New Mars Forums

Wow! That's truly incredible. I think this could definitely be the way forward for meat eating on Mars.

I am wondering whether solar farming could become a "thing" on Mars.

There might be demand for homesteaders who would have their own habitats at some distance from the main settlement. Here they would lay out thin film PV, ensuring it was "tended", ie kept clear of dust etc.

The homesteader might charge up big battery packs with power from their PV fields  (I'm thinking maybe  between 500KwHs and 1 MwH of power) that would then be towed, slowly, by robot EVs to the main settlement where they would be hooked up to the urban grid. The robot EVs would use direct solar power as well as batteries.

These homesteads might be located anything from 10 to 100 miles away from the main settlement taking advantage of sites with very good insolation. 

There would be no need to lay down cabling and other electric equipment.

A 1000 homesteaders might be providing anything up to 1 GwH of power per hour.

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-rele … -2027.html

The global watch market is expected to grow to $73 billion in 2027.  That's a lot of people who do still want to wear them. Lift your eyes a little and you will see that humans are social primates. Social primates are highly status-conscious and wrist watches have been used as a status marker for at least 100 years.

Of course there will also be opportunities for other forms of time keeping. I think a lot of children might like an Apple style watch that told the time on Mars, and showed real-time (well almost) pics from the planet on the hour perhaps and maybe featured a daily update from one of the colonists.

Don't think you've followed what I am suggesting! You don't start it all by yourself. You make a deal with Omega or whoever.

You think companies like Omega are going to let a competitor steal a lead here?...I think there will be a rush to partner with a Mars business.

Let's say Space X create a subsidiary "Mars Trading Inc" (MTI)  - then MTI would partner with a watch company (let's say Omega) to produce the watches  on Mars and ship them back to Earth. Nearly all the prep will be done by Omega on Earth.  A robotic final assembly unit will be shipped out to Mars. It won't have to be very large because the product is not very large.  Gemstones will be sourced on Mars and, again using robots, will be prepared for setting in the watches. A final robotic assembly point will package them for the return journey to Earth.

The major selling point will be that these watches contain (valuable) material from Mars and have travelled all the way from that planet to Earth.

People are impressed enough by a "diving" watch. They are going to be even more impressed to look at a watch that has in reality come all the way from Mars and contains Mars gemstones.

Maybe the watch will be able to give you "Mars time" as well as Earth time as a gimmick.

There will be a provenance certificate with the watch to add to the cachet of the product.

The only issue I can see is whether watches could survive the vibrations of launching and landing. I presume the answer is yes but there may be issues there.

I still think there is a definite opening for luxury watch assembly on Mars. Doesn't have to be from scratch. The parts could be sent to Mars and the final assembly (by robot) would take place there. A genuine Mars gem could be placed in the watchface. The back of the watch could be engraved with "Made on Mars" with the date, location and nature of the gem.

The interest I think would be principally in manufacturing men's watches given Mars's associations with male attributes.

The economics are good: luxury watches are high value, low mass and low volume articles - perfect for Mars. 

If it costs say $40 million to get a Starship to Mars and safely back again ($400 per Kg), and if the parts weighed 250 grams, that would be 4 units per Kg, so with a 100 ton cargo load, you could ship out 400,000 separate watch parts packages. If we assumed that cargo transport to and from Mars was 10% of the cost of the watch, you would need to generate sales of some $400 million to cover the transport costs.

Watch prices vary hugely, but at the super luxury end of the market we are talking 10,000s of dollars. If we assumed, say, a wholesale price of $20,000 for these remarkable watches, that would be a total value of $8,000 million.

The annual luxury watch market in the USA is about $900 million.  So $9 billion in a decade. Looking around the world, there will be big markets in other regions such as Europe,  China, and India. We could probably say there is a decade long market of around $40 billion globally.

Now, I am not saying one could sell all these watches at this price. I think you could be looking to  have a range of watch types going from super luxury watches in the $1000 to $2000 range.

I think we could think in more modest terms of perhaps 20,000 watches per annum being produced at an annual wholesale price value of $100 million (average $5000 per watch). Cargo requirement would be 10 tons every two years.

How can they approve one of the worst ever performing vaccines with 100x the number of adverse reactions compared with run of the mill vaccines?

So that's probably "the first time in 60 years". I expect they had rainfall there in the Medieval warming period when the Vikings settled Greenland and farmed its pastures.

Makes sense.

Global warming = increased evaporation = increased precipitation = increased snowfall in many parts of the world = increased reflectivity and thus reduced insolation.

This is the problem with simplistic climate analysis as presented by Musk (no doubt for good commercial reasons from his point of view).  Climate is a system of hundreds, probably thousands, of feedback mechanisms that are looping themselves but also interacting each with all the other feedback mechanisms. It is sensitive to all sorts of starting conditions such as energy from the sun, volcanic releases, and atmospheric composition. But the billions of  interactions of the feedback mechanisms mean this is an incredibly complex system. Add to that the problem of measurement. This is far more complex than most people assume. There are many crucial questions to answer: where do you measure? does increasing urbanisation and airport expansion compromise results? how are statistical parameters applied to raw satellite data?

I think we can safely ignore the Musk video on that basis that he is not exactly a disinterested party and he is not himself a climatologist.

I agree with the precautionary principle when it comes to the major climate parameters. At the same time we need to accept the principle of ignorance - we really don't understand in any meaningful (ie predictive) detail how climate works.

I do think therefore that we should seek to stop the rise in CO2 levels.

Of course, climate change does not mean "climate disaster" or "vast species extinction". Agricultural productivity has been increasing.  It seems to me we are seeing far fewer famines now, partly due to increased humidity, thanks to global warming, so fewer droughts. California seems a bit of an exception. The predictions about vast waves of climate change refugees are now proven to be wholly false.

I remain somewhat sceptical about global warming because ultimately it relies on human measurement of physical phenomena and we know there are a lot of issues there. Let's also remember that climate change is perfectly natural. It never stands still. One thirty year period is always colder or warmer than the previous 30 years.

One of my big questions if why the Maldives and Seychelles government are ploughing billions of dollars into tourism and airport development if they really believe their islands are going to be inundated by rising sea levels. I've yet to see one verified example of an island disappearing under the waves because of rising sea levels (as opposed to sinking land or natural estuarine waxing and waning of islands).

Climate alarmism (crying wolf all the time) is extremely unhelpful as is linking clmiate change issues to Green political totalitarianism and millenarianism (end of days nonsense).

Elon doesn't explain why it's OK for his rockets to contribute so much CO2...

A reasonable approach going forward is to support a shift to green energy, with strong governmental support for development of the necssary technologies and infrastructure. In the UK we've just wasted £400 billion on an absurd pandemic response. If only £100 billion had been put into green energy we could have slashed energy bills and created 100s of thousands of good quality green energy jobs.