New Mars Forums

I was actually thinking of a larger fab unit that builds the unit complete and ready to go (just add gas), probably.

I completely disagree here. The reason isn't that Wal-Mart couldn't produce items less expensively, but that the margin would probably be lower than the cost of the gas to drive there and back - and, also, most of the 'small stuff' would be impulse-buy (impulse-build?) stuff or to fill an immediate need. If you drop a glass on the floor (whoops) you wouldn't drive out to Wal-Mart to replace the thing, you'd simply flip on the fab and spit out a new one.

I believe that you conceptually can't make the leap to a society where manufacturing is so distributed, automated, and cheap. Right now, there is a serious barrier to entry for designing a car. You have to go through lots of engineering school, get a degree, get hired by a car manufacturer, and work like a slave in a cube farm, etc. The car design must meet a reasonably broad slice of the car-driving population, because of the fixed costs involved in building a car, to ensure a reasonable profit margin.

Now, imagine the nanofab society: the barrier to entry is going to be almost completely gone. All you need is a copy of CAD and DOT rules on what the car must contain, and an idea for a car. You will have a much larger segment than you think build the cars even if they have to assemble them - look at the percentage of kit airplanes built - and if larger nanofabs that can build the whole unit are included, the 'normal' car companies are going to have to radically reinvent themselves, because you will have loads of auto lovers who will distribute their own plans for free or some nominal charge. Their main payment will be the idea that people are actually driving their vehicle.

Capitalism, as traditionally construed, requires specialization, and specialization requires barriers to entry. The barriers are starting to disintegrate, and I expect that process to continue into the future.

NECROMANCY! NECROMANCY! You revived this thread from the dead...

If I might hijack the dead topic, and steer it onto a slightly different course, imagine that nanomolecular assemblers are invented and perfected in ten years, and pretty much anything you want can be manufactured from the appropriate feedstock. What sort of piracy problems would this create for, say, General Motors if anybody with a pile of old parts can magically turn them into a copy of a brand new Chevrolet, with the design for the assemblers to follow downloaded by P2P onto a DVD? Or would all those factories just be obsolete, and GM should change from worrying about an army of factories to just designing cars?

I'm no socialist, and, in fact, I'm a pro-business Republican. But I really think that capitalist economics (any traditional economics) is going to start breaking down simply because production will become progressively more automated, distributed, and cheap. IMHO the music industry is just the first one to get run down by that steamroller - the music industry's sole purpose in the economy is to take music created by artists and then distribute it to its consumers. That entire reason for existing has basically been vaporized by technology, although what relationship will develop between music creators and consumers to replace it is unknown and at this stage unformed. It won't be P2P, because that doesn't reward content creators, but it sure as heck won't be the traditional model.

What Northern Ireland is, is the West Bank a few hundred years from now, with a better climate and good beer.

It's smart to simply carry a spare belt in the trunk, actually. That, your spare tire, a tire plug kit/Fix-A-Flat, two flashlights, and a bottle of pre-mixed coolant... maybe a quart of oil if your car burns oil.

And duct tape, of course. But that goes without saying.

--Edit--

The funniest advice I ever heard for an 'emergency kit' was the following:

This happens to be exactly the point of the inflatable 'backpack' tent. For the rover, I believe that we're talking about a pop-up trailer type setup. For instance, you could have a 'second floor' on the rover, connected by a ladder, which is a sort of loft to toss your sleeping bags, put up a folding table, etc, if you made the walls out of airtight plastic and radiation-absorbing synthetic cloth.  It would fold down to a foot or two when the rover is moving, and when you stop and need the extra space, you raise and inflate.

I'm definitely with Cobra on the sunglasses. I think I'll wear Martian camo-colored pants (salmon with red and maroon blotches), a sturdy pair of boots and a nice thick warm jacket. And a Browning 9mm, since Cobra will be running around with a frickin' katana.

It requires a certain kind of person to settle a new, hostile land, one with a certain mindset. Fashion is not going to be high on their priorities, not with the planet trying its damnest to kill you. Both the initial base scientists and the initial colonists are unlikely to waste time and effort on fashion - at least not for a hundred years or so after the founding of the place, I'd wager. And afterwards, what's 'fashionable' will likely be knockoffs of whatever's currently fashionable on Earth.

Yeah, this would add utility to unpressurized rovers around the base, and it does seem to be something that can be tested 'on the cheap', as it were, right here on Earth. The only difficult bit here on Earth would be heat-build up in the tent (the opposite problem that Mars would have), but this could be eliminated by testing the device someplace cold... or even just testing in in a pool, to see if it's airtight; the water would effectively cool the tent. Tie a bunch of cinderblocks to it or something.

Yes, however, it wouldn't look as cool. :laugh:

Perhaps a Kevlar net holding the correct shape, or a different radius of curvature of the bottom like in one of Zubrin's city dome concepts?

You could pull the tanks on a golf handcart-like thing, I suppose. But such a tank would weigh about 14.5 pounds on Mars.

Weight allowances on Mars are an interesting subject. The decreased weight means all sorts of interesting things. Normally, the rule of thumb is something like 20-25% of body weight for carried stuff, although soldiers tend to carry more, relative to their weight... but we'll use the lower figures here for calculations. Now, on Earth, that means a 200 pound man should carry around 40-50 pounds. On Mars, this balloons to 105-132 pounds (all pounds are on Earth, of course!)... and he also gains 326 pounds because his body is designed to support 200 pounds, but is only moving 76 ((200-76)/.38). Granted, a lot of that extra weight allowance is going to be used on his spacesuit... but even if the suit weighs 200 pounds, that is, more than an Apollo suit, he can still carry more than his body weight in stuff without a problem. Even if you say that he can only lift the 105-132 pounds where the percieved weight on Mars is the same as the 40-50 pounds on Earth, that's still a *lot* of camping gear.

All that gear will still mass the same, of course, but that's not what kills your back hiking... it's holding that stuff up that's the killer. And Mars's low gravity puts a big hole in that one.

As far as the scrubber, the crude ones used on early submarines would probably be fine for the sort of short term stuff we're talking about. They used two chemicals, both of which I forget, one to remove moisture, and the other to remove CO2. You could have a small one rigged up with a fan and a couple batteries, no problem.

Remember, we're thinking fairly short term (one, two nights or so) stuff.

For some reason, when looking for the correct folder to put this in, I read "Life on mars" and thought '... yeah, this will be about (human) life on Mars'.

You might want to move it, I guess.