Mars Frontier

[darthgently]

 

[AckSed]

Broadly, I agree that a planetary-scale civilisation needs technology to survive. I'm not sure about the "calculated by Grok" part.

The visceral fear of there not being air due to equipment failure feels different to the fear of being stranded in a deserted city without a car, and the grocery stores looted, even though practically, they're the same in terms of danger to yourself. It sounds appealing to live off the land, in our common biosphere, but when was the last time you had nothing but your hands and your clothes? No world-spanning communications device in your pocket, no plastic card that holds all your money, no access to the jank-filled worldbrain that is Wikipedia? I can't remember one, and I'm not sure I could survive without it.

One thing that we do need is to have other people with us. The first people to settle Mars or a habitat with the attitude of building a community there will have more success than the ones who are only visiting.

Even the mega-rich who, in the past, built elaborate nuclear bunkers, and now are building boltholes, are finding that the real post-apocalypse resilience is in having neighbours that farm and exchange food and knowledge.

I also think he's touched on the real issue: space has an image problem. Mars settlement especially has an image problem. How do you make a dry, airless desert feel like a home? How do you domesticate it?

You don't dress it up as better than Earth, but you do - you should - provide food, warmth, comfort, health, work and play.

Which is a point. How was the American West promoted? What could we learn from its successes and failures?

[DDE]

4 minutes ago, AckSed said:

No world-spanning communications device in your pocket

My dad accidentally stole my phone yesterday.

Those were very unfun 15 minutes.

5 minutes ago, AckSed said:

Which is a point. How was the American West promoted?

Subsistence agriculture. Gold. Political independence.

No, I don't think it's a good analogy.

[tater]

14 minutes ago, AckSed said:

Which is a point. How was the American West promoted? What could we learn from its successes and failures?

For inhabiting Mars? Exactly nothing.

It's possible to argue that humans had to develop tech to be able to at higher latitudes than where we first evolved (easier to live where you can walk around stark naked), but the TRL of "clothes" and "fire" was hit pretty early. It's rather harder someplace where your life expectancy outside is measured by how long you can hold your breath. Colonizing Mars is harder than colonizing the sea floor on Earth. Heck, it's harder than Antarctica (which we haven't done).

[wnderer]

I'm no expert and I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I can't help thinking about these things when they talk about colonizing Mars. For me the difference between a colony and camping trip is construction. Bringing everything with you and then leaving it there just makes you a messy camper. For construction on Mars there is nothing there, at least to start with, but stone, CO2 and sunlight. To build on Mars we need miners, stonemasons and explosives. I think we could use dry ice as the explosive.

It's cold on Mars and CO2 condenses naturally so I think a machine that condenses dry ice out of the atmosphere is practical. My recipe for an explosive is just the ideal gas law PV=nRT or rearranged P=(n/V)(RT). we get the (n/V) from dry ice and the RT from sunlight. I think the rate or derivitive (dP/dt=(n/V)(RdT/dt)) is also important to the explosion.

My guess is that with drilling, packing dry ice, exploding, jack-hammering to clean up the hole and removing the material, we could advance a 3x3 meter tunnel 1 meter per day.  After 2 years we have a 700 meter long tunnel.  We start at the bottom of a crater mine upwards to the surface, so empty carts go up and full carts roll down. How do we power these tools? Dry ice air compressors! We use sunlight and shutters to control the temperature and pressure of dry ice pressure tanks. Batteries are heavy so minimize the use of batteries. Maybe even dry ice generators instead of batteries.

Even a more rough guess is that it would take 20 years to hollow out 100 meter diameter hemispherical dome. Human housing is mined into the walls of the dome. Sunlight is brought in through a light pipe from surface. Light is collected by mylar mirrors which can be rolled up during dust storms.  The light is focused on a fresnel lens which shines on a parabolic mirror which focuses the light into the light pipe. Fill the dome with pressured Mars atmosphere heated by the sunlight. Grow plants to convert CO2 to O2. Burn hydrogen to make water. (Okay, I'm not sure where we get hydrogen from.) People can't breath in there but they can walk around with just scuba gear. And that is Stone Age Mars.

After Stone Age Mars, comes Metal Age Mars. We need furnaces to make glass and metals. These furnace look alot like the habitat, but with more mirrors focusing more light into much smaller crucibles. Then Industrial Age Mars using the glass and steel to make chemical processing plants and buildings on the Mars surface.

 

[AckSed]

Interesting ideas. Dry ice as explosive, I don't see, but if you're making oxygen anyway, could be you'd use oxyliqut - carbon soaked in liquid oxygen.

See also this previous thread for other hab designs: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/topic/226413-optimal-size-for-domes-and-other-structures/page/2/

 

[darthgently]

4 hours ago, AckSed said:

Broadly, I agree that a planetary-scale civilisation needs technology to survive. I'm not sure about the "calculated by Grok" part.

Dr. Metzger has cred so if he posted the grok calculations, he vetted them.  Grok3 gets the highest analytical math scores of all the AI engines currently.

As far as promoting it, I’m not so certain that is as required as one might think.  There has always been a slice of humanity that will push into a frontier.  And it isn’t simply a human thing.  It is what living organisms do and have always done.  It might be hard to prevent if one even wanted to at this point.

 (The grok link isn’t working; error message says it wasn’t shared correctly.  I bumped Metzger to see if he can retry that share)

Edited Tuesday at 02:46 AM by darthgently

[darthgently]

Here is a working version of the grok link for Metzger’s Mars post:

https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_59abf054-1175-41a2-ab66-99dc027bc149

I continued the grok conversation Metzger started but with the failures being stochastic and the result is the same, effectively zero

 

Edited Tuesday at 10:48 AM by darthgently

[Entropian]

On 3/31/2025 at 7:28 PM, darthgently said:

Dr. Metzger has cred so if he posted the grok calculations, he vetted them.

My general belief is that if someone is credible in a given field, they should be able to work through a calculation like this without an AI augmenting their work.  While I recognize that this AI may be better than others of its kind for this application, the black-box nature of the process makes it difficult to believe from an analytical perspective as it often loses the self-consistency sanity checks one can do after the fact.

Who knows - this guy could totally be credible and simply has enough confidence in this AI, but he's not going to appear as such to me while doing so.  Just my few cents.

[darthgently]

1 hour ago, Entropian said:

My general belief is that if someone is credible in a given field, they should be able to work through a calculation like this without an AI augmenting their work.  While I recognize that this AI may be better than others of its kind for this application, the black-box nature of the process makes it difficult to believe from an analytical perspective as it often loses the self-consistency sanity checks one can do after the fact.

Who knows - this guy could totally be credible and simply has enough confidence in this AI, but he's not going to appear as such to me while doing so.  Just my few cents.

The link shows there entire process the AI took.  Just as with a person the correct approach is to find flaws in the math, not the “mather”.

It probably wouldn’t hurt to look into Dr. Metzger’s background a bit either