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#26 2004-06-28 09:20:27

MarsDog
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From: vancouver canada
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

For looking around, it will be cameras and Virtual Reality.
Instead of one large structure, it will be several for redundancy.
-
Similar to Northern cities, with protected access between buildings.
Building sports stadium sized structures will be more difficult.

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#27 2004-06-28 09:33:46

Dook
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

That is very functional, but I think the colonists would like to be able to see broad vistas in every direction.  The torus could be covered with sandbags, I guess.  I just don't know which would be more efficient (for growing crops and heat insulation, etc.) -- small windows, mirrors, and sandbags, or transparent walls and heaters?

How are you going to cover a torus inflated to 5 psi with sandbags?  Maybe if you bumped the internal pressure up to a couple thousand it would hold.

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#28 2004-06-28 11:36:07

MarsDog
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

Given the difficulty of shielding from harmful radiation;
Most of the time, the settlers will be exposed to reflected sunlight.
One sprawled out, interconnected, protected,
shopping mall style environment, with an occasional high rise ?

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#29 2004-06-28 11:52:21

Dook
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

Three inflated (clear mylar?) spheres, one in the center, a middle sphere, and an outer sphere.  The inside one will have a 5 psi air atmosphere for growing crops, the second sphere pressurized to 3 psi with ozone for absorbing dangerous UV, and the outer sphere pressurized to 3 psi with sulfur-hexaflouride or some other super greenhouse gas to hold in heat.  The inner one would leak air into the middle sphere and replenish the oxygen that is destroyed by the UV rays, ozone also replenishes itself to some degree as the UV breaks apart the triple oxygen atoms and they tend to re-assemble again.

The triple sphere design would be placed in craters made by explosives.  Regolith would be cleaned of harmful oxides, metals, or whatever and brought in to fill the center sphere's bottom half then mixed with fertilizer.   

They would be assembled in an octagon pattern with one in the center.  Each would be connected by pressurized tubes.

Can any math genius's figure out how much of each gas (sulfur hexaflouride and ozone) we would need for this to work?

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#30 2004-06-28 16:02:46

Grypd
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

You can use internal or external bracing ie metal supports to form a rib cage type of system of supports.

These would give a measure of protection from catastrophic deflation, useful too for hanging lights on and allowing access to the dome for the periodic checks of the domes integrity.

These ribs would allow the dome to have sanbags filled with regolith installed, It may also be possible to use the sanbags themselves as a structural support if you could fuse the regolith together forming structural strength items.


Chan eil mi aig a bheil ùidh ann an gleidheadh an status quo; Tha mi airson cur às e.

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#31 2004-06-28 16:09:11

Ian Flint
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

It may also be possible to use the sanbags themselves as a structural support if you could fuse the regolith together forming structural strength items.

I think he means bricks. big_smile

If we were all in charge, it sounds like there would be a wide variety of building styles on Mars.  Sounds fun!

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#32 2004-06-28 17:01:20

Grypd
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

Frankly there will be a wide variety of styles of building on mars. But what I hope to do is to make the first base as easy as we can in fact the first few bases. If we can do this it will allow expansion.

Why do i want to use Sandbags to reduce radiation inside the domes, The first colonists will be idealists who wont mind the risk themselves but when the children come. Views they wont mind if there kids will be fine


Chan eil mi aig a bheil ùidh ann an gleidheadh an status quo; Tha mi airson cur às e.

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#33 2004-06-28 21:03:18

Dook
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

Colonists?  Colonists won't have to worry about UV radiation or domes because mars will have an air atmosphere by then.  Only scientists are going to live on mars until then.

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#34 2004-06-29 03:41:27

Grypd
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

We have no idea how long it will take to get mars an increased atmosphere and one which will reduce the radiation exposure of the planet below.

But our estimates are in the hundreds of years possibly in the thousands. So we are to keep mars as a science outpost till then. Sorry no. One of the reasons we go to mars will be to colonize it. The people may well be mostly scientists but they are there to expand the human race. And to expand the human race takes children. Its children which are the races future.

And children are more susceptible to radiation induced illnesses than adults. So we will make our bases and we will make them a lot safer for those children.


Chan eil mi aig a bheil ùidh ann an gleidheadh an status quo; Tha mi airson cur às e.

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#35 2004-06-29 09:00:11

Dook
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

I don't see it.  Scientists will surely go for 5 or 10 years stays but I doubt anyone would take their family there.  Why would they?  Even if both parents are mars terraformers they wouldn't condemn their children to the long boring trip there, life on a cold and barren wasteland and another long space trip back to earth.  Lets see-earth or mars?  The earth wins every time.

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#36 2004-06-29 14:09:52

Ian Flint
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

I don't think many people will take kids to Mars, but births are bound to happen with 5 -10 year stays.  And what about the "crazies" like us who actually want to live there forever.  If we can slip through the psych screeners at NASA and get to Mars, we will actually have babies there on purpose! :laugh:

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#37 2004-06-30 08:46:01

Earthfirst
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

That for sure lots of babies, but dont you need a wife or some females. Science nerds have a hard time getting girls, most are too moral to use date drugs. So maybe people will clone them selfs or buy eggs and grow them in a fake whomb.
Maybe we could work some thing out with some of the women that are mars lover too. Like exterme dating show but on mars. At least with only .38 Gees the women can say they way 105 lbs and be truthful.
Beyond the sillyness people will be people, fall in love, have a family, and some will want to stay on their new home. Which bolds well for mars because I doubt that larg # of people could be transported to mars. Like hunderds not millions.


I love plants!

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#38 2004-06-30 17:24:55

Grypd
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

Earthfirst if you think people need drugs to be able to get girls you have a REAL problem.


There is little chance of a gene bank being used to populate mars. There would be moral outrage and well women would hardly thankyou for giving them the job description part time pioneer full time breeding machines.
There will be children it will happen naturally and as we put more people on the planet the population will naturally increase. People will stay, they will have children, we will have a colony.


Chan eil mi aig a bheil ùidh ann an gleidheadh an status quo; Tha mi airson cur às e.

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#39 2004-07-02 15:11:39

RobS
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

I've done a fair amount of thinking about the problem of larger settlements. The earliest arrivals will have to bring their inflatable housing and greenhouses along. They'll probably cover the inflatable housing with sandbags. A three meter (ten feet) thick layer of sandbags would have a weight of about three tonnes per square meter, which would also be about the internal air pressure of the habitat. Three meters of sand and dust would provide excellent radiation shielding, whether it has water in it or not. To make sure the habitat doesn't collapse if it loses internal air pressure, it will have to be reinforced.

You probably wouldn't want to do too much "native" construction if you have only about, say, twenty adults on Mars, because base maintenance will take four or five people full time, any greenhouses and food preparation will take two or three more, and exploration of planet will take at least a half dozen or so. Until you have more than about 20 you won't have the spare human resources to do a lot of fabrication and construction. I think serious native construction won't start until the base population reaches fifty to one hundred.

At that point I'd import plastic fabrication equipment able to make straight chain polyethylene, kevlar, or some other high-strength plastic. I'd build hemispheres or hemicylinders ("Quonset hut" shaped structures) with 0.3 atmospheres pressure within them (0.15 oxygen, 0.10 nitrogen, 0.05 argon, with traces of CO2 and humidity; the N2 and Ar are just Martian air minus the carbon dioxide). The enclosures would be transparent on top to let in sunlight, minus the ultraviolet and infrared (coatings on the dome would provide the uv screen and the ir retention). The dome would also have insulation curtains on the east and west sides that had a silvered under side. Both curtains would be raised at night to keep in the heat. At dawn the curtain on the east side would be lowered to let in the sunlight, which the silvered curtain on the west side would bounce downward onto the ground, increasing total insolation closer to terrestrial levels. in late morning the western curtain would be lowered. In late afternoon the eastern curtain would be raised instead to retain heat and reflect late afternoon sunlight downward.

The dome would be held in place using gigantic hollow steel "stakes" driven into the regolith by a pile driver. Each stake would be half a meter wide and thirty meters long (it would come in three to five meter lengths and a new section would be bolted on each time the previous section was driven into the ground). The stakes would be driven into the ground to make a continuous or almost continuous barrier of steel. Once the stakes were in place, steam would be forced down them to wet the ground within three meters of them; this would freeze the stakes into place over several months. A cylinder seventy meters in diameter pressurized to three tonnes per square meter would have a upward pull of 150 tonnes per square meter along its perimeter, so the stakes have to be firmly anchored in an underground cylinder of frozen regolith at least 30 meters deep and 6 meters wide (that's 180 cubic meters of regolith, which would weigh 180 tonnes in Martian gravity). Note this would require a lot of water; probably about 200 kg per tonne of regolith. So this kind of construction requires a really good water source.

The six meter thick wall of frozen ground extending 30 meters downward would form a fairly airtight barrier, but air could still leak straight down into the Martian ground. A plastic sheet could block the air, but if you have the water, creating a water table would be better. A cylinder 70 meters long and 70 meters wide would have 4900 square meters--half a hectare, a bit more than an acre of ground. I'd start by pumping heated and compressed Martian air into the dome for a few months after it was placed. The air would leak downward and escape from the dome, warming the regolith. If you want to warm two meters of regolith, density of about two tonnes (mass, not weight) per cubic meter, the 70-meter dome would have 4900 x 2 meters x 2 tonnes = 19600 tonnes. That takes a lot of heat. The best way to thaw this much ground would be to use the enclosure for agriculture and let the atmosphere be inadequate for humans but fine for plants, start with cold-climate crops like rye and potatoes, and let the dome trap solar heat for a year or two. Then as the ground warmed one would be able to use warmer climate crops.

One would want to "cultivate" a water table in the dome. If every square meter needs about a quarter tonne of water, the 4900 square meter example would require 1225 tonnes of water (another example of how water-intensive this construction technique would be). The dome would require "wells" every ten meters or so where water could be pumped in or pumped out. To push the warming downward, pump in warm water. To remove salt from the water, pump water out and desalt it, then pump it back in (warmed) at a nearby well. The regolith will have a lot of salt in it and weathering of the minerals will create a lot of salt, so one will constantly be pumping water out of the ground and desalting it. If the regolith has heavy metals in it, one would need to plant special crops that segregate heavy metals; you'd dig the plants up and thrown they away outside somewhere (or incinerate them to recapture the solar energy in them).

Once the upper two or three meters of ground was thawed and there was a layer of frozen ground underneath the soil that was airtight and that retained the air in the dome, the atmosphere could be upgraded to being mostly oxygen. The dome would then be in a good position for construction of housing. The topsoil could be moved to a new farming dome if it wouldn't be used in the old one any more. A concrete foundation would be poured, just like on earth. The housing could be placed underground in the warmed and moistened regolith. Or an airtight building bubble could be bolted to the concrete foundation (in any shape you want to make it), the building would be built inside the bubble, and siding (rather like vinyl siding) would be placed over the airtight bubble to protect it and give it the pleasant appearance desired. The siding could be bolted to a heavy steel frame that could support a rooftop garden; the meter or two of very water-saturated soil on the roof would provide radiation shielding. The last step would be landscaping; trees (probably fruit or nut yielding), flowers, attractive vegetables, and some small patches of lawn for the kids to run on. The housing dome would be connected to nearby agricultural domes (which would be future housing domes) where the carbon dioxide and human waste products would be directed for recycling by the plants.

This system of construction has various advantages:

1. You'd be making the dome, the metal stakes, and the housing bubbles inside a pressurized factory; no space suits needed.

2. Pile drivers and regolith steaming equipment could be operated with minimal hands-on human effort.

3. The most person-intensive effort would be installing the dome. Presumably the dome would have kevlar cords every meter or so that one would place inside each metal stake and concrete into place.

4. The effort to create farmland would occur inside a partially pressurized volume in a less harsh environment than the Martian outside.

5. Housing would be built in a shirtsleeve environment.

What do you think?

                   -- RobS

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#40 2004-07-02 16:18:32

Rxke
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

We love you, Robert!


Looks *very* promising.

A lot of the equipment could be built on-site, in a preliminary phase. Also, in the back of my mind, something tells me this construction is adaptable for the long time, when planetary atmospheric pressure mounts, you won't get into trouble, you can gradually change the internal pressure/atmospheric mixture, when internal pressure comes too close to external for structural rigidity, add a internal support structure, in stages... eventually open it to the outside world... and have a significant aera of 'terraformed' soil, to boot...

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#41 2004-07-02 17:54:27

Dook
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

You're saying a dome inflated to 5 psi is going to hold up 10 feet of sand bags!  No way. 

Edit: Actually a square meter pressurized to 5 psi puts out just over 7,700 lbs so it will hold more than I thought in mars reduced gravity.

You would need huge farms to support 50 to 100 people and even this food supply would have to be supplemented with supplies from earth and for what purpose?  Just to simply have people there who live out their lives trapped in a dome? 

The coatings to block UV and let in infrared are a good idea.  Wish I'd thought of it.  I know there are coatings that block UV but what coating holds in infrared though?

Oxygen ratio of 15%???  So all the workers will have to constantly wear a breathing device?  I think a 21% oxygen atmosphere would be better.

Not really sure why you need the giant steel stake.  To hold the dome in place?  Where's it going to go?  Martian wind max's out at about equal to a 6 mph wind on the earth.  Or just put it in a crater so you don't have to worry about it.  Also the water used to water the plants will soak into the ground and freeze as permafrost and probably freeze the roots of the plants unless you have some kind of ground heating, then you could recover the water with your wells.  Incinerating plant matter would take more energy than it would return and fill the dome with harmful gasses.  Why do this?  The plant matter would be better used as compost.  Before any soil on mars is used to grow plants salts and metals would have to be removed.

A buried sphere might be better and as you fill the bottom half of the sphere place something to keep the soil warm and have a tube in the center to suck up the water at the bottom, filter it, and re-use it.

Scientists on mars yes.  Civilian population?  Not until it has an atmosphere.

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#42 2004-07-02 19:57:17

RobS
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

15% versus 21%: I threw out the 15% almost randomly. My point is that humans do not need 0.21 atmospheres of oxygen. Colorado's largest city, Denver, is at 5,000 feet. The state has various towns at 9,000 feet (I ate at the Pizza Hut in Leadville. It's 8,000 feet, I think). LaPaz, the capital of Bolivia, has several million people living and working at 17,000 feet. (It is quite a dramatic city to fly into. The plane flies over the Amazon jungle, then up the Andean foothills, then up to the really high peaks of the Andes, then over the peaks and it drops just a little bit and you're in LaPaz! It's so high, when I walked around nearby at 16,000 feet I had to go very slowly because I was a little dizzy.)

My point is that the average person, over time, develops more red blood cells and adjusts to about 0.15 atmospheres of oxygen pressure fine, so I think that's where Mars should go. Pressure suits will operate better at lower pressures as well.

Supporting 50-100 people: I think intensive scientific farming can feed someone with 100 square meters, so the dome I gave as an example (hemicylinder 70 meters long, 70 meters wide, 4900 square meters) can feed 49 people. If you install several stories of housing in the dome with rooftop gardens, it could house 49 as well (you need 50 to 100 square meters of housing and work space per person as well).

Why the metal stakes: Your problem isn't Martian winds, it's internal air pressure, which is upward at about 3 tonnes per square meter. You have to hold the dome down or it will behave like a balloon that you fill with air and release without closing. There are three ways to hold a dome down:

1. Piling dirt along its outer edge or "skirt." This will work for small domes or domes with low internal pressures. The density of crustal rocks is about 3 times that of water (water is 1 tonne per cubic meter; God bless the metric system), but if you crush the rock up it has internal void spaces, typically 25-40% of the volume. So dry regolith should have a density closer to 2-2.5 tonnes per cubic meter. In Martian gravity, that's 1 tonne of weight per cubic meter. Hence every square meter of dome needs three meters of regolith weight to counteract the upward push of the air pressure. Add water to freeze the regolith hard as concrete and its density is a bit higher.

2. Stakes into the ground. They have the added advantage of forming a subsurface barrier against air leakage around the dome.

3. Connecting the airtight roof to an airtight floor. This works fine for small habitats and is the solution one would have to pursue on the moon and on asteroids. The disadvantage on Mars in large agricultural enclosures or "suburban" development enclosures is the same as anyone on Earth who has had a leaky roof knows about: no substance, exposed to liquid water, especially if that water has organic acids and other substances in it, can stand up forever. It will deteriorate. Freezing the ground above the dome floor helps only a little because the dome still has to rise through a zone of unfrozen, wet ground, and will be subject to deterioration there. Domes with floors will have to have multiple layers of plastic to protect the pressure-enclosing layer from deterioration, and they will be subject to periodic, expensive excavation and "reflooring," just as buildings on Earth have to be reroofed every decade or two.

For these reasons I prefer the "open ground" approach using metal stakes. The concrete and steel outer wall will be subject to occasional repair against damage from water and oxygen inside, but a vertical wall will have less deterioration than a horizontal floor. Perhaps every five or ten years the wall will have to have its inner edge excavated down to the permafrost layer, a coating of waterproof "paint" applied, and the trench filled back in. Maybe the coating can be injected without the need to excavate.

Craters: They are aesthetically pleasing, but they would be a nightmare to keep pressurized because they could not form a flat, uniform water table and permafrost table. The permafrost table under the rim will be higher than that under the crater floor, so water will tend to flow to the area under the crater floor. As heat works its way downward from the warmed surface, the permafrost seal under the rim will tend to melt and the water will partly flow away. The solution would be to drill lots of deep holes and inject lots of steam into the ground to freeze it deeply everywhere, thereby freezing shut the pore spaces through which air can escape. That will take lots of water; probably a couple tonnes per square meter.

No civilian population until there is terraforming: I completely disagree. It is not clear we can terraform; it is not yet clear we SHOULD terraform. The decision to terraform will not be made for perhaps a century after people begin to live in Mars. It may take that long to determine whether there is life inside the planet. It may take that long to determine HOW to terraform "cheaply." And the cost will be so large there will be no political will to spend the money until Mars already has a large population to advocate it.

Personally, I may favor a Mars "terraformed under domes." Leave much of the world wild and pristine. Terraform the pieces that are economically viable. Why oxygenate 125 million square kilometers of land if you have a population for 1,000 square kilometers? Just oxygenate the 1,000 that you need.

The analogy in my mind is the Netherlands, which pushes the sea back dike by dike, polder by polder. Mars needs polders, not terraformation; at least not for the next few centuries. The domes will get bigger and bigger, more and more grand, as the technology improves and the population grows. Suspension bridges are some of the most elegant structures ever made. Domes are essentially suspension bridges upside down, designed to work against upward air pressure rather than downward gravity. Imagine a large city built under several dozen such grand structures (not under one; you don't want any dome to enclose more than about 10% of your pressurized area, as a hedge against leaks). It could be quite a magnificent setting in which to live.

       -- RobS

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#43 2004-07-02 21:03:27

Dook
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

I'm not sure what kind of growing season plants on mars would adopt but on earth almost all fruits and vegetables only produce in the summer.  There are early and late species so you can stagger food production somewhat but during the fall, winter, and spring months you would have maybe two types of food available.  The settlers would need sizable food shipments from the earth.

A crater would hold a sphere, fill the bottom half of the sphere with regolith.  No pressurization problems.

Also your idea would require many, many lights for the plants to grow.  Huge power drain.

So you expect people, civilians, settlers, to spend six months trapped inside a small space ship just so they can go to mars where they must live out their lives stuck inside a dome?  I don't see it.  Give up the ocean, snow, a mid-winter storm, the wind, the smell of wildflowers, a drive in the country, watching children play, seeing a new movie, new music, sports, wide variety of foods, pets, bicycling, hiking, family...

Hmm, give all that up for a dome?  No way man.  Only way anyone other than a scientist would do it was if they were very well paid and only for 5 years max.

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#44 2004-07-02 22:36:48

RobS
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

We're not talking about grow lights at all, but sunshine. The dome would be transparent, and with silvered reflecting blankets it would receive about as much sunlight as the surface of the Earth does through a thick and cloudy atmosphere.

You obviously do not live in a tropical climate, like most of the Earth's inhabitants, who grow food all year round. On the Martian equator sunlight would be constantly available and crops would be continuous. If you want seasonal crops like strawberries, you haul the plants, growing in flats, into a dark, cold basement for a few months and put out other strawberry plants to enjoy the sunshine while they are hibernating.

Kids would play outside in the sun on weekend afternoons, just like they do on Earth. Even without radiation vests, a few hours a day of exposure to the sun and cosmic radiation is not a serious problem.

Movies? Beam them to Mars and play them on a big screen Satursol afternoons. Everyone on Mars can have cable. Hikes? There's the outside. Snowstorms? Half of humanity does without that right now, but eventually there will be domes with seasonal cycles and artificial snowstorms. You can always go singing in the rain at 4 a.m. when they turn on the sprinklers! There will be basketball courts once the base is big enough, and maybe a golf course outside.

Depending on what you want to do, I suspect once the base gets over 100 or so people it could become pretty comfortable. Until then, people will do without, or they won't volunteer to go. Consider that there are poor people living on houseboats in Hong Kong that are just tied up to one spot right now, never go anywhere. The people I visited in Pucapuca, Bolivia, live in mud and thatched houses and raise potatoes. They don't see the ocean, they don't participate in professional sports, and they don't have access to radio, tv, movie theaters, the internet, etc. They can't even afford to buy clothes, so they raise llamas, cut the wool, spin it into thread, and weave cloth on a hand loom. And they do fine, thank you.

If you want "first world" comparisons, there are rural sheep stations in the Australian outback and remote villages in northern Alaska where it is damn cold half the year.

It is a question of expectations. Living in a dome would not be much worse; in many ways it would be better than the life faced daily by about one third of our fellow human beings.

As for filling a crater with a sphere and filling the sphere with regolith, remember the problems of corrosion of the dome you will have from water.

         -- RobS

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#45 2004-07-02 22:53:03

MarsDog
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

So you expect people, civilians, settlers, to spend six months trapped inside a small space ship just so they can go to mars where they must live out their lives stuck inside a dome?

There are trappers, prospectors and hermits who prefer isolation. This type of person prefers doing it his own way, and would see Mars as an opportunity. A person who did not fit in on Earth could become a pioneer on Mars
-
Won't be a shortage of settlers.

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#46 2004-07-03 00:53:22

Rxke
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

Urbanized modern man does not come outside too much, lately.

And if you don't have the money to pay a holiday, chances are you never see much 'pristine' nature in your urban life. You go to puny parks, and feel fine. Most European parks are puny. As fake nature as any future dome. Hey, give me something analougeous to Biosphere II, i'd be more than a happy chappy!

And on Mars, let's say when there are about 20k people, you're a civilian, living there (a technician, food specialist, ...) if you really get a bad bout of cabin-fever, you just go up to the geology-section, apply for a job as cook, repairman,... for the next expedition into Hellas, Olympus Mons,... They're hiring, you get a paid holiday, and unbeliievable vista's you can't find on Earth to boot.

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#47 2004-07-03 08:01:14

RobS
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

As soon as there are TWO Mars bases, people at one will want to take vacations at the other. In my novel, the main "outpost" is on the floor of Marineris and not long after they clear a road to the rim, they build "the Dacha" on top able to accommodate about 16 people, complete with a bar, a dance floor, jaccuzzis, and a spot where the bubble overlaps beyond the edge of the cliff and you can walk out on "air" to look down over the valley. A perfect romantic weekend getaway. . . .

        -- RobS

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#48 2004-07-05 11:56:39

Martian Republic
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Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

That is very functional, but I think the colonists would like to be able to see broad vistas in every direction.  The torus could be covered with sandbags, I guess.  I just don't know which would be more efficient (for growing crops and heat insulation, etc.) -- small windows, mirrors, and sandbags, or transparent walls and heaters?

Another prospect for dealing with the outside radiation, would be to generate a local magnetosphere that includes the entire complex and use that for some of your shielding. But, you would still want some passive shielding encase of a power failure or your Magnetosphere generator breaks. But, that would assume that we are going to have a nuclear generator so you could generate enough power to generate that field, which we may not have for the first few years.

Larry,

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#49 2004-07-05 12:25:18

Martian Republic
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Posts: 855

Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

That for sure lots of babies, but dont you need a wife or some females. Science nerds have a hard time getting girls, most are too moral to use date durgs. So maybe people will clone them selfs or buy eggs and grow them in a fake whomb.
Maybe we could work some thing out with some of the women that are mars lover too. Like exterme dating show but on mars. At least with only .38 Gees the women can say they way 105 lbs and be truthful.
Beyond the sillyness people will be people, fall in love, have a family, and some will want to stay on their new home. Which bolds well for mars because I doubt that larg # of people could be transported to mars. Like hunderds not millions.

You may be right,!

But what do you think of this link and the possibility of building a city in forty years?

http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2 … ...eat.pdf

Unfortunately I don’t know if he can get elected though.

But, in the event he did, it would sure open up some possibilities though.

Larry,

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#50 2004-09-19 19:44:58

The Fed Man
Banned
From: Earth
Registered: 2004-04-19
Posts: 24

Re: Constructing a larger settlement - One idea

What about KSR idea of melting out a dome in an ice cap. This would not only provide sufficent radiation shielding  but also water and oxygen. I was wondering though if working inside the dome would cause it to melt larger until it reached the outside. I guess the atmosphere inside could be kept at a cold temperature.

Does anyone like this idea?

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