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Why not build the settlement in advance of the first landing? (piefed.social)
submitted 4 days ago* by to c/mars@discuss.tchncs.de
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Sending people to Mars, keeping them alive there, and bringing them back (optional) is hard.

Sending robots to Mars is easier. It's been done in 1997 and artificial intelligence and robotics have made major strides since.

A semi-autonomous* settlement with life support should be built before we send people there. This will save a lot of time and make the mission far more likely to succeed than if we treat it like a camping trip and make astronauts set their own "tents" up.

* with high-level operations being managed remotely, but real-time operations requiring automation due to the unavoidably high ping between Earth and Mars

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[–] 1 point 3 days ago (2 children)

You're ignoring the problem that can't be solved with current tech. Gravity. Humans don't do well in low gravity environments, and Mars is 1/3 the mass, and therefore 1/3 the gravity of Earth.

Venus would be much easier to get into habitable and self sustaining conditions. Venus just needs a few comets worth of ice and some cyanobacteria.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago

    Humans don't do well in low gravity environments

    Do we know this for sure? We know that humans don't do well in zero-G environments, but we have barely any dataponts between zero and one. Just a few weeks of data at 1/6 gravity from the Apollo missions.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago (1 child)

    You’re ignoring the problem that can’t be solved with current tech. Gravity.

    oh by the way. the issue can be solved with current tech. centrifuges. they produce the same net effect as a higher gravity. but also that is irrelevant as there's no clear proof that we actually need 1g. probably we could do well with less?

    AFAIK, other animals experience the world differently. for example, if an insect (like an ant) falls of a 12-story building, it doesn't even hurt itself when it hits the ground. that is because its surface area is so large compared to its mass, that it never really gets fast while falling down because the air resistance. also, fish don't even feel their own weight because they are about the same density as the water that they swim in, so in net effect, they barely feel any of their own weight.

    what i'm saying is, many animals seem to be doing just fine while not really experiencing the effects of gravity. what makes you so sure that we, the humans, definitely can't do without the gravity?

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  • [–] 1 point 3 days ago (1 child)

    It can be solved in space, sure. Just spin the craft at the right speed. You can't be strapped into a centrifuge all the time planetside, and be very productive.

    I'm pretty sure we need the gravity to be close to 1 G because we have had issues bringing astronauts back from the ISS, and no one has been on the ISS for as long as a round trip to Mars would currently take. It also does weird things to fetuses, so you couldn't have a self sustaining colony.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 days ago (1 child)

    What if they turn the spacecraft into a centrifuge on way back to Earth, like in Project Hail Mary?

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