New Mars Forums

What makes you consider we will be sending so many miners? By the time we are ready to go to Mars we will be almost completely automated in our approach to mining. Australia and South africa are showing the way to this. Probably we will need to send more technicians and plumbers to Mars than miners, even Mechanics will be more needed to keep the machinery up to standard. Personally I believe there will be little similarity between mining towns and martian colonies.

Eh??? Just to add that this century that Pol Pot, Hitler, and Joeseph Stalin where all Aethiest and in sheer numbers of victims then..... You cannot blame religion for everything. And even the worst excesses ie the Spanish Inquisition where by Goverments with the church following the official line.

do we need to do anything if we can put colonists on Mars we should be able to operate submarines under the ice in any ocean. Assuming we might want to

But you will still find that there will be more than one group going to access space and it will simply become a race between these groups. Note I said groups as this allows the possibility of commercial interests as well as religous or even groups of people from various nationalities going to Mars as they share a same idea that would not be allowed on Earth.

Your group may exclude who it likes others may only take the sort that you have excluded in the end we need all sorts to make a civilisation.

Still its a long way before we are capable of this.

Most voluntary colonisation in the 17th and 18th centuries where by groups who fled there home lands to find a new life and to avoid religous persecution.

For the USA the pilgrim fathers are a good example these people where willing to move cause they where a religous minority. So Srmeaney there are a lot of reasons for people to move somewhere new and probabily dangerous. They just have to have faith in themselves and in the rest of there party.

Of course your commonwealth would do it the other way by the involuntarily transport of people in what could be called prison hulks.

It is said that when the going gets tough the tough get going.

To somewhere a lot easier.

And who's to say the tough wont be religous actually the chances are they will be you need to have a lot of faith to do this and to take your family with you or to even decide to go to a new world and to have your family there.

Still Elon is at the beginning and can truly say that for him anything is possible...Of course this requires funds, a market and technology, but these problems can all be rectified

Please Srmeaney I find that a very distasteful thing to say. I reject that you bring religous bigotism to a board that is designed to be forward thinking and to be here for the benefit and education of mankind. My country has been wracked by feuds between religous groups and we are a lot more understanding of what religous bigotry means. I have seen it personally and really hate it.

Not necassarily that good. You see one of the possible places for life to have begun is in the prescence of heated water ie black smokers or in thermal pools. These places tend to have water with salty concentrations.

So on Mars if we want to find life then we should be looking for liquid water near a thermal source...Aquifers

And for Mars explorers getting fresh water is easy (Boil it and condense) and those salts are very useful for the long term approach to Mars

Ah but we have already found water on Mars and we also have the ability to crack the CO2 to get oxygen and of course the carbon. This would give us the ability to create plant capable ground out of the Martian regolith and this means food.

But moving ten million colonists is not going to happen anytime soon. We will have the capability one day to support that many on Mars but we have not yet sent a man there so it wont be this century.

We also have to plan in what will happen to such a colony in the future. The likehood of that water is its in the form of a perma frost and if we construct a colony on such a site and it then is under the influence of a slightly warmed Mars as a result of terraforming then we could have real engineering problems.

Even without the terraforming then we may still have problems as the colony will heat the soils under it and we could still get subsidence or worse as the permafrost melts.

Personally im not sure if this will be a problem but then again it is best we work out what might be and get fixes.

Not really a decent radiation protection can be done with just the use of about 6 feet of sandbagged dust plus the walls of the habitat.

We can dig a trench place our permanent facility in and simply cover it with martian soil. Plenty of radiation protection there certainly enough to protect the people living there and giving them earth like protection from cosmic radiation.

And we still live in caves, just what are houses but artificial caves

Well yes but, If we use a NEMF to do transport back and forth to any vehicle entering Martian space it will be economically cheaper than using vehicles that are launched from Earth and are one way shots. This improves transport between Earth and Mars and we will still send people who will want to return to Earth, maybe by undiagnosed problems that cannot be dealt with on Mars. Of course an NEMF will not really be an option for a Martian first colony but if we use cyclers then it will come and we may as well build for it.

Another advantage to being at the equator is that we benefit from the maximum amount of light that can fall on Mars and use it for solar panels. But even these will be poor energy supplies, But unlike other places in the Solar system Mars actually is a bit energy poor in sources where we can use.

we do know it exists we can make antiprotons in our largest colliders but it is horribly expensive to make and we really cannot store it.

The best way to solve Venus tempatures is to build a large enough soletta that the sun is reduced on reaching the planet it then goes we can use the soletta to power things on the planet.

Of course we are very far from the capability of building so large a soletta

Our problem is that we have almost no real effective way to store power when it is not required. A power station takes a minimum of many hours to power up and often days so when a demand is needed then there are very few power sources that can quickly "come on line". The best is Hydro power which can have electrical generation coming from its turbines quickly when needed. Another benefit of hydro is that when power is not needed across the grid it is possible to use the spare capacity to reverse the turbines to pump water back up to higher lochs and when it is needed it can be activated to pump water back down at peak need.

Another more modern possible way to store "power" is to use Fuel cells to provide peak power need and to have the system reversed when we have little need for power but still have generation going. Another advantage to fuel cells is that this system can be made to work anywhere unlike Hydro which is very terrain dependant