A City On Mars

[kerbiloid]

Mars is an ideal place for monasteries.

Far from the wordly vanity.
Requires collectivism, altruism, self-restraint.
Can produce rare Martian wine (with faint trace of perchlorates in the aroma bouquet) and souvenirs from the Martian stones.
Can host the tourists.

Place there Olympus Basilica.

[mikegarrison]

2 hours ago, tater said:

Robots are better for all the science, but it's not the same as people. I was at a conference at Caltech years ago (Voyager Neptune encounter, actually) and in a discussion someone asked what humans could do that probes couldn't, and a guy yelled, "Have children!"

No human (or even animal) children have ever been born off Earth, so it's not entirely certain that humans could have children on Mars or in a space station.

[kerbiloid]

The quails have.

https://scientificrussia.ru/articles/centrifuga-inkubator-48-aic-zacem-zemlanam-kosmiceskij-eksperiment-perepel

Mir:

1990 - 4 quails
1992 - 6 quails
1999 - 37 quails

Actually, there should be a farm module on ISS.

Of course, they were having pathologies, but does it matter for food?

[tater]

12 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

No human (or even animal) children have ever been born off Earth, so it's not entirely certain that humans could have children on Mars or in a space station.

Indeed. A station would be fine spun up to 1g, obviously (with appropriate radiation shielding, as the O'Neill concepts had). Mars is a big "?".

Seems like people pushing for Mars colonization would at some point make a centrifugal station and test out mammalian embryology, etc, in 0.38g. You'd think.

Edited April 13 by tater

[magnemoe]

14 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates. Written by Himself. would have been a book whose text was shorter than its title if he couldn't even breathe the air on his island.

It was misery for him but an group of Polynesians would probably enjoy the place. People lived all over the world long before metalworking. The Inuits lived on Greenland and you had people living in deserts. 
Antarctica was the only big we missed, suspect Inuits would manage it there to if some had transported an tribe before they started trading much 

[PakledHostage]

1 hour ago, magnemoe said:

People lived all over the world long before metalworking. 

The difference is that people can breathe all over the world. People also don't need radiation shielding throughout most of our planet's surface. Anywhere else is going to kill us pretty much the second our technology fails. And the present-day limitations of that technology also preclude building actual desirable places to live. In the near term, any artificial habitat on the moon or Mars is basically just going to be an underground bunker, with all the associated mental health challenges that that will entail. (..."All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.")

[DDE]

19 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

The romantic stories always pretty much come down to assuming that people go to these remote places because they want to leave society. They are trailblazers and explorers and individualists by nature, and that's the appeal for them. But the problem is that Mars is too hostile for individuals. You need the support of a society to live there.

This does leave a gao in the form of isolationist / secessionist social groups. They'd have to have the necessary resources and not be verboten, but it doesn't sound too impossible.

Something like...

15 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

monasteries

Yeah, I got ninja'd. That just brings us to the topic of Russia's Northern Thebaid. Granted, the fortress-monasteries involved were by far not the first human settlements, but they emphatically were an anchor for further colonization.

Edited April 13 by DDE

[SunlitZelkova]

20 hours ago, Little 908 said:

If you acknowledge what we have right now. We literally have robots that are capable of doing all your chores, fighting . We have constructed a few billion dollar space station in LEO. We have sent probes near every planet. We have done a lot of things that we dreamt of in sci-fi movies back at the start of the space race. So its likely we will have stuff we say is fiction now.

I think this is a flawed way of thinking about the future. It's naive to think the same trends we see now and in the recent past will continue forever.

People thought there would be flying battleships based on the development of airships in the early 1900s as a "natural" continuation of the technology, and it never happened. People thought there would be no more capital ships after torpedo boats made them "obsolete," also during the early 1900s. And people thought the adoption of nuclear power in the US in the late 1950s meant that by 1990 there would be a small nuclear reactor in the basement of every home in America.

When thinking about this stuff, its important to think about the economy of it.

Based on the size of airline fleets and number of total employees, I have seen estimates that it takes about 50-100 employees to maintain a single aircraft.

How many employees does it take to maintain a single rocket? How much extremely specialized labor when compared with maintaining aircraft? Where is SpaceX going to get this army of ground staff to support their launch of 1000 Starships during each transfer window?

In my state it costs about $300,000 to build a new home right now, minus permits and land costs etc. This is very close to the average US cost of 298,000 in 2023. For lack of alternative ideas, I'm going to assume SpaceX uses the "normal buildings in domes" design they have in the artwork on their website. Musk wants to house 1 million people on Mars. Let's say there are 4 people to a home. So $75 billion to build the habitats. This doesn't include the expensive domes, complete with life support on a scale never seen before. The domes will need to be even bigger because there will need to be room for the other aspects of the city. It won't just need more buildings, but a sewage system, schools, farms, the power source, and so on. So the dome will be enormous.

The ISS has about 1000m cubed of pressurized volume and cost $100 billion or so in total. I'm going to be very generous and cut that in half, assuming use of robots will help cut costs, but then I'm going to add $5 billion for those robots. So let's say 1000m cubed of volume on the Mars base will cost $55 billion to build. The city of Portland, which is probably smaller than what the Mars city will be due to lack of farmland, is 233km squared area. I'm going to treat the volume of the dome as if it were a cube, and the extra volume that wouldn't be there on account of shape will go to the farmland. So let's just say to have good circulation and allow birds to live in it, it will need to be a generous 1 km tall (the artwork shows it higher). So, the volume is just 233km cubed.

So, it would cost $233 billion dollars to build a pressurized dome for the city.

From r/theydidthemath

Quote

In permaculture (diversified annual and perennial polyculture), the rule of thumb is 1/4 acre of land to feed two adults and two kids. This would work out to 63k acres ~= 255 sqkm for 1 million people. If for every acre devoted to food production we have an acre for buildings, roads, and other infrastructure, then this city of 1 million would be ~500sqkm. In the US, San Jose would perhaps be the city that looks most like this.

If, alternatively, we look at the caloric value of a single conventional commodity crop, such as oats, we can see that oats yield roughly 3000lbs/acre, at roughly 1825kcal/lb. You might want 2500kcal/day for an adult, and if that adult could subsist solely on oats or crops with similar calorie-per-acre yield, then that adult would need 2500 kcal * 365 days = 912500kcal/yr => 500lbs of oats.

At 3000lb/acre, oats will feed 6 adults per acre each year, and implies 167k acres ~= 676 sqkm. If we imagine a city of 1 million people where 680sqkm is staple crops, and 680 is buildings, roads, etc, that 1 million person, ~1700sqkm city might look a bit like two El Paso's side by side.

Let's be generous and use the lower estimate. About 250 sq km for 1 million people.

Cost of dome + homes (minus maintenance, services, sewage, transporting dirt for farming, etc.): ~$488 billion.

The article from Payload Space that estimated SpaceX's revenue I found put operating costs in 2022 at $3 billion. They launched 61 rockets in 2022, rounding that down to 60, we get $50 million to launch one rocket.

How many Starships will it take to build the city? Way more than Musk theorizes. An interesting Seattle Times article did the calculations and the weight of a home came in at about 300 tons. So 300 million tons of material need to be moved to Mars for the housing alone. Starship 3 can bring 200 tons to LEO, and with 4-5 refueling flights could bring that to Mars. So 1,500,000 Cargo Starship launches would be required to send the materials, ignoring things like volume restrictions and what have you. Add 4 tanker flights per launch, and that would be 7,500,000 Starship launches.

Thus SpaceX's operating costs including the launch of these rockets, in total, would amount to $375 trillion. This doesn't include the 10,000 Starships needed to launch the million colonists, nor the cost of launching the dome, dirt for farmland, robot laborers, and so on. And of course the associated tankers. Nor the actual cost of the materials themselves.

These would be internal launches and thus generate no revenue.

In contrast, the Earth's GDP in 2022 was about $100 trillion.

Starlink had 2.3 million subscribers in 2023, and generated $4.2 billion in revenue. If Starlink somehow rose to 32 million subscribers and beat out Comcast to become the biggest ISP in the US, they'd have, very roughly, $63 billion in revenue each year.

This doesn't take into account inflation.

SpaceX alone could not pull this off.

$375.5 trillion for the Mars city, and that estimate is low balled. And it won't even turn a profit when it is complete. It will just be a regular old city, but costing $50 million to send stuff to and fro on a good day. Contrast with how sending a 20 ft shipping container to Japan costs about $1,200 dollars.

A Mars city will, in all likelihood, never turn a profit.

And remember those failed predictions about technology in the early 20th century? Let me introduce you to some more bad projections. In the 1920s, people predicted the end of poverty, infinite growth, and even declines in culture because people were becoming so wealthy they wouldn't want to do anything. Then after the crash of '29, people were predicting permanent damage, endless poverty and unemployment, and no hope of recovery ever.

So even though Goldman Sachs predicts the global GDP being $227 trillion in 2050, which maybe could put it at $1 quadrillion by year 2300- at which point the US GDP might be about $300-400 trillion (all at a rate of growth of $100 trillion every 25 years), that would still require a company with the ability to invest an amount equivalent to the US GDP in something they will get no return on investment in.

All that assumes there is no Second Great Depression, no nuclear war, no AI disruption to the economy, and no disastrous damage from climate change.

I really dislike the idea of things being inevitable. If we want something to happen in the future, we have to work for it, we can't assume it will just come to us. No one is really working towards anything right now, and I feel like that's just going to allow another bad cascade of events that will lead to great damage and set humanity back 50 years.

Every generation has talked about something being inevitable, then had things turned on their head and started saying the other way around was inevitable. There is great collateral in the process. I wish for once we would recognize the future is unknown and try to shape it by our own will, instead of letting it take the trajectory set by people who are either in retirement homes or dead. Because it isn't a trajectory at all, just feeling our way through the dark with no interest in our existence beyond the present.

------

Okay, now for fun let's see when a company might have the wherewithal to fund its own Mars colony, based on these unchanging linear projections that I simplified.

SpaceX's total revenue was about $8 billion according to that same Payload Space estimate. So 3/8 of that was operating costs. Assuming SpaceX's revenue can grow with the economy: maybe SpaceX and Tesla merge into one mega corporation, along with Twitter, maybe it produces the world's best mac and cheese, who knows. I'm going to use that trend as the GDP.

So SpaceX's total revenue will be $16 billion in 2050, and $32 billion in 2100. I'm gonna round it up to $10 billion in 2023 so this is easier. So $40 billion in 2100.

$64 billion in 2200, $128 billion in 2300. By the year 3000, it will be $400 billion. $800 billion in 4000, but let's bump that to a trillion. So it will be $3 trillion dollars by the year 8000.

After that, it would take about 200,000 years for SpaceX's operating costs to reach $300 trillion dollars. The extra 75, also rounded up, to 100, would take another 667 years or so to gain.

So SpaceX will have enough money to build a city on Mars starting in 208,667 A.D. By this time, two moons of Uranus will have collided, the Arecibo message will have reached its target, and Pioneer 10 will have passed within about 3 light years of Ross 248, a red dwarf, which circa 60,000 A.D. will have become the closest star to Earth for a brief period of time (10,000 years).

Disclaimer:

This is half serious attempt to calculate the cost of a Mars colony, half tongue in cheek criticism of statements that say things like "All we need to do is send some software engineers to Mars and the colony will be profitable." I did not check my math. The only really serious thing is my critique of making predictions about the future by assuming current trends will last forever.

[kerbiloid]

15 hours ago, DDE said:

Yeah, I got ninja'd. That just brings us to the topic of Russia's Northern Thebaid. Granted, the fortress-monasteries involved were by far not the first human settlements, but they emphatically were an anchor for further colonization.

There is also a known city near a salt lake in the rocky desert, full of people who are familiar with all these ideas.

Wait... Didn't they build a generation ship in Expanse?

So, build a Great Martian Tabernaculum at the opposite side of the Olympus caldera from the basilica.

The pilgrims will be proud to visit all of that.

Upd.

After thinking a little, I came to conclusion that the mentioned Monastery, Basilica, and Tabernacle should occupy another one of the Tharsis volcanoes, while Olympus Mons is the best for the low-gravity Martian Olympic Games.

Its caldera is a natural circus, useful for any kind of sport.
Also if raise the atmospheric pressure up to the value of liquid water existing, the lying aside Nergal Valley is great for yachting and rowing regattas.

The combination of low gravity and highly variabl air pressure would bring fresh air o the stagnating olympic sports.

Also, it's possible to organize an interplanetary rowing torunament, when the sportsmen are rotating the bike generators to power the ion engines and get to the Mars first.

Edited April 14 by kerbiloid

[kerbiloid]

_(multipost)

Edited April 14 by kerbiloid

[monophonic]

On 4/14/2024 at 4:55 AM, SunlitZelkova said:

How many Starships will it take to build the city? Way more than Musk theorizes. An interesting Seattle Times article did the calculations and the weight of a home came in at about 300 tons. So 300 million tons of material need to be moved to Mars for the housing alone. Starship 3 can bring 200 tons to LEO, and with 4-5 refueling flights could bring that to Mars. So 1,500,000 Cargo Starship launches would be required to send the materials, ignoring things like volume restrictions and what have you. Add 4 tanker flights per launch, and that would be 7,500,000 Starship launches.

IDK about SpaceX, but NASA has been investigating using local materials for housing structures. So how much would you save from that mass if all of foundation, floors, walls and roofs were made from martian minerals? 90%? Presumably surface materials like wallpapers/paint, flooring, probably window glass, etc. would still be brought from Earth. Most of dome material as well, I think. Could there be weight savings by accepting a large number of small(er) domes?

Then if you accepted a more european standard of living? So halve the average floor area per capita desired. That doesn't exactly halve the mass requirement, because all rooms still need four walls etc., but it should still be a significant reduction. Could drop it even further if going eastern europe level. Of course this will make recruiting new martians harder, but let's have that discussion another time. I don't think any numbers we might reach will make Mars City happen in our lifetime. I'm just interested how the numbers change if we adjust some of the assumptions slightly towards more realistic.

[kerbiloid]

The underground domes can be made much cheaper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Explosions_for_the_National_Economy

 

[tater]

The guys at LANL were playing with a tunneling device. Unlike the offering from the Boring Company, the LANL one was nuclear powered... it was designed to MELT regolith as it drove forward. The resultant glass then seeps into the surrounding regolith forming a glass tube.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3693731A/en

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4687637

Their civil engineering guys did a paper on this for the Moon and Mars I saw presented in the 90s.

[AckSed]

On 4/15/2024 at 2:35 PM, tater said:

The guys at LANL were playing with a tunneling device. Unlike the offering from the Boring Company, the LANL one was nuclear powered... it was designed to MELT regolith as it drove forward. The resultant glass then seeps into the surrounding regolith forming a glass tube.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3693731A/en

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4687637

Their civil engineering guys did a paper on this for the Moon and Mars I saw presented in the 90s.

And this is a card in High Frontier 4 All. It's the "Nuclear Drill" Robonaut. Pretty good card.

[Terwin]

I was thinking that mars and the moon would primarily start as retirement communities, with support personnel, etc.

The lower gravity should reduce strain on the body and allow for more autonomy for people too weak to get out of bed on earth.  Might even allow for better longevity as it would reduce the minimal functional strength of bones joints and muscles(including the heart).

Sure such individuals would need to be in a liquid bath for launch and possibly landing, but they would have the funds and low concern about long-term viability needed for such an endeavor.

The colony would be the laborers and heath workers supporting the retirees.

 

[kerbiloid]

Low-g increases the decalcification of bones rate.

On the other hand, in low-g they need the hip joints much less. In zero-g - almost never.

[tater]

16 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Low-g increases the decalcification of bones rate.

On the other hand, in low-g they need the hip joints much less. In zero-g - almost never.

Zero g does—but we don't have data on reduced gravity I think... all there years, and we've yet to do that experiment.

[kerbiloid]

4 minutes ago, tater said:

Zero g does—but we don't have data on reduced gravity I think... all there years, and we've yet to do that experiment.

Low weight = low pressure = low stress = low need in calcium

[tater]

14 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Low weight = low pressure = low stress = low need in calcium

Possibly. There might be a value at which bone health is preserved that is <1g.

The experiment needs to actually be done.

Edited April 17 by tater

[kerbiloid]

17 minutes ago, tater said:

Possibly. There might be a value at which bone health is preserved that is <1g.

The experiment needs to actually be done.

Is  being done for centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osteoporosis#Potentially_modifiable

Quote

• Underweight/inactive: Bone remodeling occurs in response to physical stress, so physical inactivity can lead to significant bone loss.^[4] Weight bearing exercise can increase peak bone mass achieved in adolescence,^[4] and a highly significant correlation between bone strength and muscle strength has been determined.^[51] The incidence of osteoporosis is lower in overweight people.^[52]

The bedridden patients and low-mobility people suffer from it even at 1 g.

P.S.
It's a remedy! The Martians should be fat and heavy! The potato diet is excellent for Mars.

0.4 g means 200 kg of normal body mass for a Martian.

For Mars!!
 

Spoiler

 

Edited April 17 by kerbiloid

[tater]

45 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

The bedridden patients and low-mobility people suffer from it even at 1 g.

If bone wants stimulation down the long axis (walking), or from muscle use, bedridden patients are a poor model. Would be worth experimenting at 0.38g with mammal studies. I'd say it's not definitive—but the experimental path is clear. Another reason I'm not a Mars colony guy, this needs to be demonstrated as long term safe or it's a nonstarter.

[kerbiloid]

55 minutes ago, tater said:

If bone wants stimulation down the long axis (walking), or from muscle use, bedridden patients are a poor model. Would be worth experimenting at 0.38g with mammal studies

A usual practice in the most poor and cold regions of pre/early-XX Russia was to hang a cow in late winter to the ceiling by belly on the horse tugs, to make it stand and prevent its fall, and let it last till the coming spring.

It's a ready-to-use methodics of the 0.38 g Martian gravity emulation, to study the long leg bones osteoporosis in low-g conditions.

It's amusing, how the illiterate peasants were foreseeing the future expansion to Mars!

[SunlitZelkova]

9 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

It's a remedy! The Martians should be fat and heavy! The potato diet is excellent for Mars.

From a certain Pixar movie everyone loves.

Spoiler

I did this on mobile, I hope it isn’t too big.

[kerbiloid]

On 4/11/2024 at 7:17 AM, tater said:

On 4/11/2024 at 6:38 AM, 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!

Got it.

First send the Indians.

When they have prepared the Mars, send others.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

On 4/12/2024 at 10:59 PM, PakledHostage said:

That's kind of my point.  I don’t see a colony being viable on Mars. Moon, yes. Mars, no, because the Moon has potentially useful resources (helium-3 for use in fusion reactors and ice to make rocket fuel in reasonabe proximity to Earth), while Mars has... 

It will happen.  Not as a dedicated Colony; that would be miserable.  But someone will start a science outpost, ala Antarctica, then there will be a few, then some people will stay past a transfer or two and decades later (presuming they find something worth doing there) there will be a permanent outpost.

Given enough time?  

It will look like a colony.

(It took decades for the Virginia Colony to get going - and that wasn't a particularly inhospitable place)