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A City on Mars: Reality kills space settlement dreams
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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They would ship in a new scrubber but could they? We have to assume that a colony might need to self subsist for long periods, at least as long as Biosphere 2 was running, because of the practical considerations in shipping replacement parts to Mars.
Biosphere 2 is a great story and I wish there were more follow ups. They tried to set up favorable initial conditions and then seal the hatch. They found that the environment inside shifted and became inhospitable. The crops they planned on didn’t all sustain. Then they called it all off.
What if they had allowed the biosphere to keep shifting until it found its equilibrium point, and then set about finding advantages in that? Crops that would sustain in that?
An iterative process could build on mistakes and learnings. A one-shot, naive, all-or-nothing attempt where your starting conditions have to be just right… no wonder that it failed, but where was the next iteration? Why give it all up instead of tuning? I know it’s about money, but I wish someone with money cared enough to keep this thread going.
That's not why it failed:
In any case, it is still in operation.
These would be the problems that are currently being worked on prior to manned Mars (and to a lesser extent, lunar) missions.
We absolutely will not be shipping containers of food to Mars. That's absurd.
We absolutely will be. You have no concept of the amount of energy and resources needed to feed a single human being on Earth for one meal, let alone a whole colony on another world without a breathable atmosphere and possibly toxic dirt for an indeterminate time. Farming under the best of conditions is extremely energy consuming, then there's the need to either import hardware from Earth that is specially made for Mars or go old fashion and do a lot of it by hand. There is no where else in the solar system where you can just throw seeds at the ground in large enough quantities and feed whole cities. I do homesteading, my dad tried to be totally self sufficient foodwise when I was a teen. Guess what? Turns out that's really, really hard to do. And that's under the ideal conditions of Earth.
Lol no wonder you know so little about this
But you didn't have NASA level technology. There is a lot you can do to increase food production using less space if you're willing to pay the upfront and energy costs.
This is one of those things that will need baby steps.
— using local water and dirt are probably a minimum for any non-trivial stay
— yes we really need to be able to grow our own food, at least if we want to scale up from a temporary base for a handful to something larger or more permanent. Again, this is one of the things we probably need to go there to find out: is it possible to grow a lot of our own food?
I disagree, I believe we would ship containers of food to Mars in the early days. Just like we do for mcmurdo in Antarctica.
It's doubtful we'd ship past the initial landing and support phases, which was my point. It's likely we'd send several ships out for any permanent presence, but 18 months is just too long and too much investment between trips.
If you send say 20 people to Mars, let's do the math. An average person requires approximately 2 to 3 lb of food per day. 18 months = 6,500 days x 20 people = 131,000 pounds of food, or about 65 tons. You could probably drop the weight significantly by freeze drying it and recycling the water.
In any case, 65 tons isn't a whole lot - that's about what, half of a starship payload? Zubrin's a case for Mars likewise discussed the need to bring all of your food supplies over with you.
Now over many years you could build up enough buy a waste and build a recycling system to start recycling to buy a waste in a greenhouse, but we don't know how viable like greenhouse on Mars will be for growing food. It's likely going to have to be more of a grow lab/vertical farm setup. Very energy intensive.