The Legacy Of Man...

[Brethern]

...if you ignore the cost of creating and maintaining the lunar base. Even fifty years post Apollo, sending things to the Moon is not easy, reliable or cheap. Sending enough stuff to the Moon to maintain a long-term human presence would require an investment on a major planetary commitment level.

There is some scientific justification for expending the resources to send unmanned rovers to the Moon (as the Chinese have recently done), but there is very little justification for sending people there.

So what of our legacy? Everywhere on earth there's testimony to the power of the human brain. The great wall of china, the pyramids of giza, the panama canal. Are all engineering marvels that challenged the power of the human mind.

What do you have on that level today.

[Wanderfound]

So what of our legacy? Everywhere on earth there's testimony to the power of the human brain. The great wall of china, the pyramids of giza, the panama canal. Are all engineering marvels that challenged the power of the human mind.

What do you have on that level today.

Science, liberal democracy, technological civilisation, and an average lifespan of about triple the historical norm. And if you're purely focussed on physical infrastructure, go have a look at some of the bridges and things being built in France these days. The builders of antiquity would be utterly gobsmacked.

Pharoahs and Kings build monuments; democratic people build knowledge and utility. Less cathedrals, more public schools and National Health Services.

There's a fine line between "engineering marvel" and "throwing vast quantities of resources down the drain for no good reason". This is edging into politics though, so I'll leave it there.

[Brethern]

Science, liberal democracy, technological civilisation, and an average lifespan of about triple the historical norm. And if you're purely focussed on physical infrastructure, go have a look at some of the bridges and things being built in France these days. The builders of antiquity would be utterly gobsmacked.

Pharoahs and Kings build monuments; democratic people build knowledge and utility. Less cathedrals, more public schools and National Health Services.

There's a fine line between "engineering marvel" and "throwing vast quantities of resources down the drain for no good reason". This is edging into politics though, so I'll leave it there.

And without the ones who built those cathedrals, pyramids and such where would we be? We take every one of those bridges for granted, because building them requires minimal human labor.

[Bill Phil]

Selenium maybe? It's a rare element used for semiconductors.

It could be. I've forgotten exactly what, but if I remember correctly it's most common in China.

[Kryten]

So what of our legacy? Everywhere on earth there's testimony to the power of the human brain. The great wall of china, the pyramids of giza, the panama canal. Are all engineering marvels that challenged the power of the human mind.

What do you have on that level today.

The pyramids are big piles of rock with almost no internal space, and the great wall of china is a series of perfectly normal medieval boundary walls that happen to be really long. They don't show any intelligence, just concentration of power and resources.

[tomf]

Bill Phil is talking about rare earth elements, which despite their name aren't very rare on earth. What is rare is a deposit of them that is rich enough to be worth mining. AFAIK there isn't any reason to believe that they will be any more concentrated anywhere on the moon, and as they are relatively heavy elements is seems likely they will be less common overall.

[Ralathon]

Science, liberal democracy, technological civilisation, and an average lifespan of about triple the historical norm. And if you're purely focussed on physical infrastructure, go have a look at some of the bridges and things being built in France these days. The builders of antiquity would be utterly gobsmacked.

Pharoahs and Kings build monuments; democratic people build knowledge and utility. Less cathedrals, more public schools and National Health Services.

There's a fine line between "engineering marvel" and "throwing vast quantities of resources down the drain for no good reason". This is edging into politics though, so I'll leave it there.

I would argue that manned space exploration isn't wasting resources. In fact, it is a big contributor to the most important goal of humanity: Staying alive.

Carl Sagan makes this argument in favor of manned exploration in the book "Pale Blue Dot" (which is an excellent read). The gist of it is that manned exploration really isn't worth it from a purely materialistic point of view. It doesn't create any more jobs or have a higher ROI than any other governmental branch. Spinoff technology isn't worth it either because space is orders of magnitude more expensive than just investing in the spinoff directly. Considering how many starving people could be fed for the cost of a single launch we can't really advocate it from a moral point of view either. Lastly, humans might be faster, but a robotic mission can do all the science just as well, if not better. And a robot is way easier to keep alive at a fraction of the cost.

Yet we should still have manned exploration because the universe is a dangerous place. If something on earth goes horribly wrong we are screwed! One nuclear war or a big asteroid and humanity is back in the stone age, if not extinct. If we have a semiautonomous base somewhere in the solar system our chances of long term survival are dramatically better. Asteroid hits the earth? Sure, the martians will feel sad and they'll miss their shipments of luxury goods, but humanity will survive. If you do a cost benefit analysis with that in mind there isn't anything that can compete with manned spaceflight.

[Nibb31]

Yet we should still have manned exploration because the universe is a dangerous place. If something on earth goes horribly wrong we are screwed! One nuclear war or a big asteroid and humanity is back in the stone age, if not extinct. If we have a semiautonomous base somewhere in the solar system our chances of long term survival are dramatically better. Asteroid hits the earth? Sure, the martians will feel sad and they'll miss their shipments of luxury goods, but humanity will survive. If you do a cost benefit analysis with that in mind there isn't anything that can compete with manned spaceflight.

That argument is a fallacy. By definition, a semiautonomous base could not survive autonomously. It would have to a 100% self-sufficient colony, which is currently beyond our technology.

However, if we ever are capable of building 100% self sufficience colonies on Mars, then we are also capable of building them on Earth. A scorched Earth will always be easier for us to survive on than Mars or Titan. And even if a nuclear war or a big asteroid wipes out 99.9% of humanity, there will still be millions of survivors, equivalent to the entire World population during the Middle Ages, which is much more than any self-sufficient off-world colony could ever sustain.

[Wanderfound]

I would argue that manned space exploration isn't wasting resources. In fact, it is a big contributor to the most important goal of humanity: Staying alive.

Carl Sagan makes this argument in favor of manned exploration in the book "Pale Blue Dot" (which is an excellent read). The gist of it is that manned exploration really isn't worth it from a purely materialistic point of view. It doesn't create any more jobs or have a higher ROI than any other governmental branch. Spinoff technology isn't worth it either because space is orders of magnitude more expensive than just investing in the spinoff directly. Considering how many starving people could be fed for the cost of a single launch we can't really advocate it from a moral point of view either. Lastly, humans might be faster, but a robotic mission can do all the science just as well, if not better. And a robot is way easier to keep alive at a fraction of the cost.

Yet we should still have manned exploration because the universe is a dangerous place. If something on earth goes horribly wrong we are screwed! One nuclear war or a big asteroid and humanity is back in the stone age, if not extinct. If we have a semiautonomous base somewhere in the solar system our chances of long term survival are dramatically better. Asteroid hits the earth? Sure, the martians will feel sad and they'll miss their shipments of luxury goods, but humanity will survive. If you do a cost benefit analysis with that in mind there isn't anything that can compete with manned spaceflight.

Unfortunately though, Sagan is wrong in this case. Interplanetary colonisation is not a remotely practical thing at present, and is not going to be so any time in the near future. Off-Earth human settlement provides no insurance against global catastrophe unless it is self-sufficient; that's even further away than colonisation itself. Centuries, at an absolute minimum.

It does us no good to have a handful of people in a space station or Moonbase if they're all going to die a week after their resupply ship fails to arrive. And, if rather than burning all of those resources on keeping a handful of people temporarily alive off-Earth, we'd instead spent our effort on telescope monitoring and impactor diversion tech (i.e. send up a robotic spacecraft and give that comet a nudge; it's actually not that hard to do. The tricky bit is seeing them in time) then we might have been able to avert that planetary catastrophe altogether.

It's an opportunity cost thing: every dollar that you spend on pointless boots and flags missions is a dollar that you aren't spending on telescopes, or another Mars rover, or the Large Hadron Collider, or climate monitoring satellites, or...

Manned spaceflight is great for national propaganda, but it's lethal to science. Sure, Chris Hadfield is a way cool dude and I like his song, but the scientific output of the I.S.S. is essentially zero. For the cost of building the I.S.S., we could've put rovers on every planet in the solar system.

As always in these sorts of threads, I'd encourage y'all to have a read of this: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html

There is a strong tendency amongst space fans (of whom I am one, incidentally; there are assorted schools around the world using telescopes and other scientific equipment paid for by me) to massively underestimate the impracticality of human existence in space. From a human survival point of view, the most horrible place on Earth is an absolute paradise in comparison to anything off Earth in this solar system.

[Mazon Del]

However, if we ever are capable of building 100% self sufficience colonies on Mars, then we are also capable of building them on Earth. A scorched Earth will always be easier for us to survive on than Mars or Titan. And even if a nuclear war or a big asteroid wipes out 99.9% of humanity, there will still be millions of survivors, equivalent to the entire World population during the Middle Ages, which is much more than any self-sufficient off-world colony could ever sustain.

This argument is in and of itself something of a fallacy. The proposed shelters certainly help things assuming the problem is an asteroid or some other natural disaster that we can see coming. But it ignores situations we don't see coming such as massive gamma ray bursts, or man made extinction. An example being nuclear war of course. If say Russia and the US both had big massive facilities to ensure that millions of civilians would survive, you can bet they have a few ground penetrating warheads devoted soley for them. Strictly speaking assuming nuclear war broke out, it wouldn't be too terribly hard (but expensive!) for either side to have a couple of interplanetary rockets ready to fire to lob some nukes at Mars to deal with the colonies, but in general that becomes a cost/benefit situation. Guarenteed any Mars colony is going to be in no position to provide aid to its Earth based patron for quite some time, so they don't need to worry about that. If there are no nukes on Mars then don't need to worry about bombardment. Largely it is this nicely contained problem that you can deal with at your leisure if you with control of the Earth.

Additionally, the argument about the millions surviving guarenteeing we live on is flawed. The reason the world population way back was able to survive was because they had basically always lived under the conditions existent at that time, everybody KNEW how to forage and whatnot as was necessary. The vast majority of people in developed nations would have no idea how to survive without readily available supplies. Rather, they do know one method, to take by force what others have gained themselves. While I agree if several million spread across the world survived, we as a species would survive, the more important thing is that we WOULD lose at least the last 500 years of tech generally speaking. Sure if conditions were good the survivors can salvage bits and bobs of tech in order to do certain things, but in general the understanding of how to MAKE those things would be lost. Oh sure, the concept an electric motor requiring a magnet and a coil of wire and few other odds and ends would probably survive. But the mathematics behind the interaction between number of coils, strength of the magnets, etc will be lost. Quite frankly our scientific knowledge surviving is more important to humanity than any given civilization's survival. Civilizations come and go all the time, this can happen with a minimum of problems assuming the tech base survives. Once a tech base drops out (fall of Rome) things get bad, fast, and long.

[Brethern]

The pyramids are big piles of rock with almost no internal space, and the great wall of china is a series of perfectly normal medieval boundary walls that happen to be really long. They don't show any intelligence, just concentration of power and resources.

You ever try to lay a foundation? You ever try to move several tons of rocks into a pyramid form? You ever try to do all that while ensuring the finished product is almost perfectly squared?

Don't ever say that it doesn't show any intelligence because it does.

[Rondon]

This argument is in and of itself something of a fallacy. The proposed shelters certainly help things assuming the problem is an asteroid or some other natural disaster that we can see coming. But it ignores situations we don't see coming such as massive gamma ray bursts, or man made extinction. An example being nuclear war of course. If say Russia and the US both had big massive facilities to ensure that millions of civilians would survive, you can bet they have a few ground penetrating warheads devoted soley for them. Strictly speaking assuming nuclear war broke out, it wouldn't be too terribly hard (but expensive!) for either side to have a couple of interplanetary rockets ready to fire to lob some nukes at Mars to deal with the colonies, but in general that becomes a cost/benefit situation. Guarenteed any Mars colony is going to be in no position to provide aid to its Earth based patron for quite some time, so they don't need to worry about that. If there are no nukes on Mars then don't need to worry about bombardment. Largely it is this nicely contained problem that you can deal with at your leisure if you with control of the Earth.

Whatever about the other scenarios you're thinking of, if this fully autonomous base is far enough underground it really doesn't matter what happens, it will survive. Looking it up there's was a major fuss about America developing a nuclear bunker buster that would be the "mother of all bombs", and do you know how much ground there talking about penetrating? Couple of hundred feet, whereas the deepest facilities in the world can go down as far as several thousand feet. And you don't need necessarily to go deep, must fallout shelters make do with a couple meters of soil, spread out far enough or isolated in separate cells , the base again could survive.

[Bill Phil]

The pyramids are big piles of rock with almost no internal space, and the great wall of china is a series of perfectly normal medieval boundary walls that happen to be really long. They don't show any intelligence, just concentration of power and resources.

What about Hadrian's wall? The coliseums of Rome? The Roman plumbing system that delivered more water per person than New York currently does? Concrete? The roads of Rome?

All these things are major achievements, concrete being a useful construction material.

[Mazon Del]

Whatever about the other scenarios you're thinking of, if this fully autonomous base is far enough underground it really doesn't matter what happens, it will survive. Looking it up there's was a major fuss about America developing a nuclear bunker buster that would be the "mother of all bombs", and do you know how much ground there talking about penetrating? Couple of hundred feet, whereas the deepest facilities in the world can go down as far as several thousand feet. And you don't need necessarily to go deep, must fallout shelters make do with a couple meters of soil, spread out far enough or isolated in separate cells , the base again could survive.

Fallout shelters are a completely different issue entirely. They assume you are not shooting at them.

The main point about the super-shelters that can save millions though. Sure, you could spend ridiculous amounts of money burying the facility far enough underground that nukes cant reach it (which frankly reaches near space-travel costs pretty quickly actually, ESPECIALLY since you are nuke-proofing it. It isn't just the immediate problems of the explosion, its the shockwave after all), but are you going to actually have people living in them 24/7? Not really likely. A full active city instead of an emergency survival city requires even more space and much more cost. You wouldn't be able to charge anyone extra for living there otherwise it would be far too expensive. Plus if you have people living their, your maintenance costs are going to be exhorbitant. It is quite easy to pay for keeping an empty facility ready for use instead of constantly replacing the broken/in use widgets. But again though, if you have a facility that you brag is nuke-proof that holds millions of people, your enemy WILL find a way to take it out, perhaps by sneaking nukes in? All sorts of ways.

Those ground penetrators by the way, they penetrate the ground only hundreds of feet, but that's just the projectile itself, which nobody cares about. Once it is inside the ground, when it detonates so that the maximum amount of shockwave is transmitted through the ground instead of losing energy transferred from the air/ground barrier.

One of the most secure facilities on the planet, Cheyenne Mountain was designed to be able to survive a single 30 megaton airburst attack at a distance of 1 mile. That is pretty impressive, and yet if that same blast happened a couple hundred feet inside the mass of the mountain, it would be quite easily destroyed. Besides, if you really cared about taking out a location like Cheyenne mountain, you'd have preprogrammed in two patterns just to be sure. One is a series of staggered blasts going off one after the other in say 5 minute intervals (easily done with multiple launches), this constant hammering weakens the rock and makes it easier for subsequent blasts to reach deeper. The other is a series of simultaneous impacts slightly more spread out attempting to create a shockwave as powerful as roughly that of a detonation equal to the sum of the various yields involved (difficult to get perfect, but easily done with a single MIRVing shot). Plus if you wanted, devote three MIRVing missiles to this task and you are guarenteed a kill.

One of the reasons (though the main was, surprise surprise, upkeep cost!) provided for changing NORADs location from there to its current less secured location was that our main opponents have nukes accurate enough to hit the mountain anyway, so on the nuclear side the risk isn't really being increased by moving it to a non-hardened facility.

[peadar1987]

I think people overestimate the damage nuclear war would cause. The US, Russia and China would probably be completely destroyed, Western Europe wouldn't come off too well either, but none of the superpowers are going to waste their warheads attacking Africa, Australasia, or South America, essentially just for the craic. There would be short-term side-effects due to radiation, but even that wouldn't be extinction-level. The human race would survive, and probably survive quite nicely outside of the areas directly targeted.

[Wanderfound]

I think people overestimate the damage nuclear war would cause. The US, Russia and China would probably be completely destroyed, Western Europe wouldn't come off too well either, but none of the superpowers are going to waste their warheads attacking Africa, Australasia, or South America, essentially just for the craic. There would be short-term side-effects due to radiation, but even that wouldn't be extinction-level. The human race would survive, and probably survive quite nicely outside of the areas directly targeted.

1) Google up "nuclear winter". You don't have to be anywhere near the bombs for them to kill you.

2) Central Australia contains a substantial chunk of the U.S.'s SIGINT infrastructure (Pine Gap and other facilities), and the major players have plenty of nukes to spare.

Total human extinction? Probably not. Total collapse of technological society? Probably.

[peadar1987]

1) Google up "nuclear winter". You don't have to be anywhere near the bombs for them to kill you.

2) Central Australia contains a substantial chunk of the U.S.'s SIGINT infrastructure (Pine Gap and other facilities), and the major players have plenty of nukes to spare.

Total human extinction? Probably not. Total collapse of technological society? Probably.

Australia, fair enough, but my point on Africa and South America still stands.

Nuclear winter also isn't as serious as people make out. The global active nuclear arsenal is about 1 gigaton. That's about 4 or 5 times the size of the Krakatoa eruption (and will throw up a lot less dust per megaton, seeing as they'll mostly be airbursts). There will possibly be limited cooling, more due to fire than anything else, there will be crop failures, but it is unlikely there would be decades without sun or anything so dramatic. Things will be tight for a couple of years, but people outside direct warzones will make it through.

[GregA]

Bill Phil is talking about rare earth elements, which despite their name aren't very rare on earth. What is rare is a deposit of them that is rich enough to be worth mining. AFAIK there isn't any reason to believe that they will be any more concentrated anywhere on the moon, and as they are relatively heavy elements is seems likely they will be less common overall.

I thought the thing that made rare earth elements "rare" is that they all act chemically identical to one another, so they are expensive to refine, because they require staged centrifuge to separate from one another.

[Mazon Del]

The comparison between nuclear war and Krakatoa isn't a valid comparison. The issue is not the immediate dust thrown into the atmosphere from the airbursts of nuclear weapons, as you say this is negligable really). The big problem is that you can assume that almost every nuke used will cause a city to burn to the ground. Cities are FILLED with petrochemicals that when burned release LOADS and LOADS of ash into the air. There was a study done that assumed a "limited" nuclear engagement between India and Pakistan where only 100 cities burned. The increased ash in the atmosphere from just the burning of the cities post-detonation decreased the global temperature by 5 degrees F. That is just 100 cities. All sides combined have the ability to wipe out thousands of cities.

The reason why the comparison isn't quite valid is because Krakatoa is a single explosion, and the damages involved in single explosion for things like dust clouds and whatnot does not scale well with size. IE: You get more damage out of 3-1 megaton bombs going off spread around a single city, then you get with a single 3 megaton bomb going off in the center of the city.

Incidentally on the rare earth metal side of things, the general statement is that the supplies of these metals on the ground were depositive via meteor/asteroid impacts, so the belief is that such objects should contain a much higher concentration of them that is "easier" to get to than mining it on the ground.

[Rondon]

Fallout shelters are a completely different issue entirely. They assume you are not shooting at them.

The main point about the super-shelters that can save millions though. Sure, you could spend ridiculous amounts of money burying the facility far enough underground that nukes cant reach it (which frankly reaches near space-travel costs pretty quickly actually...

Right so I could talk about how this statement is wrong (for bases with a minimum viable population, not millions of people), but I thought of a much simpler way to get my point across.

Imagine you have you're Mars base with a minimum viable population of around 150, centralised to minimise the expense of life support. Now, how much would it cost to bomb it? No matter how much it costs to send the stuff there, the mass of one bomb will always be less than the mass of the colony, the mass of the people alone is 10 tons, and for example Fat Man was 5 tons. Now, how much does the bomb itself cost to make? Well to be fair it's hard to say, but the USA has spent 5 trillion on nuclear warfare and has made about 10000 nukes in the process, so we can say that the average nuke costs half a billion dollars. So if you're base minus those five tons of stuff costs more than half a billion, destroying the base will cost less than it took to build it. Now let's face facts were talking about building a fully autonomous base, capable of operating indefinitely, it's going to be in the figure of billions, to put it lightly.

So what can you do? You would want to make the potential target(s) as low-key as possible, split it into individual sub cells each as cheap as possible while capable of supporting at least 1 person so it becomes more and more expensive and impractical to destroy everything, so then comes the next question, why are you building this base in space? By virtue of sending it there, everything is well astronomically expensive, by building on earth such an initiative would cost a fraction of the expense.

But what do you mean "They assume you are not shooting at them."? It's a nuclear war, if the opponents can get close enough to attack small shelters, then it's clearly been a pretty rubbish nuclear war. Edit: ah I see, it's a difference in levels of protection from a fallout and blast shelter.

Edited November 6, 2014 by Rondon

[razark]

But what do you mean "They assume you are not shooting at them."?

A fallout shelter is built to withstand the radioactive fallout. It's not (necessarily) built to withstand the blast and thermal effects of a nuclear weapon.

Fallout shelters and blast shelters are different things.

[Mazon Del]

Mostly the issue I am trying to point out Rondon, is that the problem with nuke-safe bunkers is that if an enemy knows where they are, the bunker is as good as dead if the enemy can get off a full spread of nukes (always assume they do, its how nuclear-game theory tends to work for these arguments (surviving) to keep them on topic). So of course you try to keep things secret. A fixed object costing billions to construct and requiring a major investment in terms of materials and personel just to build? Trivial to find these days. It was difficult to find the assorted bases way back before the internet made all kinds of additional analysis technologies possible. Submarines are a bit better as they are mobile, but we've already proven (cold war) that really for all intents and purposes at some point or another your ship is going to be found by another ship.

What I would have to say is the largest advantages that a Mars colony has (depending heavily on size) is the fact that it is harmless to the warring Earth nations. Without cheap transport to/from Earth, there is nothing the enemy Mars colony can do to threaten you. Sure it might threaten YOUR Mars colony, but that is why you gave them a few guns. Besides, you are busy trying to rebuild your country. So, the colony has the perception of being harmless. Second, assuming widescale warfare broke out, any missile launched from Earth will take at least 6 months to reach Mars. It would be a truly herculean effort considering the resources at your disposal, but it is quite possible to move enough of the colony gear in that time (tear it down, move it, build it up). This particular argument is somewhat weak because it relies on very many conditionals. What sort of tools do they have? How many space suits? How many Mars Buggies and what sort of capacity do they have? Plus then you can get into arguments about how the enemy developed their anti-Mars weapon. Maybe it automatically enters orbit, retargets and then descends. Really one of the bigger issues is that even today the things we send to Mars need a connection back to Earth for position verification and course control (just about every Mars probe I've heard of required mid-course burns to correct their path). So there exists an extreme possibility that it would miss simply because the systems it would use to try and correct its path might not exist any longer and doing a purely ballistic path is unlikely to hit. All in all, this is one of the few situations where a land based target has the advantage in defense against a nuclear weapon.

[Rondon]

Mostly the issue I am trying to point out Rondon, is that the problem with nuke-safe bunkers is that if an enemy knows where they are, the bunker is as good as dead if the enemy can get off a full spread of nukes (always assume they do, its how nuclear-game theory tends to work for these arguments (surviving) to keep them on topic). So of course you try to keep things secret. A fixed object costing billions to construct and requiring a major investment in terms of materials and personel just to build? Trivial to find these days. It was difficult to find the assorted bases way back before the internet made all kinds of additional analysis technologies possible. Submarines are a bit better as they are mobile, but we've already proven (cold war) that really for all intents and purposes at some point or another your ship is going to be found by another ship.

Right, I see you didn't notice that I was moving onto to other concepts for shelters, rather then just a singular underground base, after all there are so many ways you could set up a backup up for civilisation, you could indeed have a singular base, or you could have hundreds of mini blast shelters build into a city or even better in the countryside or hey just build a library of known science or the USB equivalent in somewhere you know isn't going to bear the brunt of a nuclear war, rural Iceland, a pacific island. there's just so many ways to go about the problem, you couldn't say any method is individually the best.

But in-terms of the whole equation of difficulty to destroy vs strategic importance, a Mars base does not "solve" the problem, the reason a Mars base wouldn't be targeted isn't because of how expensive it is, or how technically difficult the destruction would be to perform, but as you say a Mars base is of no strategic threat, it can't do anything (significant). First off this entire idea is probably going against the whole exciting dream of Martian colonisation, the moment this civilisation gains nuclear , orbital and significant industrial capability it is a threat,( to the nations survivors anyway), so if this Mars base is to perform it's supposed purpose of continuing human civilisation expanding and growing defies it's function. Although considering the inhospitable environment it probably won't be able to grow quickly anyway.

Secondly, and related to that last sentence, it's a poor return on investment if you have so and so many billions of dollars to spend on the continuation of civilisation a Mars base represents an exorbitantly expensive village built into a desert more barren than any on earth, but take any of the methods above or any other method for continuation and with the resources taken to build just one Martian village you could store thousands upon thousands of tons of supplies critical for rapidly restarting civilisation