Mars colonization will take off extremely rapidly, most likely.
Making propellant on Mars is easy, all you need is Hydrogen and power and you can make 16x as much mass in propellant as the Hydrogen you bring along. And this is with mere kilograms of equipment to process the martian atmosphere. Make no mistake, this is a big deal in a lot of different ways.
So that bootstraps you into being able to effectively explore Mars at all, because now you don't have to ship out all the propellant for the return trip, which is an exponential savings.
Now add to that the fact that Mars has a day similar to Earth and substantial quantities of subsurface ice (and small amounts of water in the surface soil). That means you can use fairly modest capital equipment (stuff you can transport using the same vehicles you send people, and capable of being powered fairly easily) to start mining water ice within the first handful of trips to the planet. Which means that you can have local supplies of: potable water, propellant, fuel for equipment that runs on internal combustion engines, breathable oxygen, and carbon monoxide (which I'll explain the significance of later).
With oxygen, abundant CO2, water, and inflatable structures you can start growing plants on Mars due to the light levels and day lengths. A colony could start supplying some of its own food within less than a decade.
But wait, there's more. Given the low Martian gravity it would be almost trivially easy to create an SSTO RLV that could travel back and forth between the martian surface and orbit, refueling on the surface with locally produced propellant. You could build these on Earth and send them over without crews and just enough propellant to make a powered, parachute assisted landing before being put into service. They could visit a station in Mars orbit which would make it easier to make trips back and forth to Earth.
Additionally, by using a cycler (a spacecraft which is on a permanent trajectory looping between Earth and Mars) you could significantly increase the amount of useful payload you could deliver to Mars and increase the comfort and safety of passengers. Although for bulk cargo you could use electric propulsion to push the cargo out of low Earth orbit over to Mars and then use aerocapture / aerobraking to bring the payloads within reach of an orbital tug at Mars that could bring it to a station where it could be ferried down to the surface.
Back to Martian resources. With carbon monoxide available all you need is energy in order to be able to effectively smelt metals such as iron, copper, or aluminum. Some of the rocks and regolith on Mars are effectively high grade ores, especially of iron. It would not take much equipment to be able to start producing builk amounts of steel. This could be used for all sorts of purposes in expanding a base into a full fledged settlement.
From there things accelerate quickly. It gets easier and easier to send things to Mars, to come back from Mars, and to build things on Mars. Capital investments on Mars start to make a huge amount of sense. A substantial power source on Mars (even just in the single megawatt range) is not merely a lifeline for a base it becomes the seed of a growing industrial base. With power and water you can process the atmosphere and bootstrap the chemical industry with all the products listed above. And with that you can smelt bulk metals, and make glass. You can also start making concrete and other building materials. You can start making buildings and farming structures where only a small fraction of the structure is composed of supplies shipped from Earth.
And that's really just square 1. From there you can move on to more advanced industry, more robust farming, more advanced technology, and so on. The very first visitors to Mars will likely be scientists, but the second wave will be dominated by engineers. Imagine what will be built with the thousands of tonnes of steel, concrete, aluminum, copper, and so forth that will be produced within only the first decade of this primitive industrial capacity coming online. Certainly more than a trailer park in the skies, far more.
All of this can be done today in the Sahara, or underwater, or on the top of K2, but nobody has done them there. Why should Mars be any different?
Yes, one can do these things, but will the economics work out such that it's actually feasible? For example, solar power on Mars is pitiful, and there are no fossil fuels. Where does the power for industrial production come from? Nuclear reactors? How expensive is it to bootstrap a reactor on another planet? Where does the coolant come from without a nearby river?
The Sahara lacks a CO2 atmosphere, it also lacks substantial quantities of subsurface ice.
Besides which, about 4 million people live in the Sahara today, despite many of the surrounding countries being some of the poorest and least developed on Earth.
The point of living on Mars is not to find the most convenient place possible to live. That would not be Mars, nor would it be the Sahara, nor would it even be Copenhagen, Dubai, or the Netherlands (where 10 million people live on land that used to be under the sea). But people live in those places even so because it turns out there are compelling reasons to live there. Just as, I believe, there are compelling reasons to live on Mars (much more so than in living in the Sahara).
Edit: most people living in the developed world today are swaddled in the embrace of a vast web of advanced technology and industry. The hammer used to build the home down the street was mined and forged an ocean away. The phone you use every day contains components developed and manufactured across a handful of continents. The food you eat could come from next door or across the world. But that web of technology and industry is familiar to us, whereas one involving living on Mars is alien and implausible to our sensibilities. But over the course of decades and centuries as technology advances, as industry develops, as the unusual becomes more commonplace, maybe people will start to view life on Mars in a similar fashion. Maybe it won't seem so impractical when the bounty of martian agriculture feeds substantial populations, when martian industry is a multi-billion dollar or multi-trillion dollar business, when cities full of people exist on Mars, and so on.
Wow, my creative mind is tingling with ideas of what this could lead to. Martian politics? Martian colonies rebelling and forming their own 'nation'? Race and gender issues on Mars? Possibility of wars between Earth and Mars over the most easily accessible resources? Arms race? Etcetc... whoa!
Because Mars can 1) support a large human population, with industrial infrastructure, and 2) is situated closer to the majority of the resources of the solar system. It's a foregone conclusion that if humanity gets off the Earth, that Mars will be a future economic superpower.
(The middle of the Sahara and certain places underwater may also become settled for similar reasons: proximity to natural resources. K2, not so much.)
> solar power on Mars is pitiful, and there are no fossil fuels. Where does the power for industrial production come from?
The economics of solar power are completely different for Mars.
Given that Mars is about 1/10th as massive as the Earth, launching from its surface to space is vastly cheaper. In fact, the reduced gravity on Mars is forgiving enough that we can contemplate building a space elevator there with materials that are currently commercially available.
I'm not convinced Mars can support a large human population even with initial massive economic subsidy. Pregnancy in the high radiation and low gravity of Mars may result in low fertility rates and some very... interesting, (misshapen, if not defective) new humans. Unfortunately the only studies, which were kind of bad, were conducted in zero G and not 0.4 G [1], and the embryos were quickly transferred into mice in 1G for neonatal development and birth.
Even if fetal development in microgravity is OK, absent DNA repair technologies, radiation induced decay of the gene pool over the generations may require a continual replenishment of fresh, "unmutated" DNA from Earth--at least until humans evolve sufficiently on Mars. It is not practical to assume no additional radiation exposure on Mars: even if humans are buried underground, and do not come out during the occasional solar storm, they must occasionally walk on the Martian surface. Otherwise it's a robot's world, and human colonization is merely an exercise in preserving the human race though Martian burial in case of Earth apocalypse.
> radiation induced decay of the gene pool over the generations
Exercise: think of inexpensive ways of mitigating this. Took me about 2 seconds to think of 3.
Low gravity might be an issue. Given the record on biological processes we thought earth-normal gravity would be vital for, I doubt it, however. I did find one mention of lower fertility rates from microgravity.
> Exercise: think of inexpensive ways of mitigating this. Took me about 2 seconds to think of 3.
instead of "leaving it as an exercise to the reader", why don't you list your three cheap ways to mitigate gene pool decay? coz i can't see any cheap ways - anything coming from earth will cost an arm and a leg.
> coz i can't see any cheap ways - anything coming from earth will cost an arm and a leg.
Good point: Relatively inexpensive.
1) Zygotes, sperm and eggs are very small. Even with radiation shielding, it's not that expensive to ship a whole lot of them from Earth. These can be used to "refresh" genetic information from Earth and ensure enough genetic diversity. If medical technology has progressed far enough, it may even be possible to send sequencing data and avoid shipping material altogether.
2) Keep everyone born on Mars underground and shielded from radiation, at least until they can store their genetic material in radiation immune facilities for breeding later.
3) Everyone immigrating from Earth would be wise to store and ship their own genetic information. This can be sent on the same flights with the "backup diversity" information in (1), which would greatly minimize the cost. The marginal cost for another sample of eggs/sperm is going to be pretty low.
Also keep in mind that not every launch has to contain such information.
For example, if the fertility rate is lower (but not zero), you can try a "quantity, not quality" approach. My parents had like a half dozen siblings each; nowadays people only have one or two kids but they could easily try for more within a lifetime.
The simple answer about the Sahara is that's its (1) in our biosphere and (2) there are too many people about.
Part of the reason space is so attractive is because it's empty - land goes to who gets there, not who has force of arms to hold it, and there's a hell of a lot of it out there.
The other reason is, you can do whatever you want, and not endanger the lives, or livelihoods of other members of the human race. Toxic spills on Mars, or asteroids or in orbital foundries don't endanger anyone. There's a massive advantage to be had pushing heavy industry and mining off-world.
> land goes to who gets there, not who has force of arms to hold it
no, this will never be true, whether its mars or earth. Right now, the other planets isn't "claimed" because it's not economical, nor worthwhile (yet). I bet you when the sufficient incentive and technology exists to colonize another planet/moon, the various gov'ts will start claiming land, using the thread of force.
An unfortunate truth. Many settlers who came to the New World did so to escape persecution from the existing regimes in the Old World. But upon arrival, they created their own societies, cultures and governments that persecuted new groups of people.
I'm afraid that the saying "you can take the [person] out of the trailer park, but you can't take the trailer park out of the [person]" applies to all of humanity.
Excellent run-down of the situation. Additionally, the asteroid belt is figuratively next-door, and the reduced launch costs from the surface only make it easier to reach. Mars will be the center of future space commerce, not Earth.
Thanks for this. My digestion of this was that "Mars has a competitive advantage over earth with its low gravity, and a competitive advantage over orbit because of the proximity to resources, which could make it incredibly important for large scale industrial production." Hadn't thought of it that way.
Making propellant on Mars is easy, all you need is Hydrogen and power and you can make 16x as much mass in propellant as the Hydrogen you bring along. And this is with mere kilograms of equipment to process the martian atmosphere. Make no mistake, this is a big deal in a lot of different ways.
So that bootstraps you into being able to effectively explore Mars at all, because now you don't have to ship out all the propellant for the return trip, which is an exponential savings.
Now add to that the fact that Mars has a day similar to Earth and substantial quantities of subsurface ice (and small amounts of water in the surface soil). That means you can use fairly modest capital equipment (stuff you can transport using the same vehicles you send people, and capable of being powered fairly easily) to start mining water ice within the first handful of trips to the planet. Which means that you can have local supplies of: potable water, propellant, fuel for equipment that runs on internal combustion engines, breathable oxygen, and carbon monoxide (which I'll explain the significance of later).
With oxygen, abundant CO2, water, and inflatable structures you can start growing plants on Mars due to the light levels and day lengths. A colony could start supplying some of its own food within less than a decade.
But wait, there's more. Given the low Martian gravity it would be almost trivially easy to create an SSTO RLV that could travel back and forth between the martian surface and orbit, refueling on the surface with locally produced propellant. You could build these on Earth and send them over without crews and just enough propellant to make a powered, parachute assisted landing before being put into service. They could visit a station in Mars orbit which would make it easier to make trips back and forth to Earth.
Additionally, by using a cycler (a spacecraft which is on a permanent trajectory looping between Earth and Mars) you could significantly increase the amount of useful payload you could deliver to Mars and increase the comfort and safety of passengers. Although for bulk cargo you could use electric propulsion to push the cargo out of low Earth orbit over to Mars and then use aerocapture / aerobraking to bring the payloads within reach of an orbital tug at Mars that could bring it to a station where it could be ferried down to the surface.
Back to Martian resources. With carbon monoxide available all you need is energy in order to be able to effectively smelt metals such as iron, copper, or aluminum. Some of the rocks and regolith on Mars are effectively high grade ores, especially of iron. It would not take much equipment to be able to start producing builk amounts of steel. This could be used for all sorts of purposes in expanding a base into a full fledged settlement.
From there things accelerate quickly. It gets easier and easier to send things to Mars, to come back from Mars, and to build things on Mars. Capital investments on Mars start to make a huge amount of sense. A substantial power source on Mars (even just in the single megawatt range) is not merely a lifeline for a base it becomes the seed of a growing industrial base. With power and water you can process the atmosphere and bootstrap the chemical industry with all the products listed above. And with that you can smelt bulk metals, and make glass. You can also start making concrete and other building materials. You can start making buildings and farming structures where only a small fraction of the structure is composed of supplies shipped from Earth.
And that's really just square 1. From there you can move on to more advanced industry, more robust farming, more advanced technology, and so on. The very first visitors to Mars will likely be scientists, but the second wave will be dominated by engineers. Imagine what will be built with the thousands of tonnes of steel, concrete, aluminum, copper, and so forth that will be produced within only the first decade of this primitive industrial capacity coming online. Certainly more than a trailer park in the skies, far more.