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Comment by mongol | Hacker News Reader

It is an interesting problem of energy. How would a robot bulldozer or excavator be powered? They require more power than a rower.

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Solar still works on Mars as does fission. Plenty of stuff about this online if you look.

Sure, but solar is not great for digging underground. So now you need a solar station and wires connected to it, and that already complicates things significantly and massively increases the chance of failure.

small nuclear power plant would be the first thing sent to mars, or many arrays of solar cells. then pods of batteries, then construction materials, then equipment, then humans.

realistically, the assembly could be done remotely, and you would want at least two habitable shielded pods with a very large excess of food/oxygen/supplies stored by the time humans arrived.

This might seem impossible, but i don't think it's particularly difficult, the only major hurdle would be the budget. The rocket vessel will make a good living pod, the small nuclear reactor was studied by the US Gov in the 50s, so that shouldn't be a problem, except maybe cooling, but again that should be a solvable problem.

They don't require more than a rover if you accept them doing their work far slower than their normal earth equivalents. Hence sending them years in advance to dig out a some holes that would only take a few days for excavators on Earth.

While speed is a factor as well, you still need a lot more energy consumption to move a mass of rock&dust some distance away than to move a small rover. This immediately follows from the formula for work and the gravitational force.

Given enough time, you can dig out a house foundation with a spoon, power is not an issue here. The less power you have available the slower you work. If your robots wear out, you send more.

The real problem is finding enough time and money to waste on such a fruitless endeavor. If that can't be managed it nullifies the entire problem of digging a hole on Mars since a Mars base is nothing but a waste of time and money. Wasting time and money is table stakes.

If we can spend $100 billion on blowing people up, we can certainly afford a Mars colony.

That's easy to claim, but it's not so easy to actually convince a government of this.

Before you get angry with me: I'm not saying this is the way it ought to be, but it's the way it is.

As terrible as it is, blowing people up at least serves a purpose (an evil, mean-spirited, ego-driven purpose). A colony on Mars is entirely pointless. It would be like spending $100 billion on a performance art project.

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