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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.
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.
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.
This is a news site for nerds?
Reading the comments on this thread I don't think so.
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
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.
One person can feed ten people for 25 days, so after 25 days there will only be 900 people to feed....etc, etc.