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.
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.