New Mars Forums

The large ship will have space drones that dock to the outside of the central hub. One will be a space telescope with primary mirror the same size as Hubble, but with latest image sensor electronics. During manoeuvres it will be docked, but when drifting between planets the telescope will free-fly. This telescope will be for passengers to use to observe stars.

However, a second drone will have star sight sensors that crew will use for celestial navigation. The ship is rotating, a drone that doesn't will provide more accurate measurements for precise navigation. And radio systems that provide precise position measurement between ship and drone. Gotta keep navigation as precise as a NASA Mars probe. This second probe will be for crew use only.

Perhaps additional sensors on the crew drone, or maybe another drone with high resolution cameras to look for asteroids or meteoroids. Watch for space debris to avoid collision. Space is vast and there's no confirmed case of any space probe colliding with debris, but the Soviet Phobos 1 probe mysteriously stopped all communication during transit between Earth and Mars. Wikipedia now claims an end-of-mission command was sent by a computer. But still, precautions sound justified.

Another item for research: a late term fetus will have a functioning liver. Metabolic waste will be processed to recover nutrients and extract the last bit of energy. Final waste product will be urine aka piss. Baby's kidneys will not yet function, releasing urine through the placenta into mother's blood. Mother's kidneys will filter that out, so mother literally pisses for two. However, for an embryo, an early term baby, will unprocessed waste cross the placenta? Does mother's liver process that?

I said a dialysis machine sized for an fetus could extract waste from the artificial blood. Will waste from an early term baby complicate that?

Placental Enzymes
Springer Link. A single chapter from a book titled "Placental Function Tests", pages 34-38.
Placental Enzymes
Google preview:

Pay wall. There's a price of US$29.95 plus exchange into Canadian dollars, plus Canadian tax. I don't want to pay that for a single chapter of a book, only 5 pages, so if someone has institution access, please send me a copy of the PDF.

This is important for the artificial womb from conception to birth. As I said, a rubber wall will be required to serve as the mother's uterus where it interfaces with the placenta. The placenta produces enzymes to open blood vessels, allowing mother's blood to wash across the placenta. The rubber wall will require flow channels moulded into it to simulate mother's blood vessels, and placenta enzymes must be able to open them. So what are these enzymes and what materials could be dissolved by these enzymes?

The book"Caves of Steel" by Isaac Asimov imagined a world completely encased with solid city. Domes covered every city, and the domes were connected. With multiple levels within each dome. But I don't think we'll get to that point. We currently have birth rate (fertility rate) below sustainability in every developed country.  Developing and under developed countries bare trying to catch up to us as fast as they can. And that is already bringing with it the fertility rate problem. We need a more stable birth rate, something to sustain current population. The birth rate is crashing causing all the problems I cited above. I don't think we need to worry about overpopulation.

Your profile doesn't say where you live. Didn't you say you live somewhere in New England? Perhaps you need to take a road trip to the Midwest. The Atlantic coast of the US is packed with cities that flow into eachother. But drive west of this line. No one did this on purpose, it happened due to rain. It's dry west of the line. California from the coast to the mountains obviously has a lot of rain, consequently California is the most populous state. Note: 20% of US population  lives west of the line, including California. Now imagine population not including California. Take a road trip in the unpopulated area of the US. There's lots and lots of room.


If you click the first image, it's a YouTube video. The border line is the 98th meridian. And if you exclude Pacific coast, the population west of that line is 1/3 the land area of the US but only 9% of the population.

Wikipedia: Scarcity
Click the heading "Concept".

Geographers are scientists who study large populations, such as an entire country or the whole planet. They define the term "fertility rate" as meaning the number of babies a woman will give birth to during her entire life. It's an average over the population studied. Medical science defines the term differently but I'm going to use that definition. You may think a couple needs to have 2 children to ensure the next generation has the same number of people, but due to child deaths and other technical factors the number must be 2.1. And since families can have various forms these days it's presented as babies per woman. Adoption has its role, but that doesn't affect population of the country or the planet. If fertility rate is above 2.1 the population grows, if it falls below the population shrinks. The problem is fertility rate has fallen below sustainability in absolutely every developed country. And as developing countries adopt our lifestyle, it's falling there too.

For several years now, developed countries have accepted large numbers of immigrants to compensate for this low birth rate. Population would be shrinking if they did not. But that is causing other problems. Many countries have accepted immigrants so quickly that they are not assimilating. That is creating culture clashes between citizens and new comers. In some cases this has broken into violence. In Germany, the city of Bonn had a massive protest of Muslim immigrants who demanded Sharia Law. Of course Germany said no. Germany then reduced their immigration rate, but they are now experiencing an aging population.

When fertility rate is low, population doesn't shrink right away. Citizens retire, they don't just drop dead. Rate of individuals retiring from the workforce is greater than the number of young people maturing and entering the workforce. This results in a shrinking workforce at the same time as number of retirees grows. So the question is who is going to maintain roads, who is going to maintain power generating stations, power lines, water treatment facilities, sewage treatment, water mains, all the things needed for modern society. Who is going to fix the plumbing in your house? Reshingle your roof? Who is going to manufacture goods in stores?

Froma government's perspective, who is going to pay taxes to fund pensions and healthcare? As number of retirees increase, number of seniors requiring healthcare increases. That increases demand on healthcare systems, requiring more healthcare workers (doctors, nurses, etc) as well as more funding to pay for it. If number of individuals Woking and paying taxes decreases, how is this going to work?

Tom quoted a claim that world population is increasing. But I saw in interview with authors of a book that claimed UN estimates and predictions are based on formulas from the 1970s and completely out of date. They predicted world population would peak at 8.0 billion in 2060, then decline. The UN announced world population hit 8 billion in March 2022. But the US census bureau said it didn't. The US census bureau said it reached that in October 2022. Later studies showed it hit 8 billion in November 2022. So we did hit that number, but not as soon as the UN announced. Birth rate is falling faster than most people expected, so world population is not going to grow much more. We pretty much peaked now.

One issue is China. Federal funding for cities is dependent on population so cities have lied about their population for a long time. China ended their one-child policy in 2015. But they couldn't just but out, they changed to a two-child policy. That didn't work so they changed to a three-child policy in May 2021. In July 2021 they removed all limits. But China has moved from rural to urban, with efficiency apartments and condos in tall tower buildings. They don't have room for children. China's fertility rate dropped to 1.15 in 2021 and appears to still be declining. They revised down their population estimate, but real population may be even lower yet.

Peter Zeihan is an American economist. He predicts in 10 years Germany won't have enough workers to sustain an industrial economy. He predicts China will face a crisis causing their economy to collapse about the same time. What will happen to these countries? Germany is a democracy, but China is a dictatorship. Nasty things happen in a dictatorship when the economy collapses.

Robert Malthus wrote a book in 1798 about scarcity. He believed population growth would eventually result in insufficient food for everyone. Malthusian theory has led to a lot of atrocities. One reason for World Wars 1 & 2 was belief that nations must complete for limited resources. Robert Zubrin has spoken about this. He pointed out Germany today has smaller land area than beginning of WW2, yet per capita standard of living is higher. The reason is humans convert raw materials into resources, and human ingenuity can create new resources. James Burk had a British TV show in the 1970s called "Connections". He pointed out how one innovation led to another. One example was a war in the 1800s severely restricted access to elephant tusks. Wealthy middle class played a game called billiards (pool). Billiard balls were carved from ivory. So someone offered a prize to anyone who could invent a substitute for ivory. One chemist invented celluloid. It's made from cellulose from wood, treated with chemicals like sulphuric acid and nitric acid. Sulphur is a plentiful mineral from rocks, and wood comes from trees. There are definitely more trees than demand for billiard balls. So there's no longer any practical limit of resources for billiard balls.

Many resources are like that. Paleontology found an encampment of Neanderthals. It includes food residue. They harvested seeds of tall grass, pounded them to a paste between rocks, then cooked a flatbread on a rock at the side of a bonfire. Humans selectively planted grass seed to increase yield. Result was two plants called Einhorn and Emmer. Then they found crossbreeding these two produced a hybrid with even greater yield. The hybrid was sterile, but more food per acre. Eventually a mutation of the hybrid bred true, so they could just plant that. The hybrid is wheat. Farmers then selective bred wheat to increase yield further. In the 20th century, scientists have produced varies of many staple foods with higher yield. And fertilizer increases yield further.

Around 6,500 BC, ancestors of Sumeria arrived in Mesopotamia. Latest belief is they came from a valley that is now the bottom of the Persian Gulf. When Lake Agassiz drained, sea level rise causing their valley to flood. Lake Agassiz was created by melting ice in North America at the end of the last ice age. Moving upstream along the same river is not exactly radical. The southern most part of Mesopotamia was swamp, but most was very dry. Mesopotamia is defined by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Lots of water in the rivers. Around 3,500 BC (5,500 years ago) Sumerians invented irrigation. That greatly increased food production, enabling their population to swell from villages to the first cities.

The point is more humans means more innovation. More innovation increases standard of living for everyone. Economy of scale also reduces cost per unit, and if cost of goods goes down, again standard of living increases.

Space is filled with resources. There's a limited amount of gold on Earth, limited silver, platinum and platinum group metals. However asteroids have all of these. The third richest deposit of platinum in the world is Sudbury Canada. That's an asteroid that hit about 2 billion years ago. There's a crater 30 miles wide by 60 miles long. The asteroid cracked the crust, causing lava to intrude into the cracks. The nickel and platinum group metals mined today are fragments of that asteroid. If you mine a metal asteroid in space, it's pure asteroid material, not fragments mixed with Earth rock.

Robert Zubrin pointed out there are people today who view humans as a blight upon the Earth, damaging the environment or damaging nature. That attitude is very dangerous because leads to treating people as vermin. Instead view people as improving the environment, so people are treated as creators. As Robert Zubrin pointed out, terraforming Mars or other worlds leads to treating humans as creating life. Therefore humans are beneficial, we need to support and celebrate humans.

Original crew Dragon seating. Someone at NASA was concerned how "difficult" it was to get in or out, so required them to reduce to one row, 4 crew.

From the website that Tom linked in post #111

NASA went from no humans ever entering space, to landing a man on the Moon in less than a decade. JFK's speech to Congress to land a man on the Moon was May 25, 1961. Apollo 11 landed July 24, 1969. That's 8 years. NASA could do it again. If NASA accepted Mars Direct in June 1990, we could have had humans on Mars by 1999. I would argue an unmanned test of equipment would land on Mars first in 1997. Earth-Mars launch opportunities are every 26 months. Life support proposed in 1968 for a Mars mission used the same principles as life support currently on ISS, so I would argue a push for Mars could have been done. I have also argued for an unmanned sample-return mission using ISPP, primarily to demonstrate technology for exactly the reason you stated. Technologies will not develop themselves, someone has to get off his big fat ass and do the work. "Old Space" contractors have gotten a hell of a lot of money during operation of Space Shuttle and everything since, more than enough to have done this work. Constantly complaining that it's "not ready" will not get the job done.

I have said before and will repeat: a far more practical approach would be Mars Direct using Starship as the launch vehicle. It's large enough to deliver a hab into LEO with a fully fuelled TMI stage, and Starship will still be recoverable. Two launches: ERV and hab.

I came up with a modified architecture in 2002, with later updates. My idea is a Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV) sent first, then the manned assembly. I could waste time how to do it with other launchers, but this would require one Starship for the MAV, and two for the assembly. The assembly would include two habits: one for surface, the other would remain in Mars orbit and used for return. The Interplanetary Transit Vehicle (ITV) is the second have, optimized for space. The ITV would aerocapture into Earth orbit and be reused. The MAV would be the TEI stage, and would be the counterweight for rotation just like the Earth-to-Mars leg. Include a Dragon capsule for Earth atmospheric entry.

Either way, start with science missions. But rather than each mission to a different site, we've done enough unmanned rovers already to narrow down base location. Multiple missions to one site build up infrastructure.

Then build a permanent base for 12 crew using insitu materials and these science habs. If each hab carries 6 astronauts instead of just 4, that only requires 2 habs. I visualize a base like Mars Homestead project.

Then use the 12 crew base to build a larger base for 100 people. When the first passenger Starship arrives with 100 settlers, their accommodation and life support is waiting for them.

Also a 1994 film "Disclosure". A female corporate executive wants promotion to VP. A male manager ran a program to manufacture CD-ROM drives, and they had a factory overseas. The female executive changes air filters.to something from a local supplier because they were cheaper. Result was soany defecta that repairing them cost much more that the savings. In a shareholder meeting bshe tried to deny it, but the male manager had documents showing her orders and video from local news at the factory site showing her there. So she blatheree in about cost to investment ratios or something like that. One of the share holders said "I thought we were building something". The CEO walked her out of the meeting and fired her.

The new president of Boeing reminds me of that woman. The Boeing CEO is male, but you get the point.

A couple other themes in the movie that aren't relevant. You get the point.

Since we're talking about speculative future technology, a lot happens once a quantum entanglement communication chip is invented. Instantaneous communication from Earth to Mars. So a normal human could wear virtual reality goggles and headphones, control a robot on Mars. It would look and sound like you're on Mars, but you're really in a chair on Earth. No body modification. Rent time of a robot on Mars, or a different one on the Moon. Or another on Venus, etc.