i just made this diagram by comparing history of the US with possible future history of mars (timescale included). notable technological turning points include:
- solar panel production on-site, because it would mean that the settlement has very large amount of energy available, and just like the steam engine and all the heavily-motorized machines kicked off the industrial revolution, having much energy available would do a lot.
- polar ice extraction because water is just extremely valuable, and therefore it’s worth it at some point to build that 3000 km railway system to the korolev crater. this would flood the economy with water which would give another important growth spurt.
There’s no way you’d evolve as fast as an earth civilization when you have no resources available to you and everything must be brought from earth. Even just solar production requires such advanced chemistry and industry to be setup on site.
that’s why it’s so important to produce as much as possible on-site, starting with water, food, plastics, etc.
Plastics from what? Atmospheric CO2?
yeah, it’s already possible: https://blog.bccresearch.com/global-co-based-plastics-market-turning-a-green-gas-into-valuable-polymers
if you want a keyword to read up on the whole process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syngas
Genuine question: why go all the way to Mars when the Moon is right there?
The Moon has effectively no atmosphere, which causes all kinds of problems for habitation. For example, the lunar regolith does not get eroded by wind, so rather than little rounded particles of sand the dust on the Moon is like tiny little shards of glass. Imagine chalk dust, but razor blades. It’s been found to be more chemically reactive than dust on Earth, statically charged causing it to cling to surfaces, highly abrasive due to being sharp, and apparently toxic with repeat exposure:
Anecdotal reports of human exposures to lunar dust during the Apollo program suggest that lunar dust has toxic properties. After each EVA, the crew modules were heavily contaminated with dust; many astronauts reported coughs, throat irritation, watery eyes, and blurred vision that likely reduced their performance. A flight surgeon exposed to the capsule interiors after recovery developed what appeared to be allergic reactions to lunar dust that worsened after each exposure.
Dust is also expected to be a problem on Mars, but we don’t have any samples to study directly and we haven’t exposed any humans to it yet, so we don’t know if it will be similar. We do know that there is wind on Mars, including dust storms, and in the past there was flowing water on the surface, so there has been at least some erosion. It might be better than the Moon, we don’t know yet, but we do know that the lunar regolith is really bad for both people and equipment.
Also humans do poorly in low gravity fields. The human body evolved in a gravity field. Without it, the circulatory system doesn’t work properly, blood doesn’t flow downward like it should and you end up with too much in your head and not enough in your feet. Your kidneys don’t really work properly. Your eyeballs distort because they’re adapted to being slightly squashed by gravity, so everybody who spends extended time in space becomes myopic as the shape of their eyeballs change. Your bones start to thin because they don’t have to resist the pull of gravity. Your muscles atrophy unless you put a lot of time and effort into exercising.
Basically everything goes wrong in the human body in low gravity. Mars has less than Earth (about 38%), but significantly more than the Moon (16.6%), so the long-term impact should be lower. Of course, we won’t really know until we try it.
A big problem with both the Moon and Mars is the lack of an electromagnetic field. On Earth we’re protected from a lot of solar and cosmic radiation by the magnetic field, but there’s no such protection on the others. That will mean radiation damage to both electronics and organic tissue. Really the only way that anyone will be able to stay on Mars long-term will be underground, using several meters of rock as radiation shielding.
fun fact: it takes more fuel to reach the moon than to reach mars (because aerobraking)
also the moon doesn’t have a source of carbon in its atmosphere. so constructing the basics of life is more difficult there.
the moon doesn’t have a source of carbon in its atmosphere.
I would assume it has plenty of carbon in its rocks, though. But that might be more difficult to access, I suppose.
yeah carbonates exist, but they typically decompose (and release the CO2) above 1500°C, so it’s much more difficult than to just collect it from the atmosphere.
Looks nice
why not both?
It shouldn’t take 200+ years to establish on-site production of solar panels, let alone 300+ for rocketry, for the simple reason that the colony will likely start off with 21st century levels of knowledge and a limited-yet-significant amount of advanced tools and resources that the US settlers did not have.
yeah true but also these things benefit from economies of scale and that only makes sense once that you have a significant number of people on-site, which is gonna take a while. populations grow, but they don’t jump. even at 3% annual growth, it would still take 100 - 200 years to get to a few million people, i guess.
Good point too, and at 3% annual growth it would take a starting population of at least a few thousand to reach a million in 200 years.
