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Elon Musk's Mars Colony Would Have a Horde of Mining Robots (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader shares an Engadget report: If it wasn't already clear that Elon Musk has considered virtually every aspect of what it would take to colonize Mars, it is now. As part of his Reddit AMA session, the SpaceX founder has revealed that his vision of a permanent colony would entail a huge number of "miner/tunneling droids." The robots would build large volumes of underground pressurized space for industrial activity, leaving geodesic domes (made of carbon fiber and glass) for everyday living. As a resident, you might never see the 'ugly' side of settling the Red Planet. Musk also explained how his colony would get to the point where it can reliably refuel spacecraft all by itself. Dragon capsules would serve as scouts, helping find the "best way" to extract water for fuel reactions. An unmanned Heart of Gold spaceship would then deliver the basics for a propellant plant, while the first crewed mission would finish that plant. After that, SpaceX would double the number of flights between each ideal Earth-Mars rendezvous (every 26 months) until the colony can reliably produce fuel by itself. Oh, and don't worry about today's Falcon 9 rockets being consigned to the history books. Although the main booster for interplanetary travel will "have an easier time of things," Musk believes that the final iteration of Falcon 9 (Block 5) could be used "almost indefinitely" if properly maintained. Production on Block 5 should fly in the next 6 to 8 months.
This will make this project more realistic.
Would it really have a horde of mining robots? Or should it be more accurately described as a Hurd?
That it, I am not going to Mars unless Musk also agrees to implement an alliance of mining robots.
If we send 1000 people to Mars how exactly are we going to feed them? I have heard enough about spaceships, engines, fuel and robots. Has anybody done some thinking on the steaks and the veggies?
So now he's adding an army of robots to the transport ship's register? That fleet keeps getting bigger all the time.
Naming this supply ship for disaster, I guess. At least it's unmanned.
Okay, so we've got the mining robots, the auto-fuelling spaceship dock, the autonomous telephone sanitizers... I can't help feeling there's something we're forgetting...
Oh! Right - people.
Hang on. Why are we sending people again?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Ride-sharing on the robots will be prohibited.
Being outcast to a mining colony on a barren planet where the very air is toxic and robots might turn against their masters. The only question before I book passage is whether I should buy the regular space suit or stump the extra cash for the one with a "ludicrous" 60 minutes of extra oxygen.
Mars ain't the kind of place to raise your kids, in fact it's cold as hell.
We have the technology to grow plants inside,
We do but that doesn't mean we can do so with 100% reliability. Plus we have a lot to learn before we start exo-farming. It's not clear how reliably we can grow crops on Mars even in a well controlled greenhouse. There is reason for optimism but there is a lot we don't know yet.
Mars has enough gravity that most plants should grow just fine,
Perhaps but currently that is an unproven assertion. Frankly the gravity is likely to be among the least of the challenges to growing food on Mars. When you have a small self contained garden you run the risk of any number of problems hugely disrupting the entire crop. And the crop for early explorers will necessarily be small with minimal excess most likely. On Earth we have enough agriculture that we only tend to experience localized famines due to distribution problems because other areas can make up for a shortage. Early Mars explorers could very easily have their entire crop wiped out and the only back up option is to ship food from Earth. I'm not saying it's impossible but it probably will be quite a challenge.
Hang on. Why are we sending people again?
I think this comic sums it up rather well.
SpaceX = Spacers
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Bacterial vats, or single cell algae are probably the future of space food. Add crap and energy into vats and either bacteria or algae converts the crap into food.
(more too it than that, but that forms the bulk)
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Elon Musk's Mars Colony Would Have a Horde of Mining Robots
Good, because it sure as hell won't have any humans.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
If we send 1000 people to Mars how exactly are we going to feed them?
It will be a substantial challenge but hardly the only one. Early explorers will be supplied from Earth but they'll have to develop some self sustaining exo-farming technology. This is not a trivial problem. And manufacturing will have even bigger problems. You basically have to develop an entire self contained supply chain from scratch which except for life support issues is probably the biggest show stopper problem with colonizing another planet. Need some tungsten? You have to either ship it from Earth at tremendous cost or you have to figure out how to mine it and refine it locally on Mars. Either way it's a tough challenge.
Has anybody done some thinking on the steaks and the veggies?
Yes though such research has a looooong way to go.
The people that initially left Europe for America had air to breath, wild game to eat, materials to build shelters and a relatively short trip back home and could be re-supplied. Yet most of the original settlements failed...starved, frozen, disease, etc.
Who thinks shooting people to mars in a tin can is going to result in anything less. The whole lot of them will be dead in six months.
He describes such robots. He called them Von Neumans.
I'm sure other writers thought of them too.
oh. horde.
-linux... they can't *give* that shit away.
One thing to keep in mind is that they will go out on a ship where they will live for a year.
That ship will have to handle the same problems of food and air. So once you get past the ship, the colonization should be easy.
Just transfer the facilities from the ship.
https://youtu.be/eT9K0TAfiIQ?t=1299
Mars doesn't have dirt- it has regolith, an abiotic rock dust that can't support most plant life, even if it weren't full of volatile poisons
Other than nitrogen, plants don't derive their nutrients from the soil; it's not relevant that the soil is "abiotic". You will have to either supply nitrogen, or else grow plants that incorporate nitrogen-fixing bacteria (e.g., legumes, alfalfa).
By "volatile poisons" I assume you are referring to perchlorates (which aren't actually all that volatile). These can be washed out of the soil. (You'd probably want to do this to reduce the level of salts in the soil anyway).
Growing plants is a technology that is pretty well understood. Soil is unlikely to be the bottleneck. Frankly, the hardest problem isn't going to be the soil; it's going to be the power supply to keep the greenhouses above freezing at night. (Presumably waste heat from a nuclear reactor).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
This is a news site for nerds?
Reading the comments on this thread I don't think so.
Bullshit!
They could be self replicating.
We don't yet have the slightest notion how to make self-replicating robots. Probably the best we could do is to send up the sophisticated parts, but make some of the physical chassis components from available resources, to reduce somewhat the mass required from Earth.
Or they could send humans, which are less efficient, but self replicate already.
Raising babies takes a tremendous amount of infrastructure. An adult human is mostly self-sufficient; babies are not. As somebody said, it really does "take a village" to raise a child.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. The irony is in reality it is reversed. The biggest health problem for Mars colonization is the loss of vision due to low gravity for men and not women. The longer trip to Mars compared to Venus means that it is more economical to send women who will require less food and fuel due to less mass along with living in basically a cave for radiation protection along with permanent drug dependency or genetic engineering to alleviate low gravity bone loss. Venus cloud cities on the other hand will require and allow due to radiation deflection from atmosphere and weak induced magnetic field men to work outside to build and repair the exterior. Venus likely will be able to be colonized by building up Maxwell Montes and building a carbon-based structure on it to get to ~55 km that will allow the creation of rigid airships that block the solar radiation to cool the planet.
Material Defender is going to need his Pyro GX for all that defective robot disassembly and miner rescue :)
I am 100% for robotic automation of labor but it seems like this is a task they should master on Earth before they try it out on Mars. So the question is, will SpaceX dominate Earth's mining industry?
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Now there's plan already. Send the measured system components to Mars and see how reliable they are over the next decades, while doing the remaining science projects on the side. A sea floor mining project would be a good test environment for a system test, with the individual components adapted to the different requirements. It would be embarrassing to lose the whole colony during the first solar storm, or due to other nearby astronomic event.
There is at least one thing right in that plan. We should not be sending humans until the robot population is large and has done all the construction. The robots could even have a full garden going before humans arrive.
Phew, I was getting worried that Muskdot hadn't done its daily post about Elon.
Which is exactly why we should go there. Were not going to find out or learn anything without going to Mars to test these things.
Agreed. This is actually one of the most compelling arguments against the "only send robots" crowd. You cannot learn much of anything about topics like exo-farming by just sending robots. Same with every other topic relating to human physiology and space. I strongly expect that anything we learn would have immediate and useful applications on terrestrial farming.
Maybe he should start writing science fiction? Most of these things he talks about have been already thought about, maybe we can start planning this thing when there are mining robots on earth.
love is just extroverted narcissism
and not just a flim-flam man, wouldn't he already HAVE a "colony" in Antarctica? Can anyone who takes this fantasy seriously explain why he doesn't? Seriously, according to his time-line, a lot of the equipment should already be in shake-down testing, since it will need to have mean-time-to-failure values of a decade or more.
This is just another example of how detached from reality the industrialist class has become.
These billionaires - with no actual training in science - are so disconnected from what is possible and what is not possible.
A fool who made his money off of paypal and government subsidies envisions Mars mining with robots while actual mining today on Earth cannot be accomplished with robots. Has this moron ever even been in a working mine today, in the real world? I have worked for over 2 decades now in an actual working mine on underground physics projects in SNOlab.
I cannot stress how profoundly STUPID this man is and no one should give him the time of day. We've truly entered into a new guilded age where the industrial aristocracy wishes to see itself as more important than it is, to build great things, and do things of importance. These are nothing but the fanciful, vain adventures of a self-aggrandising childish intellect given too much money by an unhinged global capitalism.
Lets tax the bastard into oblivion and give the money to people actually doing science.
I'm seen this movie. They just need a construction worker looking for a lunch break vacation. Then the no oxygen problem will be solved.
Knowing Musk's track record for naming other vessels, I guess we should be glad he isn't going to name it the UGSP Quark.*
* yes, I'm aware Quark was the captain's name, not the ship.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It may be better to ship an oil drilling rig and look for oil and gas than try to synthesize it.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
So what are the technical hurdles that would need to be overcome for there to be actual mining with robots? Doing some quick googling I see that Komatsu and CAT and a few others offer fully autonomous mining solutions. Are those just bullshit and don't work as advertised?
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
I just realized, some of these skin-jobs (which were made for off-world colony work) were made this year!
Roy: Jan 8, 2016.
Pris: Feb 14, 2016.
Zhora: June 12, 2016.
Leon: 2016?
Be advised, and don't ask probing questions about strangers' mothers.
The only thing that space oligarchs like Musk have figured out is how to get that dole money from the taxpayer through NASA.
All the things he talks about need intense human maintenance. Which means the humans must come first. But they can't come first without the infrastructure he talks about. Which means the robots must come first. But they need intense maintenance so the humans must come first. But they can't until the infrastructure comes first, so the robots must come first. But they can't until the humans come first.......impossible on the face of it.
E Proelio Veritas.
"leaving geodesic domes (made of carbon fiber and glass) for everyday living"
An endless stream of pie-in-the-sky colonization porn.... However shouldn't each article on this topic deal with the problem of shielding vulnerable biological creatures such as humans from the harsh reality of high energy particles zipping around to and fro?
Suppose you have magical mining robots... Well, then what? You have piles of ore, you need to melt that shit down, often with all kinds of additives and fluxes, to get something useful out the other end. And even then, all you end up with is refined material in a chunk... so what? ... what? Girders? Nuts? Bolts?
Then you need factories to turn that material into
With what infrastructure and magical technology?
And to keep the plants powered. Mars is at 1.5AU, which gives less than half the sunlight intensity of earth - your crop would grow very slowly and very small.
Plants grow fine in places that are cloudy. Mars will get on the order of ~250 to 300 w/m2 averaged over a day. Here's a map of the incident solar radiation ("insolation") on Earth:
geosun.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/GHI-Solar-map-World.png
Mars insolation levels correspond to the light green color. It's no worse the Europe in terms of sunlight, and plants grow in Europe
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
So what are the technical hurdles that would need to be overcome for there to be actual mining with robots? Doing some quick googling I see that Komatsu and CAT and a few others offer fully autonomous mining solutions. Are those just bullshit and don't work as advertised?
Link to these full solutions please? On Komatsu website I only find autonomous components.
Otherwise: maintenance, sheer mass to get to Mars?
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Autonomous robots, mining colonies...we start with Mars! Is Musk the founder of what will become PTMC? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Glad I bought & downloaded via http://www.gog.com/ before the dispute with Parallax/Interplay! https://www.gog.com/forum/desc...
Since when is computer programming and a degree in physics "no actual training in science" ?
You should read "mining" as tunnelling, which can be automated. It's just carving out a living space (in 1/3 g!), the only thing they are really mining for is water, which is in almost any piece of Martian rock, just crush it. head it up, and capture the water vapour. They need tons of water, but have 26 month to collect it, so just a trickle is sufficient.
Exactly. Mining is not automated because people are cheap and plentiful... on Earth.
When I first glanced at the story title, I saw "Elon Musk's Mars Colony Would Have a Horde of Cops". Yes, I live in the USA.
Every time this subject comes up on Slashdot there is an overwhelming amount of negativity. âoeWe canâ(TM)t go.â âoeWe shouldnâ(TM)t go.â âoeItâ(TM)s impossible!â âoeYou would die there.â âoeIt will never happen.â âoeItâ(TM)s all smoke and mirrors.â âoeSolve Earth problems first.â âoeItâ(TM)s too expensive!â On and on and on you go, whining all the way. And your objections are silly. âoeWell, has anyone thought about food?â Seriously? You think no one has THOUGHT about food? âoeBut thereâ(TM)s no atmosphere!â Really? Like they donâ(TM)t know that?
What the Hell is wrong with you people? You need to turn in your Slashdot membership cards and decoder rings. Where is your sense of adventure? Where is your sense of a future? Staring at screens in the basement writing obscure code? If the ancients had attitudes like yours no one would ever have dared to cross a raging river, much less a vast ocean. It would have been deemed âoetoo dangerousâ with âoeno useful outcome.â They would have stayed in their caves and never ventured forth, never left Olduvai Gorge because, you know, something bad might happen or we havenâ(TM)t figured out all the angles yet. Besides, there might be dragons.
Every single one of the objections here is a solvable engineering problem. ALL of them. Technically there is nothing that cannot be solved here. Itâ(TM)s all possible. If you donâ(TM)t think so, then I feel sorry for you and your lack of vision and faith that these issues CAN be solved even if they are unsolved today. As for your attitudinal problems, those people who say, âoeI donâ(TM)t want to go therefore you shouldnâ(TM)t either.â Please get the fuck out of the way. Itâ(TM)s not your call. There are plenty of people who want to go regardless if to you the circumstances would result in death on a distant planet. Whatâ(TM)s the difference? Youâ(TM)ll die, too. If youâ(TM)re atheistic, youâ(TM)re dust in both places. If you believe in the hereafter, it shouldnâ(TM)t matter. Whereâ(TM)s the beef?
Thereâ(TM)s one simple reason we should go no matter what the odds, no matter what the opposition. It will double our chances as a species. If youâ(TM)re one of those self-loathing humans who think we all deserve to die, well, go kill yourself first. We need to get off this planet before the next asteroid hits. No, not everybody. Most everyone will die. No equality here. If a few survive, we did it. And thatâ(TM)s not all. We need to get out of this solar system. That makes Mars look like a holiday drive to the ocean cabin, but ultimately, unless we can harness the Sun to do our bidding, thatâ(TM)s what we have to do.
If you donâ(TM)t want to do that, if you donâ(TM)t want to participate, thatâ(TM)s just fine. Itâ(TM)s not required that you have the vision and the drive to get there. You can just stay here and whatever it is that makes you happy. But the first rockets to leave for mars will surely do so within our lifetimes, so you can go from saying, âoeIt will ever happen.â To saying, âoeThis is sheer folly and will never work.â So when you lay dying knowing full well that the first ships made it, and there are people on Mars, you can console yourself for being so very smart knowing you had the presence of mind to stay on shore.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Whatever else people may think of the architecture or Elon personally, that is admirable, and it is hopeful, especially for the younger generation that hears no end to the doom and gloom and have to put up with a couple of idiots running for president this year further depressing them.
https://denniswingo.wordpress....
mfwright@batnet.com
So the only reason to go to Mars would be tourism? That's not a compelling case.
Holy missing the point Batman! Of course there are more reasons to go to Mars than tourism. Science research, preservation of our species, joy of exploration, financial gain, engineering, military dominance, and the list goes on and on. Use your brain and think of a few more. It's not hard. The point is that relatively little of this is possible by just sending robots just like there is a difference between knowing that it is 85F and sunny in Hawaii and actually being there yourself.
Hawaii is a really nice place for humans to live: the weather is perfect, it's lush and beautiful, there's all kinds of fun things to do like swimming, surfing, scuba diving, exploring rain forests, etc.
Way to miss the point. We explore Antarctica too for lots of very good reasons and it is anything but hospitable. Mars is very similar but with the degree of difficulty turned up to 11. There are plenty of good reasons to go there in person. Learn to understand what an analogy is and stop thinking so literally and being so short sighted.
Perhaps all science starts as science fiction.
But usually, there is a clearer path from one to the other.
I'm not seeing the simple, reachable, first steps to get to an army of mining droids in this old guy's lifetime.
Is there an example of anything like this here on earth, much less one with such long supply and communications lines?
Deep sea mining is a working example, but they have a nearby surface ship for when a bot is in over it's head.
You wrote a sentence that made me realize why the Mars colony debate still goes on, and how we can end the debate.
No, it's why someone should go there. I am part of "we" and holy crap: leave me out of it! I want to trick someone else into going through all that annoyance/fear/starvation/death. Of course, you're part of "we" too and disagree.
Don't you see how easily this can be solved?
STOP USING THE WORD "WE!" I'll stop and you stop. Everyone stops using that word. Everyone wins.
This man spends most of his days in engineering meetings and in fact is nothing less than stupid. His company supplies the ISS right now, is the only way the US can return cargo from space and nobody knows if it will be his company or Boeing (of all things) that will first launch people to space from the US since quite a while in a one or two years.
Musk is the current air-brained celebrity blonde of the moment, regardless of his actual hair color. He is an idiot living on ephemeral BS and repeated BS.
I for one, welcome our robotic mining overlords!
Make stuff from what ?
I gave a link. Read it.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Since he lacks all practical applicable expertise.
Do not forget that there can only be one mining robot harvesting vespene gas at a time, so more robots != more gas. Also be careful not to disturb the Protoss...
What sig ?
"We require more minerals"
You can even see how this varies here on Earth. I once spent a few months watching a large construction project progress in the middle east. There were easily ten times as many workers as you would have on a similar project in the USA, because it was cheaper to hire a load of people with hand tools than to employ fewer people and equip them with power tools.
Title was a cheesy movie. (But funny, if you lived corporate culture.)
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
ok the fuel they mention what is that ? and has anyone determined just how much water is available on MArs which will be the ultimate limiting factor? Unless they can start mining asteroids there too.
Since he lacks all practical applicable expertise.
Well, except for that entire runs a company that built and uses re-usable rockets that put things into orbit bit.
I have worked for over 2 decades now in an actual working mine on underground physics projects in SNOlab.
That's nice. Maybe you should come out of that hole in the ground and look around and see what other people are doing. They're a lot smarter than you, Coward.
It'd be only marginally more difficult to build interplanetary space habitats inside asteroids (for radiation shielding) and forego the energetic costs of entering and leaving the gravity well. After all, with the length (time) of the Hohmann transfer orbit between the Earth and mars, we have no option but to develop techniques for living significant periods of time in freefall. So just bite the bullet, and learn to live in freefall, or learn to make significant-g habitats in freefall.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Was recently outside in minus 20 degree celsius weather with a pollution index over a thousand. In short an environment that puts the 'in' into inhospitable. Neoprene breathing masks are routinely worn here when the coal smoke reaches levels not seen since 1880 London. By all accounts UB can get twice as polluted as Beijing. Now I ask you... Why go to Mars when we are in the process of Martiaforming Earth? Soon we will have all the uninhabitability that Elon or anyone else could ever want right here at home.
Sarcasm aside. I can see mining asteroids. And I can also see robotic study of Mars and other gravity wells in the search for X-life and knowledge. But people Mars? Really? Why? Moreover, human life on Mars would quickly end it’s viability as a laboratory for X-life -- if indeed such is to be found there.
Fate has seen me visit some of the nearly uninhabitable places on EARTH Siberia, The Gobi Desert, The Arctic and The High Pamir. These places are here on Earth and it is tough to survive in them year round. Nearly impossible without constant imports from better climes. Mars is orders of magnitude more problematic than, say, Antarctica. At least there you can breath. And there is plenty to eat in the seas. It would take an army of advanced AI remotes and droids to construct a habitable environment on Mars for people. It is doable -- or will be. But to what end? To dodge a planet killing asteroid? Oh come on... If human life on earth went tits up chances are a Mars colony would go soon after. I sincerely doubt such a place would ever survive on its own -- not to mention thrive.
Don't get me wrong... The romance of the idea of a Mars colony is not lost on me. Wonderous! But as a scientific project human pollution would actually obviate one of the most interesting things about the place.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy