
Domes are overrated - Amorymeltzer
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/11/28/domes-are-very-over-rated/
======
credit_guy
Some people wonder why we should go to Mars. There's not much to profit by
going there. In terms of mining, not much is useful there, plus asteroids are
easier to mine.

The benefit is that a colony on Mars would be an engine of innovation. People
keep pointing out that NASA has produced hundreds of useful innovations (like
space blankets). Imagine how many innovations would a colony of 500 people
come up with when stranded there for months and years. It's not that we send
them there with only sticks and stone tools, they'll have the most advanced
technology we can fit them with, but they'll still find themselves in
thousands of situations where their tools will be puny compared to their
problems.

Some in this thread mention boring machines. Well, just after a boring machine
cuts a few meters of tunnel, someone lines that tunnel with some concrete
elements. Where's the concrete coming from on Mars? Oh, I guess they can make
it locally. Great, where are the components coming from? I guess you can mine
them locally, but you'd need to bore some tunnels for that. A bit of a chicken
and egg. What if the concrete does not set exactly like on Earth, because, you
know, there's not enough humidity in their air (and there's not enough air
either).

These guys will face millions of problems. And they'll have no choice but
solve them.

It's going to be awesome.

~~~
glitchdout
Why not create a colony on the Moon then? Much faster, cheaper and easier to
reach, etc, etc

~~~
ben_w
While I like the moon for those reasons, it has the downside of 14-day-long
night and wild surface temperature variation.

While solar + batteries will last an Earth night or a Mars night, for
something with a big enough population to be called a “colony” rather than a
“base”, you suddenly find you need either a nuclear reactor, or some very big
orbital mirrors, or a circumlunar powergrid.

None of these options are impossible, but they might make people prefer Mars.

~~~
tartoran
There are places on the moon where there is quasi permanent sublight. These
places also have some ice and are perfect for a moon base project.

 _Although not “eternal” in the original sense, they are sunlit for extended
periods, well beyond the typical lunar day-night cycle.

What is the significance of such features? Permanently lit areas of the Moon
are important for future habitation and use of the Moon for two principal
reasons. First, these sunlit areas are prime locations for the establishment
of solar photovoltaic arrays. The constant sunlight here means continuous
generation of electrical power using solar panels. This solves one of the most
difficult problems of lunar habitation, survival during the 354-hour lunar
night. Prior to the discovery of the quasi-permanently lit areas, we imagined
that the only feasible power source to survive this long night was nuclear
reactors. Such a power system does not exist and would require several tens of
billions of dollars to develop. So sunlit zones allow us to go to the Moon and
stay there without this expense and technology development.

The second advantage of a sunlit area is that it is thermally benign. The
surface temperatures at the lunar equator and mid-latitudes depend almost
entirely upon incident solar illumination and range from less than -150° to
over 100° C, a 250° temperature-swing over the course of a day. In contrast,
the surface temperature of these quasi-permanent lit areas is nearly constant
– a nice, toasty -50° ± 10° C. This simplifies the thermal design of surface
habitats and equipment and greatly relieves the energy required for thermal
control at an outpost.

The sunlit areas of the poles occur in close proximity to high concentrations
of water ice and other volatiles at the poles of the Moon. Their presence
indicates the lunar poles are the best places we have found off-planet for
human habitation. Constant sunlight, benign temperatures, near the water and a
great view – that’s prime real estate._

[]: [https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/new-light-on-the-
lu...](https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/new-light-on-the-lunar-
poles-156800678/)

https

------
bimmer44
I believe this post ignores the implications of increased surface level
radiation (Mars does not have a protective magnetosphere). See the two
articles I link below.

A structure like this might make sense for a shorter mission - but considering
the thought experiment asks what structure would be suitable for a long term
Musk-style settlement I don't think thin ETFE would be enough.

At least part of the radiation risk is temporary solar events, so perhaps you
could use a slightly hardened version of ETFE as the author suggests but keep
all human activity near regularly placed deep shelters to retreat to when
radiation spikes are detected?

[https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex...](https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Exploration/The_radiation_showstopper_for_Mars_exploration)

[https://phys.org/news/2016-11-bad-
mars.html](https://phys.org/news/2016-11-bad-mars.html)

~~~
DennisP
The article's author points out that normal radiation on Mars is about the
same as background radiation in Ramsar, Iran. Residents there have normal
lifespans and cancer rates. Solar storms are a problem but fortunately, they
give you enough warning to take shelter.

[https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/omg-space-
is-f...](https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/omg-space-is-full-of-
radiation-and-why-im-not-worried/)

~~~
bimmer44
Thanks for this interesting link - I take back my criticism of the article!
Based on your comment and that of t3hz0r it sounds like the martian colonists
would be fine with this setup, as long as they mainly worked and lived in
shielded habitats within the ETFE covered areas and also had underground
shelters for emergency radiation protection.

~~~
imglorp
I'll just point out that a Boring Co machine will fit inside a Starship.

Underground may be the only way to live, given that radiation dosage is
cumulative, 24/7, it may not be possible to live on the surface at all in
inflated domes. Maybe they're better suited for equipment storage and
agriculture.

~~~
mantap
Why bother going then? I mean you can live underground on Earth much more
easily.

~~~
baq
Because it’s there. Some people like living in unusual places.

------
pizzaparty2
I thought going underground was the way to go. I wasn't imagining a
"pressurized tunnel" but rather a pressurized underground complex filled with
tunnels and rooms (minecraft).

But maybe pressurizing an underground complex with walls made out of ...Mars
is more difficult than building something on the surface?

Going underground seemed like it had limitless room for easy expansion.

I like the authors suggestion and it does sound better than a dome but living
underground seems safer to me.

~~~
david_draco
Yes, it is curious that natural land features are not exploited more. You can
put that city wherever you want on Mars.

Cover a canyon (walls for free). Use lava tubes. Or search for any peculiar
geological feature that is amendable. I don't get why the assumption is a
completely flat, desert surface.

~~~
9nGQluzmnq3M
Expandability. If you need more space in any direction, all you need to do is
put up a few (high-tech) tarps, instead of excavating rock.

Cities on Earth are generally not being in canyons either, even though that
would give you "walls for free" as well.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Keeping air in and radiation out aren't concerns on Earth, so other factors
prevail in deciding where to build a settlement.

------
jefftk
> It turns out that the main advantage of domes – no internal supports –
> becomes a major liability on Mars. While rigid geodesic domes on Earth are
> compressive structures, on Mars, a pressurized dome actually supports its
> own weight and then some. As a result, the structure is under tension and
> the dome is attempting to tear itself out of the ground. Since lifting force
> scales with area, while anchoring force scales with circumference, domes on
> Mars can’t be much wider than about 150 feet, and even then would require
> extensive foundation engineering.

~~~
rimliu
Does it need to be more extensive than "make the very bottom ridge of the dome
wider than the dome itself (some kind of "lip") and place it into the groove
carved in the rock?

~~~
FeepingCreature
Yes... Remember that there's 1 bar of atmosphere in there. 150 feet (45m)
makes for a circle of 140m circumference but 1600m^2 area. Since 1 bar ~=
100_000Pa, each of that square meters has 100KN of upwards force on it, for a
sum of 160MN distributed over 140m of circumference or ~1MN per meter. So
assuming the mass of the dome is negligible, we're talking about the
equivalent strength of holding on to a mass of about 100 metric tons (compared
to Earth gravity) per meter of dome. Ie. the amount of support you need per
meter is the amount that you would need on Earth to hold up 100 metric tons
against gravity. That's about a Boeing 737. Per meter.

~~~
rimliu
Steel cable with a diameter of 1inch has a breaking strength of 47 tonnes.
Give it a safety margin and assume it can hold 10 tonnes. So you need 10
cables per meter. So I assume in case the "lip" being just a sheet of steel it
can be way thinner than 25mm.

[https://imgur.com/a/h92bLIp](https://imgur.com/a/h92bLIp)

~~~
FeepingCreature
Sure but you need to be sure that the thing you're attaching it to can hold
the weight. Ie. if the martian floor was the ceiling, you'd have to be able to
hang a plane off that attachment point without it ripping out.

In other words, your lip needs to be distributing force onto a sufficient
volume of ground to make up 100_000 metric tons of martian soil, per meter of
circumference.

~~~
rimliu
Actually I think just making the underground part cone-shaped would be much
better and simpler solution than that lip.

------
amluto
I would suggest a refinement. The author proposes that the vertical cables be
anchored in the ground with driven piles. This ought to work, but it’s
ignoring a detail: the Martian surface is presumably permeable enough to air
that the bottom of the structure would need to be lined. If the bottom were
strong enough (e.g. the same material as the top), then the cables could be
anchored to the bottom material. No piles needed. The resulting structure
would look very much like an air mattress sitting on the ground, and air
mattresses don’t need to be staked down.

~~~
samatman
The bottom will have to be lined anyway, because the Martian soil contains a
high fraction of toxic perchlorates.

This is also bad news for trying to establish any sort of agriculture.

------
crazygringo
Very interesting read.

Just curious though -- I'd always assumed domes were just a fun sci-fi
illustration/trope because they look cool -- not that they were necessarily
taken seriously by engineers.

Is the author just responding to that sci-fi concept (same thing as,
spaceships don't make a whoosh sound in space), or are there more serious Mars
plans that have genuinely proposed domes? I feel like the author isn't quite
clear who he's responding to.

Still interesting either way.

------
Someone
OK. Let’s assume the technology works out, and that this is realistic:

> the Mars city will need teams of specialists

> On Mars, SpaceX hopes to get by with “only” a million people and a lot of
> manufacturing automation

> What is the per capita area requirement on Mars? In a future post I’ll
> estimate this more rigorously but I believe it’s on the order of 10,000 sqft

How do you bootstrap to get there?

> If a Mars base is doubling its population every launch window, then the
> 5000->10000 person increment

So, let’s say you are such a specialist. What would entice you to sign up for
one of the first flights?

Given the disadvantages (a return flight will be years out, if ever in your
lifetime, and those in the first 10 or so flights will have to trust that
200-ish further flights will follow) I doubt ‘fame’ and ‘adventure’ will cut
it (possibly for some people, but try finding 25,000 or so for those first
flights, with the restriction on getting a good mix of expertises and a good
psychological mix)

I can think of:

\- coercion by your government

\- Earth being wasted enough to make Mars look enticing.

\- lots of unmanned flights, to ensure that the first flights going there have
an escape vehicle, if needed.

~~~
tomrod
Assuming my family is grown (and thus my direct life responsibilities fully
attended), I'd sign up.

Recall the older generation that cleaned up at Fukushima.[0] These are folks
that knew their activities would be uncomfortable, may cause their death, but
ultimately was absolutely vital to the benefit of all mankind.

This view on life is not constrained to a single culture or background. Self-
sacrifice in such a way is often considered the highest pinnacle of morality
-- even under the auspices of selfish genes since the act does not directly
benefit descendants. Planting trees in your later years that the fruit may be
enjoyed generations after.

You may ask if I have any special skills. I do, but suppose I don't. In such a
place you will need grunts. And I'd be happy to join in to build humanity's
insurance policy to be a bit broader.

[0]
[http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/05/31/japan.nuclear.su...](http://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/asiapcf/05/31/japan.nuclear.suicide/index.html)

~~~
fastball
Pretty sure they'd want people in the prime of their life, not people with
grown children.

~~~
tomrod
All depends on the cost-benefit evaluation at the margin. To fill the
resource, the prime candidates may be too few to recruit, and the people with
grown children still relatively young and healthy available to make the trip
and contribute sufficiently.

------
knolax
What happens when the tent loses pressure? Wouldn't you then need fallback
supports with compressive strength? Although assuming the force exerted by
pressure is at least twice that of gravity (so that pressure minus gravity is
still greater than gravity by itself) the requirements for the fallback
supports probably don't have to hold as much load.

~~~
Cthulhu_
The whole thing would collapse. However, given a big enough scale, it would
take a long time even if there was what we would think is a big hole in it.
But even then, they'd have to have a number of contingency plans; a supply of
compressed air that can be manually released in case of a power outage for
example.

------
huntertwo
I don’t understand the dedication of resources to solving problems on Mars
when we have plenty of unsolved problems that affect people that are alive
today and suffering. Maybe they don’t have the allure of private profit but I
think it would be much more valuable to figure out how to grow and distribute
food in food insecure places than to figure out how to grow and distribute
food on Mars in addition to figuring out how to get there in the first place.

~~~
bpodgursky
India's space program is a huge point of pride for their country (and
rightfully so).

They have problems to solve. It doesn't mean that it's wrong to spend a
(relatively) tiny amount of money to give people something to aspire to, and
to take pride in accomplishing together. We can do two things at once.

You're only focus on the space program because it's technically similar to
food insecurity. But you're ignoring the 50% of the economy which is focused
on -- let's be honest -- irrelevant shit. Incredible sums of money (and time
and effort) go towards entertainment (hollywood), fashion, jewelry, vacations,
and other luxuries.

If you want to divert more resources towards solving world hunger, take it
from Hollywood. You don't need to strip bare a source of inspiration that
unites people and moves humanity forward.

~~~
huntertwo
It’s valid to spend money on entertainment as an individual and all economies
in the world have significant portions of the productivity of their population
going towards “irrelevant shit”. India spending money on a space program seems
like an insignificant amount of money to me compared to their total population
and is likely not enough money to solve their food problems. We agree on this
part. I spend money on vapid shit every day and so do millions of other
people. They’re not bad.

But, total resources for a Mars colonization effort seems like an order of
magnitude more expensive than a simple space program for the benefit of an
order of magnitude fewer people. In addition, the capital that is contributing
to these efforts (ie Bezos and Musk money) is much more concentrated and can
be mobilized in a much more precise manner. I don’t see Mars colonization as a
source of inspiration outside of these SV types, and that’s not a significant
enough population for me to find this justifiable.

------
empath75
Starship is cool but it ain’t magic. They haven’t changed the rocket equation.
It’s still going to be extraordinarily expensive to ship stuff to mars.

~~~
jiofih
You’re gonna have to provide a bit more context for that challenge,
considering all the information already available about it. Which figure do
you think is wrong?

~~~
empath75
The completely absurd suggestion that we’re going to be shipping millions of
tons of cargo to mars in this century, let alone this decade.

------
sornaensis
A bit off topic but:

It takes billions of dollars and many years just to construct things like
subway systems in developed countries.

The only way I see a mars mission happening is launching remote controlled
equipment over the course of decades to the red planet and building and
preparing everything as much as possible before so much as the first human
arrives. I don't see any other way it happens with how expensive and risk
averse we are as a society these days.

And even then, the likely scenario is sending and constructing return vehicles
for a very short human mission.

And that's all assuming we figure out how to get people from here to there in
a space ship for so many weeks in the first place!

Maybe I'm just more pessimistic than the average HN user when it comes to sci
fi stuff like this, I don't know. I just can't see humans investing the money
to get over all these hurdles for a colony that we don't even know could work
out currently-- we can't even make self sustaining habitats here on earth!

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _It takes billions of dollars and many years just to construct things like
> subway systems in developed countries._

Much, if not most, of that being spent on lawsuits, as people block
construction projects, hoping to extract maximum value for themselves now that
they know the society needs their permission.

Having this in mind, I wouldn't be surprised if building infrastructure on
Moon or Mars ended up being cheaper than in the US - there are no land owners
up there just yet.

~~~
spenczar5
Do you have a source for your claim that much/most of subway construction cost
is lawsuits? I haven’t seen that one before.

~~~
capableweb
I'm pretty sure it's not true as most subway systems outside of the US (where
we are not as lawsuit-happy) still cost billions of dollars and takes many
years to construct.

------
throwawaymath
This is cool. Reading about the engineering challenges of a dome reminds me of
_Brunelleschi 's Dome_.

Does anyone else have good examples of popular scifi tropes which have formed
an engineering zeitgeist, but which are realistically very suboptimal?

------
amelius
> It’s a pitiless frozen vacuum. The Earth’s south pole in the middle of
> winter is closer to a beach in Hawaii than the nicest place on Mars on the
> nicest day of the year.

Wow, on the surface pictures made by the rover, it looks like a hot desert. I
understand that the lack of water causes this drastic difference in
appearance, but never would have imagined the difference to be so big.

~~~
Sharlin
It’s the near-vacuum, plus the radiation environment, mostly. Temperatures on
Mars can rise above freezing in the tropics, on a particularly warm summer
day, but the average temperature on the planet is several tens of degrees C on
the negative side. The author’s point is, I believe, that even in the southern
polar night a human being can survive, for a while, with stone age technology.
Whereas if the atmosphere around you isn’t breathable there’s not much you can
do without (literally) space age gear.

------
hinkley
The common conceit I see in these designs is trying to use a single pressure
vessel instead of nested ones. Humans only need a couple PSI to avoid physical
damage to skin and eyes, and if you just leave most of the nitrogen out if the
air you can drop the pressure significantly, still breathe, and not set things
on fire (flammability is tied to oxygen partial pressure). But even then, a
single fault in the system leaks all your air out and everyone dies.

Space habitats so far look more like submarines. It’s a bunch of tubes with
bulkheads. But they don’t scale, and some of the biggest ones so far are in
fact inflatables.

If you nested inflatable structures, the forces on them are due to the
pressures between the layers. You could run an outer chamber that requires a
respirator, an inner one for living space, and a third for medical. An alarm
system in each layer could begin capturing atmosphere in the event of a
breach, with emergency venting for over pressure. You would only risk half of
your air to a single failure.

The Eden project uses hexagons panels that resemble a blister on bubble wrap.
No accuse angles there. And why can’t you cable a dome down the same as this
design?

The idea of a dome is volume. If you aren’t going to build upward in the dome,
why bother? Building upward avoids interfacing with the envelope.

If you could work out how to construct a dome over the top of an existing
dome, you wouldn’t even have to move. Just deconstruct the inner dome and
begin expanding outward.

~~~
jiofih
This is all covered in the last third of the essay, including nested
structures, depressurization and the proposed structure has much, much higher
volume than a dome.

~~~
hinkley
Does he though? Felt like a throwaway sentence to me.

Also, his idea about hanging buildings from the wires is bunk. If you hang
your buildings from the tensile structure that is buoyed by air and you have a
rupture, now your buildings are going to collapse. Likely onto other
buildings. Since his design has no compressive strength at all there is no way
to address that issue.

[edit] what makes it more bunk is that in order to have tall structures, the
entire habitat has to be the same height as the structure, instead of placing
them near apex of a hemispherical structure. So he's just doubled the volume
versus a sphere. Also if you make a bubble structure that tall you have to
handle the pressure on the walls. I don't see where he mentions walls at all
except when talking about how dome walls suck. Not as much as trying to
pressurize a rectangular pressure vessel! The only place his solution shines
is in 'doming' a valley or a canyon, where a dome has a host of other problems
he hasn't even covered.

I can't remember if the bubbles on the Eden domes contribute strength to the
structure, but I expect you could design them to do so. Then the structure
begins to more resemble a bouncy castle (like the ISS inflatable hab unit).

------
pontifier
This is very similar to an idea I've had about terrestrial weather protection.
I wanted to use square ETFE pillows filled with hydrogen and tethered down to
make a flat roof over an area. Flamability is a concern, so testing is
required. I think it will be fine if I fully surround each hydrogen filled
pillow with nitrogen filled ones.

------
tempodox
Buckminster Fuller would be so disappointed.

~~~
eternalban
And that makes Walther Bauersfeld doubly disappointed:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther_Bauersfeld](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walther_Bauersfeld)

~~~
tempodox
For all practical purposes, the sky over Mars is its own planetarium. Until
light pollution reaches Earth level, that is.

------
foxhop
You smell humidified latex and vinyl.

You see a canopy flowing as-far-as-your-eye-can-see over a vast red desert
oasis.

The oasis sprawls out to form lakes, ponds, and streams and slowly terraforms
the landscape.

An autmosphere grows using natural systems like trees, shrubs, vines, and
prairy.

------
Causality1
You could use nuclear weapons to dig a bunch of upside-down domes into the
ground and seal the tops. It would only take a couple of years for
radioactivity to reduce to the point they could be inhabited without
protective clothing.

------
Avshalom
Bubbles!

you get the advantage of just having to ship an inflatable skin and then you
just dig out a hole some fraction of sphere, put the bubble in and then fill
the dirt back inside the bubble, now it's pressure supported and anchored.

------
jwilliams
As an aside - in the Kim Stanley Robinson Red/Green/Blue Mars series, the
tents are supported, rather than solely relying on pressure. This includes the
use of aerogels (or "airgels") for the struts.

------
davedx
Casey is also quite active on Twitter, been following him for a while. Well
worth a follow: [https://twitter.com/CJHandmer](https://twitter.com/CJHandmer)

------
choeger
Question: if we build such a structure and make really high, like 200m or
more, would the denser atmosphere provide significant protection against the
more nasty solar radiation?

------
rini17
Won't any plastic surface on Mars collect dust and thus become opaque over
time?

This was too a problem on a mars rover solar panel, can't remember which one.

------
packet_nerd
I didn't see addressed in the article, what about the ground? What keeps air
from leaking out through porous sand and rock?

~~~
jmull
I would guess by coating the floors/ground with sealing coating (and walls and
ceilings if you're underground).

It might need to be nice and thick to withstand wear, but maybe not that thick
depending on how tough the sealant is, how regular the surfaces and how well
maintained.

------
SideburnsOfDoom
How do you contain failures to the roof, or fix them?

Given that a tear would result in catastrophic depressurisation.

~~~
allannienhuis
ya, you'd need multiples of these anyway, just for the redundancy. That said,
it's fairly straightforward to put up separate walls that seal different
compartments. The rectangular shape makes expansion and inter-zone connections
a lot easier. Many air mattresses use similar techniques, and most inflatable
watercraft have that redundancy.

------
jacobwilliamroy
I find the popular colonialist view of space travel problematic, because if it
comes to fruition, then that means that earthlings couldn't figure out how to
take care of themselves. I don't see our salvation in the destructive
exploitation of other worlds.

~~~
nickparker
Orbital manufacturing will pay enormous technological dividends and _help_
take care of Earth.

If you step out of the parochial world where we happen to live on this planet,
the fact that every one of our manufacturing processes is built around an
ambient acceleration of 10 m/s^2 is weird and limiting. Beyond the freedom
from gravity, orbital manufacturing provides for absolutely perfect vibration
isolation (see LISA mission for an example).

Made in Space Fiber / FOMS is just the tip of the iceberg. Semiconductor fabs
are going up there sooner or later.

~~~
jacobwilliamroy
Are the energy savings really enough to justify sending stuff up and bringing
it back down?

~~~
nickparker
It's not about energy, it's about processes that literally don't work on
Earth.

See Made in Space fiber[0] for an early example - they're producing best-in-
class optical fibers which can't be made on Earth because convection
introduces crystalline impurities. Their value per kg is attractive enough to
make this a profitable business with today's launch costs.

As launch costs drop and people explore this space we're going to discover a
_lot_ of such problems.

Solutions / mixtures essentially don't separate in micro-g so you can grow
much better crystals, smelt very high entropy alloys, do all sorts of awesome
tissue engineering, etc.

The vibration isolation thing is also a huge force multiplier for all this.
Ultra-precision manufacturing is a game of complete and total process control.
Right now we spend absurd sums on isolation systems to block vibrations from
the truck driving by half a mile away. In orbit you just make sure anything
with moving parts is on a separate free body from your isolated component and
they fly in formation. The LISA mission is doing this to position ultra-
perfect reference objects and detect gravitational waves with baselines
measured in thousands of kilometers.

[0]: [https://madeinspace.us/capabilities-and-technology/fiber-
opt...](https://madeinspace.us/capabilities-and-technology/fiber-optics/)

~~~
jacobwilliamroy
I like this stuff. Materials engineering is cool.

------
Aeolun
But what if someone stabs your fabric!? We could never have teenagers on Mars.
You would never be able to find all the holes.

~~~
all2
Except at the edges, the fabric could fly at 100+ feet.

I want try this here to see how feasible it is for co trolled environmental
spaces.

~~~
Aeolun
Well, yes. But there’s still a ton of edges. My initial comment was flippant,
but the problem was serious. If it breaks, how would you find out?

~~~
sfink
Release a bunch of balloons into the air. They'd float to the leak.

If you want to get fancy, coat them with a glue that bonds to the ceiling
material, and they'd fix the leak too! At least temporarily. My first thought
was that they'd clog the hole automatically even without glue, but I think the
pressure differential would just squeeze them through.

------
bovermyer
Remind me again, why is terraforming bad?

~~~
krapp
Assume it was feasible to create a breathable atmosphere on Mars - that you
could just melt the polar ice like in Total Recall, and boom, instant blue
skies. Ignore the radiation Mars has been bathed in over the aeons, the
toxicity of the soil, the low light levels which might make photosynthesis
(and, thus, an ecosystem) impossible, and the lack of a magnetic field to
shield the planet from solar winds[0]. How would you keep the necessary amount
of atmosphere _on the planet_ given its small size and gravity relative to
Earth?

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars#Challenge...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Mars#Challenges_and_limitations)

~~~
bovermyer
So, it's not that it's bad, it's that it's a hard problem.

------
awinter-py
air bed mars here I come

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StuffedParrot
The author should read the mars trilogy. Its omission here is glaring.

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viburnum
Why did the author go to all the trouble to write this when within their own
argument it’s obvious that it’s impossible for humans to survive and flourish
without Earth?

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ReptileMan
The way I would do it is send a lot of self replicating terraforming robots.
That requires relatively little cargo - the only components that cannot be
manifactured on mars directly are smd and processors.

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simonh
I have a Nobel prize and a billion dollars of VC money right here in my back
pocket. All you've got to do is demonstrate your design for a self replicating
general purpose constructor robot. Actually anybody's demonstrable design will
do, and I'll give you a sweet cut of the VC money.

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jtolmar
As reductive as "just send self-replicating robots" is, it's still potentially
easier than a self-sustaining human civilization like the article is talking
about. Both require building the entire set of infrastructure to build
industrial infrastructure and computers. The robot approach requires that
every single factory and excavator is automated* - a huge feat. The human
approach requires every piece of infrastructure the robot one does, plus the
infrastructure to make pressurized domes, oxygen, food, heating, etc, etc, and
also requires shipping large numbers of humans through the vacuum of space -
also a huge feat. I don't think it's a given that either approach is easier.

* At least, automated enough that it's not bottlenecked by humans operating robot arms at a 30 minute feedback delay.

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saalweachter
I mean, the humans are just our best existing implementation of self
replicating constructors.

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kwhitefoot
So the solution is to tie the dome down at more points.

Sounds like a distinction without (much) difference.

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abricot
I think the point is, if you need to tie it down anyway, why limit yourself to
the dome shape.

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Aeolun
I guess it’s still a dome, just a huge one!

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baybal2
Have the man studied engineering? I don't feel so. Too much drama for a
trivial issue.

Point one, if a dome is in tension, you have not put enough weight.

Point two, tents are more manufacturable and robust for as long as cost is
concerned.

Point three, massive human space colonisation will only happen long, long
after we will get manufacturing automation, automated resource extraction,
automated farming, and power production to "sci-fi" levels and above.

We are not even 1% done on that, and that's the biggest point. Without getting
to at least 1% on that scale, the talk about even ~100 people research
outposts in space are pointless.

Adding to that, once humanity will reach that level, the entire idea of going
to space for something we don't get on earth will look silly.

Once we get robots to the point where one can get a skyscraper constructed
with a single mouse click, it will likely wouldn't matter much more if that
skyscraper will also have to be airtight and have life support installed.

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angrygoat
> In an open system, an effectively infinite supply of natural raw materials
> can be used, and wasted, as needed. The Mars city solves this problem by
> building on the surface of a planet that is made of all the raw materials it
> could need.

It makes me sad to think that exploration and settlement of the solar system
would take with it this kind of thinking, which is dangerously close to
rendering the Earth uninhabitable.

The Earth (and Mars...) are, in some sense, closed systems, in that
exploitation of resources has a hard limit beyond which we're looking at
biosphere collapse, or just plain resource exhaustion.

Maybe we could use space exploration to come up with a different way, and then
roll that back into how we live here on Earth.

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twodave
I think a lot of those concerns disappear once you leave Earth. What makes our
planet precious is how uncommon it is. The universe is incredibly vast, yet we
have not observed life on any planet but our own. So to me whatever the cost
is to a planet like Mars of putting life on its surface, that cost is well
worth it (the planet certainly doesn’t mind). The only ones who might be
offended by this idea are us Terrans.

~~~
brain5ide
We haven't tried that much planets yet, tbh.

