
Living on Mars: The Stuff You Never Thought About - szczys
http://hackaday.com/2017/08/17/living-on-mars-the-stuff-you-never-thought-about/
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baron816
I think there are going to be some very serious mental health issues for
people trying to colonize Mars, especially if they're taking a one way trip.
First, you have to deal with a different day-night cycle and the reduced
gravity. That stuff matters for humans who have gotten used to 24 hour days
and 9.807 m/s^2 gravity over the last 200,000 years.

Then, you're going to have to deal with boredom and cabin fever. Mars seems
cool in the abstract--"explore another world!"\--but its just a big,
completely dead desert. I'm betting the novelty of it will wear of in an hour
(tops) of landing there. There really isn't that much for humans to learn by
going there in person. Those people will just have to stay in a tiny space for
years on end without a lot to do. Think of what a bust the video game No Man's
Sky was. People hated it because it was boring. But I'm sure exploring planets
in that game was much more interested than Mars will be.

As the years go on, loneliness and despair will set in. Those first colonists
will likely spend the rest of their lives pretty much with who they landed
with. Their lives won't change much at all over the decades they're there, and
they'll have no hope for things to ever be different.

Settling to Mars seems so glamorous, but it really will not be a fun affair.
It'll be extremely expensive, really depressing, and probably pointless.

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LeifCarrotson
> Then, you're going to have to deal with boredom and cabin fever. Mars seems
> cool in the abstract--"explore another world!"\--but its just a big,
> completely dead desert. I'm betting the novelty of it will wear of in an
> hour (tops) of landing there.

Have you ever been backpacking in a desert, mountains, wilderness? It
continues to be amazing for days. Anything that new and different definitely
induces novelty more than an hour tops.

Also, have you seen the data returned by the rovers? There's stuff to explore
and discover everywhere. Mars may have less biome variation (on a scale that
can be sensed by unprotected humans, and for whatever the 'bio' of 'biome'
means on a lifeless world) than Earth, but it's not featureless.

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theothermkn
This strikes me as the usual motivated denial that you get from Mars
enthusiasts. You're not going to "go exploring" forever. At some point, it's
just more rocks.

A better analogy than backpacking would be permanently living underwater at
great depth. To leave your underwater habitat, you have to scuba dive or get
into a submarine. You never get an unmediated experience of the outside world.
Your skin touches the inside of your suit. You smell only the air from your
breathing apparatus and your own breath. Forever.

I'd be way more impressed with Mars enthusiasts if they'd admit that this is a
problem and then describe how they'll overcome it, rather than just insisting
that it all really is going to be one big breathless adventure. It's like
mentioning boredom on Mars is a taboo that upsets frail escapists.

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resu_nimda
I'd be more impressed with Mars pessimists if they'd admit that it's just not
really the kind of thing that interests them rather than insisting that it's
going to be a terrible nightmare for anyone.

The GP said the novelty will wear off in one hour, tops. Sorry, to some
people, that's a ridiculous statement. Pointing out that it would probably
last longer than that is not insisting that it's going to be one big
breathless adventure.

People have lived in solitude and isolation before. People have lived on the
space station for extended periods of time. There are people that don't really
care to come home to their comfortable home and family every night. I'm pretty
sure there are some people who would not be miserable living on Mars.

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thaumaturgy
Common among computer geeks: "I don't like this thing, and I'm perfectly
rational, therefore nobody else would either."

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nercht12
But I insist I'm not like that, and I'm perfectly rational, therefore nobody
else is either...

... wait a minute... DOH!

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maxxxxx
I remember a talk by a NASA guy that a first try would be to land some people
with limited supplies on the Antarctic and let them live autonomously for a
few years. He said before we go to Mars we need the ability to do this easily.

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grondilu
Or try an other biosphere experiment[1]. The problem is, it would cost almost
as much as a real mars mission. So it's not sure it'd be worth it.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2)

~~~
LeifCarrotson
> The problem is, it would cost almost as much as a real mars mission.

I understand that's what the estimates say, but how is that reasonable? The
mars mission would include a biosphere of some kind, right?

Is the Biosphere 3 estimate far too high? Or is the Mars mission estimate far
too low?

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deegles
I've thought about a lot of things... think of the massive supply chain that
would be needed to build semiconductors, for example. Or even something simple
like... cheese. There's a reason Musk estimated that a million people would be
needed for a fully self sufficient colony.

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jessriedel
Semiconductors are one of few products that are so value dense ($/kg) that you
can ship them from Earth for a reasonable marginal price. It's everything else
with a long production chain (or very large upfront costs, like mining) that's
infeasible to do on Mars without 1M+ people.

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semi-extrinsic
I imagine construction materials will be a right pain. E.g. concrete is right
out, as is most metals, since you need a lot of carbon (coal) in the
production process. Those two are pretty important in tunnel digging.

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asploder
What exactly would a Mars colony need to dig tunnels for?

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Matt3o12_
According to many experts, this would be an easy way to shield humans from the
radiation. A glass dome could also work but would be more expensive and could
be fragile.

On the other hands, tunnels do not provide any sunlight but I don't know if
humans can actually use the sunlight on Mars (so a dome might be necessary as
an addition or completely irrelevant anyways).

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Apocryphon
The lower gravity than Earth bit sounds like the most debilitating thing about
Martian colonization. One of the reasons why I think Venus cloud cities would
be a better long-term bet for baseline humanity:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8985151](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8985151)

~~~
justin66
Nobody actually knows what an extended period living in 38% of Earth-normal
gravity will do to a person. It seems probable that there will be bone density
problems that might not be correctable with any existing drug or exercise
regimen, but there's no evidence it will be as systematically debilitating as
living for an extended period in microgravity.

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0xffff2
Are the bone density problems actually a _problem_ if you never plan to return
to Earth?

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jerf
We don't know. If the bones are "adapting" to a lower gravity, and stop
getting weaker at some point, then it may be OK. If the bones are losing
strength all the time, then it may not be.

And, of course, bones are not monolithic atomic objects but complex living
things. Different parts of them may be described by either of those two cases,
or others.

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jcriddle4
Also I haven't seen any data on what happens if you break a bone in low or
zero gravity. Would it even heal?

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chrismealy
So basically Mars would be a prison, with robots doing most of the work. Might
as well just send the robots and leave the humans on Earth. If people want to
live in a cave they can do that here.

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rm_-rf_slash
Technically the sole inhabitants of Mars _are_ robots so you're not too far
off.

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erdle
they get unlimited data but the network is crap

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takingflac
The bandwidth is improving. If they could fix that 240000ms ping it would at
least be bearable.

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hellofunk
Interesting article, however, it did make one erroneous assumption: I have
thought about these things before.

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mikhailfranco
Don't forget, that if you're unlucky enough to be an American (like Musk), you
will still fall under the interplanetary/intersolar/intergalactic grasp of the
IRS.

Even an 'offplanet' bank will fall under FATCA and FBAR.

Renounce before blast off!

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devrandomguy
Perfect timing! Isaac Arthur just kicked off Outward Bound with an in depth
look at colonizing Mars.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmFOBoy2MZ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmFOBoy2MZ8)

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jononor
Wonder if one can extract power from the static buildup caused by dust moving
on surfaces (triboelectric effect).

~~~
bluGill
You can, but static electricity tends to be very high voltage but lot wattage.
You typically cannot collect any meaningful amount of power.

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BurningFrog
Having your house covered in a few feet of regolith sounds like roofs and
walls to me, not "living underground".

Windows will be hard. Maybe you could have them on the side facing away from
the sun, but I think general cosmic radiation is also a big problem.

More realistically, you'd have "camera windows". A camera on the outside that
displays an image on a screen inside of what you _would_ see if there was a
window there.

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lindgrenj6
Very cool article! It will certainly be interesting to see how we get around
these hurdles. The most interesting one to me was definitely the lack of being
able to electrically ground anything, we will definitely have to design newer
electrical motors etc to get around that!

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maxerickson
It wouldn't really impact devices, it would impact buildings.

(for household service, ground and neutral are bonded at the service panel,
grounding is a safety issue, not something electrical devices depend on to
function)

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jostmey
Sounds like we need to find caves on mars to convert into easy shelters

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executesorder66
Or dig out underground rooms, and live dwarffortress style.

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jlebrech
mhh if only someone owned a rocket company AND a boring company.

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szczys
I think we need biologically inspired robots. Have you seen a ground digger
wasp (Eastern Cicada Killer)? They can mine many times their body weight in
hard soil each day.

Landing pods on the surface and then covering them in regolith is going to
call for heavy machinery. A boring machine is also heavy machinery. These cost
an enormous amount to get to Mars. But insect-like robots over a large
timescale could do the work at a lower cost.

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semi-extrinsic
> [Insects] can mine many times their body weight in hard soil each day.

This is because of the square-cube-law. Basically, muscle strength is
proportional to cross-sectional muscle area, while muscle weight is
proportional to volume. So when you take e.g. an insect and start scaling it
up, it gets heavier faster than it gets stronger, thus strength relative to
weight decreases.

But: I'd seriously doubt that wasps can mine more than an excavator.

Let's take e.g. a Caterpillar 300.9D excavator (weighing 950 kg, same as about
a million wasps). That excavator can lift 100+ kg with every swing of the
bucket, so if you assume the wasps dig 30x their body weight, the excavator
beats the wasps if it can dig more than 300 buckets in one day. That sounds
easy - there are 480 minutes in an 8 hour working day, and a bucket each
minute is very doable. And on Mars you'd have it fully robotic running 24/7.

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dragonwriter
> Let's take e.g. a Caterpillar 300.9D excavator (weighing 950 kg, same as
> about a million wasps).

Not that it matters, given the way you did the calculation, but it's closer to
10+ million.

