's is primarily for being a useful product on Earth, but yes. The software will not care if the robot is humanoid, or a bulldozer, frontloader, whatever, either. Optimus runs a version of FSD.

Yes, I noted the big market would be on Earth.  A humanoid robot can control a normal frontloader that could later be controlled by a human.  That would make the frontloader simpler and the FSD brains hardware more useful in other tasks also.   If a frontloader is parked for a month the bot can be used elsewhere.  But sure, if cheap enough, have brains in the frontloader also.   The best part is no part maybe however

Edited November 21, 2023 by darthgently

[tater]

21 minutes ago, darthgently said:

Yeah, that is why I specified signal delay and also that humans orbiting Mars could have near real time control of a bot (assuming a good enough Marslink constellation were in place).  For the leasing for a hike, the person on earth would plan a path then the robot would execute it autonomously 

Optimus won't need real time control.

Or, rather, it HAS real time control, it's a real robot that controls itself, it's not a drone.

[kerbiloid]

9 hours ago, darthgently said:

Tesla robot has been spec'd with the explicit design constraint that is should have human proportion and pattern and be able to function in an environment designed for humans.  This would give it a larger market on Earth, but would also make huge sense if used to build off world habitat for later arriving humans

Teslabot arrival to Mars.

To the left - the 3rd generation of human colonists.

Spoiler

 

 

[darthgently]

4 hours ago, tater said:

Optimus won't need real time control.

Or, rather, it HAS real time control, it's a real robot that controls itself, it's not a drone.

I fully understand that.  But it would be capable of real time control, just as a car is.  Why else would you want a neuralink? Lol

[darthgently]

Resurrecting thread with interesting take from someone authoritative:

 

[SunlitZelkova]

4 hours ago, darthgently said:

Resurrecting thread with interesting take from someone authoritative:

 

I see his point, but I feel like he kinda contradicts himself.

If all Mars has to rely on standard Earth commodities, it’s questionable whether these specialists would be enticed to live on Mars.

Does the “I wanna be a first generation Martian” group overlap with software and biotech engineers?

Unless the Mars colony can be proven to be extremely safe and viable as a long term place to live, I don’t see the kind of people who are ambitious and want to change the world throughout their whole lives flocking to a place where their life might be ended at any moment in an instant.

Don't get me wrong, I think SpaceX can achieve their goal at some point in the future, I just think this particular line of logic is a little flawed.

And that’s not to say there is some aha moment waiting out there to prove a Mars colony could be profitable. There probably is. I just don’t see it as this.

———

Personal thought: A Mars colony doesn’t need to be profitable to be worthwhile. Enough with the capitalist doctrine of profit, let’s build a colony because society (freaking life, as much as I hate humanity sometimes, if they’re a vehicle to save guinea pig (cavia porcellus) kind than I’ll accept their prosperity at the expense of whatever) has a need to expand to other worlds.

I.e. Let’s build based on the needs of society rather than the needs of shareholders and CEOs’ bank accounts.

I think David S.F. Portee, the eminent spaceflight historian, has the wrong take when it comes to SpaceX (he thinks it will fail and resembles early Shuttle concepts), but his ethos that “to achieve new heights in space we need to recognize it won’t be cheap and be prepared to pay” can be applied here. Let’s just pay the cost instead of trying to cut corners and turn everything into a business.

Final note: colonization of the Americas is a poor comparison here. Colonizing another land mass on the same planet accessed by relatively primitive sailing ships is incomparable to colonizing an inhospitable planet. We cannot have the expectation that the only reason Mars will be worthwhile is if it has its own equivalent to the tobacco plantations and what not.

[tater]

38 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Personal thought: A Mars colony doesn’t need to be profitable to be worthwhile. Enough with the capitalist doctrine of profit, let’s build a colony because society (freaking life, as much as I hate humanity sometimes, if they’re a vehicle to save guinea pig (cavia porcellus) kind than I’ll accept their prosperity at the expense of whatever) has a need to expand to other worlds.

I.e. Let’s build based on the needs of society rather than the needs of shareholders and CEOs’ bank accounts.

That's fairy dust IMO.

Humans are humans, and there are bottom-line incentives that drive us (all of us as a species). In the natural state for large groups—capitalism—people work to increase their own place in the world, with the most motivated being the higher end of the scale (these days CEOs, etc). Minus the "profit" incentive structure the same people exist (history has demonstrated this to the misery of 10s of millions)—but since they cannot create ways to generate wealth via commerce, they improve their lot by the only remaining outlet—personal power. I don't see collectivism being a way to innovate Mars into long term survival.

So while a Mars colony could absolutely be created without any chance of profit—it will certainly fail if profit is never bootstrapped there. It can possibly survive with just a working internal economy—profit in Martian currency units—but the input in dollars will be a sunk cost, IMO. There's nothing to trade cost effectively with Earth that is unique to Mars. People claim that they might come up with new intellectual property, inventions, etc—and that's certainly possible—but that kind of innovation doesn't depend on Mars, it happening there would just be luck. So all the initial spend on building the place is just to do it, there's no ROI.

Regardless, I agree that convincing people to move there would be... nontrivial. As much as I might like to visit Mars before I die as a tourist, the idea of moving there? Literally anywhere on Earth would be preferable to live. Even Antarctica.

38 minutes ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Final note: colonization of the Americas is a poor comparison here. Colonizing another land mass on the same planet accessed by relatively primitive sailing ships is incomparable to colonizing an inhospitable planet. We cannot have the expectation that the only reason Mars will be worthwhile is if it has its own equivalent to the tobacco plantations and what not.

Yeah, no human colonization to data is even remotely analogous. Guys from Europe got off of ships—the apex of technology at the time—and walked off the beach to find people already there, in many cases virtually naked. I only mention their choice in clothing because it demonstrates how technologically easy it was to live in those places. If literal stone age tech allows people to thrive—the location is pretty hospitable. Mars might as well be orbit in terms of how hospitable it is—death is always just however long you can hold your breath away.

Even the first colonists of the New World—the people who we now call "Native Americans"—had it easy compared to Mars... there was food, resources, and heck, they could even breathe!

Edited April 11 by tater

[SunlitZelkova]

1 hour ago, tater said:

That's fairy dust IMO.

It is indeed idealist, not realist. But-

1 hour ago, tater said:

Humans are humans, and there are bottom-line incentives that drive us (all of us as a species). In the natural state for large groups—capitalism—people work to increase their own place in the world, with the most motivated being the higher end of the scale (these days CEOs, etc). Minus the "profit" incentive structure the same people exist (history has demonstrated this to the misery of 10s of millions)—but since they cannot create ways to generate wealth via commerce, they improve their lot by the only remaining outlet—personal power. I don't see collectivism being a way to innovate Mars into long term survival.

I personally haven’t seen anthropological evidence supporting this notion. My understanding it that the idea that capitalism is the end all be all of civilization comes from philosophy rather than a scientific look at the history of the world. It’s still a theory, of course.

As I said, I don’t think a collectivist utopia is the answer. That was wishful thinking on my part.

But I don’t think a Mars colony is going to survive unless we get creative in ways that haven’t been seen since humans settled on land and began agriculture. Unless there is a corporate entity rich enough to build and sustain the colony all on its own in the initial phases and somehow turn into a city-state with a GDP comparable to a small developed Earth country, which is questionable, exporting Earth societal systems- designed to work in a place where you don’t have to worry about losing breathing gases or losing your food supply to a faulty circuit- will not work.

Just my opinion. Not an argument.

Now, on the other hand, if we could prove traditional Earth economic systems could work on the Moon before attempting to build a Mars colony, I’d think different.

The way I see it is this.

European colonists took practices found in Europe (on Earth) and were able to use them successfully in the Americas (on Earth).

Human colonists trying to take practices found on Earth and apply them to Mars, to me, sounds like European colonists trying to take practices found in Europe and apply them to living underwater.

If European colonists were capable of building massive habitats right off the bat and sustaining them at great expense, sure it’d work, but that isn’t realistic. Neither is trying to run a Mars colony based on Earth metrics like profit. It will take something new and innovative- not the idealist utopia I seemed to describe in my post, reminiscent of a certain 19th century economist and philosophers beliefs, but rather something never before seen in the history of humanity.

Just my opinion  At the heart of the question of how Mars will be colonized are very old questions that humans have argued over for years. Economics, especially. What drives a society? et al. It’s probably pointless to argue here as we all have our own opinions informed by years of prior learning and experience.

But, it is interesting to hear different opinions and get feedback on them.

Edited April 11 by SunlitZelkova

[darthgently]

5 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

My understanding it that the idea that capitalism is the end all be all of civilization comes from philosophy rather than a scientific look at the history of the world. It’s still a theory, of course.

Even animals practice free market principals.  But scientists call it symbiosis or coevolution. 

The idea that one can't see one being voluntarily trading with another being for mutual advantage as anything other than philosophical requires ignoring evidence right before our eyes. 

Free markets are natural, "organic", and emergent.  No political system anywhere or at any time has been able to keep them from happening and when those political systems collapsed it was emergent free markets that picked up the pieces.  Naturally. 

Two beings trading is not some crazy abstract concept dreamt up by philosophers.  Every cell in your body has mitochondria trading services for security.  It is built in and emergent.  Completely natural and proven by billions of years.  Full duration tested many times! 

Edited April 11 by darthgently

[DDE]

My 2 cents: capital doesn't necessarily take the form of money. Political and social capital are also things that exist.