Space colonization

Factual Questions
101

Building a colony on Mars or the Moon isn’t like the Europeans building a colony in North America where a group with appropriate skills can just learn to live off the land. Physics is even more of an obstacle on Mars, etc as the environment is completely inhospitable to humans.

Growing any sort of crops will require the construction of complex artificial environments to sustain them. They can’t simply clear more fields to plant more crops or hunt local game.

Extracting minerals will require complex and dangerous mining operations, much like here on Earth, except they will be even more complex and dangerous.

A lot of parts can’t simply be “3D printed” out of generic magical fabrication dust. Particularly for things like rocket ships, reactors, high pressure/temperature pumps, electrical equipment.

If you are worried about a Chicxulub event wiping out humanity, developing the technology to detect and send unmanned rockets to divert an asteroid is infinitely simpler than building a sustainable colony or Mars or even the Moon.

If you are worried about a human-caused extinction event such as war, mismanagement of resources, and so on, I suspect humans will bring those same problems to wherever we go. Particularly if they will be living in self-sustaining bubbles with delicate and complex artificial ecosystems.

Really, if we had anything close to the technology for creating a self-sustain space colony of significant size, we could be doing wonders with it on Earth.

102

Many asteroids don’t seem to be suitable places to ‘burrow inside’. 486958 Arrokoth appears to be a conglomeration of large boulders and dust that would probably collapse like meringue if you tried to bury anything inside it. This might be a good thing - instead of burrowing inside an irregular asteroid with awkward rotational properties, you could crumble the asteroid material up and distribute it in carefully controlled amounts around the outer shell of your habitat. Waste not, want not.

103

Indeed:

And many of the medium-sized asteroids, while they may not have many internal voids, are likely riven with faults which would cause problems if you tried to burrow into them.

104

What would make it collapse? You aren’t increasing the gravity.

That just makes it easier. The entire point is that you wouldn’t need extensive excavation equipment in order to get a substantial amount of asteroid material as shielding against radiation and potential collisions. You aren’t depending on it for structural stability.

As @eburacum45 points out, it would be like meringue, easy to poke into for your structure.

Also makes it much easier for resource extraction, you aren’t digging so much as scooping.

Mars is an easier thing for people to envision to get them excited about space exploration. The moon is a useful stop, but the real colonization will take place in asteroids.

As far as Mars goes, there’s a lot of scientific reasons to continue to explore, but none for putting boots on the ground. Personally, I think it would be irresponsible to land humans on Mars until we have a robust facility on Phobos or Demos to act as a staging point and resources for potential rescue missions.

That said, Mars has the advantage in people’s imaginations of exploration, as it’s the only planet (other than earth) where we could actually put boots on the ground. People will keep talking about it until we do so and find out how much of a waste of time and energy it was. Gravity wells are for suckers.

Right, I’m not talking about using pentium technology itself, just saying that we probably don’t need much more performance than that for most uses, and creating chips with that sort of performance would be much easier than the latest and greatest fabs coming out of ASML.

And while they would need higher end chips to run data centers or AI systems, those can be shipped more economically, as high end chips are one of the few things that are far more valuable than the cost to launch them. If you ordered a ton of A100’s from Nvidia, it would only cost a few percent more for them to be shipped with a detour by the Moon.

105

Are you somehow suggesting that instead of ASML a bunch of dudes in a shed could build an older chipmaking machine?
You’d need an ASML equivalent and if you got access to the “latest and greatest” it makes no sense to use an older generation chip.
You can’t just downgrade the tech a decade and then not need the industrial base to actually build it.
That is not how any of that works.

106

No, that’s not what I said, not even close. Since the rest of your post rests on your misrepresentation of my actual statement, none of it is relevant.

107

Then what does this sentence mean?

108

Exactly what is says. It does not say that “a bunch of dudes in a shed could build an older chipmaking machine”.

Are you somehow suggesting that it doesn’t require any more technological inputs to make a fab that puts out chips with 7nm features than with 800 nm features?

Go back a couple more chip generations, and it litterally was some dudes in a shed carving on silkscreens.

109

No, but it’s much more likely to fall to pieces, with each piece going off in its own direction. (and this is actually what @eburacum45 meant but used the misleading term “collapse”.) Eventually some pieces may re-coalesce, but it may take weeks to do so.

110

What’s it “falling” into? I’m not suggesting we put big spinning drills like what people think of when digging on earth. You are taking advantage of the fact that it’s a pile of loosely held together rocks, and just pushing into it, like pushing a berry into a pile of meringue.

Some of it may be disturbed and float off, but that’s fine. And it doesn’t really matter if it takes weeks to settle down when we are talking about a settlement that will be in use for decades at least.

111

Most people really have no idea how hard it is to make modern things.

For example, go look at the effort it took to figure out how to make titanium viable as a working metal. Decades of work by thousands of people to figure out how to alloy it, how to bend and cut it, how to keep it from becoming brittle, how to repair it, etc. New tooling had to be made to handle the hardness of the metal. Until fairly recently, Titanium in products was rare even though it’s incredibly abundant, because turning raw titanium into an alloy and then shaping it into parts is really, really hard.

There will be a million differences between the way things work on Mars (or the Moon) that will require new research to figure out. Some things that are easy on Earth will be hard there, and vice versa.

But most importantly, modern manufactured goods are part of gigantic supply chains. A pencil probably has 50 companies and thousands of people in a supply chain to provide it. A chip fab probably has millions of people in its supply chain.

A medium-sized company can have 50,000 businesses in its supply chain. And each one of those businesses has its own supply chain. Even a simple part is made from assembly lines which have to be built, use solvents and other consumables that were developed over decades or centuries, etc.

Starting all that up on another planet is incredibly daunting, and will cost many trillions of dollars before self-sufficiency could be achieved. This is why we can’t just ‘decide’ where to colonize, or plan for a self-sufficient colony because we have no idea how to do that.

A colony, if one ever develops, will grow where there’s an economic need for people. It will happen organically and its nature will depend on what the people are doing. It’s very hard to see this happening on Mars. Not so much on the Moon or Asteroids. So the best bet for a colony is in one of those places.

Here’s a scenario for the Moon: A company figures out how to extract water from the regolith at an industrial scale. Automated machines walk the regolith on flat plains in the north or south, scooping it up and hitting it with microwaves and extracting the water and other volatiles into bladders. The water is then sold either to other lunar bases, or shipped into lunar orbit or the RLHO for use at the Gateway. Space Mining companies react to the availability of cheap water in lunar orbit by building mining craft that fuel up in lunar orbit, travel to the asteroids to extract minerals, then come back to lunar orbit to drop their payload and take on more water. A growing market develops for lunar water.

This causes expansion of water mining, the arrival of mechanics and others to maintain the machines, and perhaps a crew to start working on a mass driver so that water can be shipped almost free into lunar orbit. Profits go up, more companies join in.

All those people on the Moon start learning how to do things in 1/6 g airless environments. The Moon turns out to be a great place to manufacture things, as the environment is stable, the machines don’t have to worry about wind, water, erosion, yada yada. You can put a solar powered mining machine out in a field of regolith and it will mine constantly without interruption. Start the machine and leave it, and a month later you have barrels of titanium, iron, magnesium and other products, and bladders full of water, some argon, nitrogen, etc. Controlled environments are the best for automating.

Eventually as we learn to use more resources in situ, costs come down. More possibilities open up for working on the Moon. Explorers and vcacationers arrive, along with the people who will have to guide, feed and house them. Maybe a Saudi Billionaire decides a Lava Tube would be a great place to build a palace and a hotel/retirement villa. Disney builds a park. Soon thousands of people are living on the moon at any given time, either working or playing.

That still doesn’t get you to self-sufficiency, but it might get you to the point where the Moon is self-sustaining financially, and even profitable. Once that happens, time will tell but I could imagine continued growth and improvement until one day the Moon could continue even if a bio weapon wiped out all life on Earth. Maybe hundreds or thousands of years from now.

I can’t see a path to that happening on Mars. Maybe in the asteroids, though. It depends how much material is there. Especially volatiles like nitrogen. But the asteroids would be much more difficult to develop and inhabit than lava tubes on the Moon.

112

It’s not falling into anything, it would fall apart. Note the phrase I used: “each piece going off into its own direction”. The thing about rubble piles in space is that there’s very little holding them together. Mostly just the very slight amount of gravity they each have.

113

Right, this is exactly correct. The easiest way to secure a long-term human habitat is to stop ruining the planet we live on. We could cut back on fossil fuels, we could sequester carbon, there are so many real and realistic approaches, but humanity won’t commit to the cost of doing so.

If humanity can’t even mobilize the (relatively) manageable cost of halting the terra-deforming of our own planet, why do we think we’ll be willing to pay the cost of doing somewhere else, a place that most of us will never see?

The answer is that a certain population of people believe that:

  1. All problems on earth are due to government regulations. There will be no government regulations on Mars, so everything will be fine.
  2. Finders keepers. Whoever is the first to colonize Mars will be wealthy and powerful beyond all reckoning. If you jump on his bandwagon, you’ll do fairly well for yourself.

Meanwhile we can’t even get a Biosphere project to work, just no real effort at all for a permanent human habitat. That’s what tells you that the popular “space exploration” myths in circulation are a scam intended to generate excitement in a certain billionaire’s business so he can continue to get rich off government contracts.

114

The rotational energy of many asteroids is nearly sufficient to rip them apart. If we disturb the surface some of that material will spin off and be lost forever, or go into long slow orbits. To catch the debris it may be necessary to use some sort of bag secured to the surface, a tricky operation.

115

The big problem on the moon is lunar dust. Sharp uneroded soil wears down parts and is nasty to breathe. Solvable I expect, though we don’t know how yet. Overview of lunar dust toxicity risk | npj Microgravity

I’m curious about the extent to which Martian wind erosion offsets the problem. We should send automated Rovers to the moon and compare their performance and longevity to Martian rovers.

116

Some little conspiracy theory crossed my mind on this one. Maybe not a bad thing. Any project like this would start in stages. I wonder if the guy talking about it is really thinking development of technology for fixing earth.

117

This sounds to me like a caricature of what people think. Show me anyone who has said there will be no regulations on Mars as a reason for going, outside of some libertarian crank.

Anyone with a brain knows that hostile environments with severe resource constraints are not conducive to libertarianism. There will be regulation of behavior, no matter how it’s administered. Maybe it’ll be more like a Kibbutz or collective if they can keep the population below Dunbar’s number, but Libertarians would probably hate that anyway. By the time the population is anywhere near ‘colony’ levels (thousands of people or more), there will be plenty of government. Even the Libertarian-leaning “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” admitted that government was inevitable.

And no one thinks that the first people to colonize Mars will own the planet. A colony is very likely to bankrupt anyone who tries it, and there are treaties that cover ownerhip of discovered minerals and they will get more fleshed out and detailed when we get closer to actually mining them. This is just political potshotting where it doesn’t belong.

118

Absolutely, dust is a big problem. I’d point out though that lava tubes are not full of the same dust, and should be pristine rock. There are new techniques being developed for dealig with dust, though. Electrostatics, new materials and seals, and techniques to never let the dust get inside in the first place, such as having suits that are outside, with the entry to the suit inside, so the dust on the suit never enters a cabin. Still, that dust is really, really abrasive and will have to be dealt with. It’s not a showstopper, though. Just a pain in the ass.

119

You can’t use Earth as a model for what is required. Take any complicated mechanical object and count the number of different screw types. It’s immense! Different sizes, different pitches, different materials, different head types. And each of those require their own factory, or at least a major line all to themselves.

This happens because it can. There’s an immense drive to reduce costs by a tiny fraction of a cent, and zero drive to reduce the size of the supply line. And various social and political factors like the design group for one part of a product not talking to the designer of another part and agreeing on a common set of components.

Add even the tiniest interest to reduce this effect, and it’ll happen. Perhaps it makes the product 1% less mass efficient. But it means you only need a couple of screw lines instead of dozens.

That’s just one example of many. Anyone that does “maker” stuff learns similar tricks, because it’s ridiculous to store so many different types of components. Electronics is another beneficiary. Mouser or Digikey carry literal millions of different component types. But you can reduce that by a factor of 1000 with almost no loss in functionality because there is so much redundancy. That surface-mount resistor comes in 0201, 0402, 0603, 0805, etc., in values separated by 5%, with various accuracy/temperature/certification grades. You don’t need that. You can just have one size and much more granular values.

This design philosophy will be useful even before a colony is self-sufficient. They’ll have some stocks for repair work, but they’ll have limited capacity. And not necessarily a way to predict what they’ll need in advance. It’s much better to carry 100x of one common component than 1x each of 100 components, even if it makes the thing in question slightly less efficient.

120

A combination of e-beam lithography and a FIB machine (focused ion beam) could get you most of the way to a benchtop semiconductor fab. It would be slow, and have some limitations, but you could definitely crank out a simple CPU. It wasn’t that long ago that we considered a 6502 a reasonable desktop processor.

The only trouble is that a simple CPU, on a modern process, with minimum packaging, might weigh 0.5 grams. If the benchtop fab weighs 500 kg with all the support extras, it would have to produce a million chips before it paid for itself, mass-wise. And that probably isn’t going to happen–it would need to produce a unit every few minutes, but FIBs are way too slow.

Still, maybe there is some intermediate approach that makes sense. Not quite mass production, but something that is a little faster than writing one transistor at a time.