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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.
That it, I am not going to Mars unless Musk also agrees to implement an alliance of mining robots.
Depends, on how evil we are going to make them.
If you have said robots build a city ahead of time. We have the technology to grow plants inside, Mars has enough gravity that most plants should grow just fine, we just need soil (and all the bacteria that contains, which yes, would require us starting with some earth soil) worms and seeds.
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.
I assume we would feed them food which magically makes its way to my mom's fridge and then to my basement lair. Just make sure they have fridges and the rest will follow.
More seriously, Mars has all the nutrients plants need, sunlight, and dirt. Whatever you can already grow in a greenhouse on Earth, you can grow in a Martian greenhouse as well.
You will not have steaks and meat, even vegan "steaks" take a lot of processing. Unless you take a vegetable cut it up and call it a steak or piece of meat.
There has been a lot of work done on the food issue from NASA and individuals. there is a place called the Mars Desert Research Station which researches growing in mars simulated environments and soil, except for gravity. Reports from the ISS have shown gravity is not really that much of a matter for some plants.
The one thing that is needed is lots of water and lots of manual labor. So while you might not be working in a mine you would probably be working on a farm.
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.
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You would think some who read slashdot would know about Bertha in Seattle.
The rest is just AI similar to self driving software.
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.
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.
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.
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
These are details, and will be solved with more CGI of 3D printers and press releases.
i fixed your post for you.
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.
We have the technology to grow plants inside...we just need soil...and seeds.
Hydroponic systems make importing soil and soil amendments (like bacteria and worms) unnecessary. If (a BIG if) we follow Musk's assumptions that robots are sophisticated enough to tunnel through Martian soil/rock, mine and process fuel, water, and oxygen, and build pressurized human habitats, then it's not unreasonable to believe robots could also build hydroponic farms in advance of humans arriving. You really have to drink the kool-aid to believe all that is possible in any reasonable time frame, though.
I am very skeptical of Musk's plans, but also he's not harming anyone with these press releases and he is bringing much needed awareness and interest to science. We need those types of ambassadors of science (like Neil DeGasse Tyson, Carl Sagan, Buzz Aldrin, etc.). Furthermore, just because Musk issues a press release outlining his dreams does not mean he's betting everything on a moon-shot to Mars [Mars-shot?]...SpaceX as a company is still moving one step at a time through their challenges.
Well half of them can eat the other half. That strategy can be repeated for a while, at the very least.
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.
Would it really have a horde of mining robots? Or should it be more accurately described as a Hurd?
Looking at this usage and this list of Animal Group Names I suggest - and I am not making this up:
Animal: Gnus
Group: Implausibility
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Fred Saberhagen ALSO described such robots. Except HE called them "Berserkers". . .
So the question to ask is. . .are you Goodlife ???
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.
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.
I feel sorry for you. Living on Mars would be the total opposite of individual freedom. You be completely dependent on the grace of your corporate overlords just to maintain the very air that you breathed. You would be under complete surveillance 24/7. Every transaction would be monitored and recorded. A Mars colony would be the ultimate police state because compliance would be necessary for survival. Everyone but Musk would be no better than an indentured servant. If your willing to sacrifice comfort for freedom, you be better off colonizing one of the many uninhabited islands in the Arctic or Antarctica.