Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

His cost numbers for reliable supply from either nuclear are solar are in the $150B per GW range. A reactor like that might serve 1.5M terrestrial customers. The thing is martians use electricity for everything while flatlanders use a variety of energy sources. Also martians use electricity to provide services that are provided by the ecosystem on Earth such as breathable atmosphere, climate control, prevailing oxidization states, etc. His chart says martians use 100x as much water, methane and other primary resources so that can support 150,000 martians which also take 1500 Starship flights at a cost of $150B. Solar has the advantage is that it can be deployed as scalable modules to support the first 1,500 martians as well as the next. However 20 or 30 years in the future those martians need a new power plant. If they were serious about establishing a durable presence on Mars they'd also be reproducing and growing in population.

Eric Drexler gave up on the Gerard K. O'Neill vision because he foresaw the problem of that kind of economy being dependent on the Earth for some high-leverage aspects of technology. A Mars colony has to expect that terrestrial sponsors may give up on the project someday so they have political reasons to develop self-sufficiency. (e.g. it's hard to see how a Mars colony would be profitable to the Earth as a whole) Some radical advanced in manufacturing that allows a small group of people to manufacture everything they need for their survival on a strange world seems necessary.

Sooner or later the martians will need to build their own solar panels, batteries, nuclear reactors, whatever. Today I think it is a profitable research area to look into manufacturing techniques that might let a colony of 15,000 martians be largely self-sufficient in that this research could pay off here on Earth.

Some other stuff martians will need:

- Replacement rubber caskets for airlocks and the kilometres of plumbing. Synthetic rubber seems petrol based; natural rubber trees seem to need a lot of space.

- A source of fabric for clothes and other cloth stuff. Presumably natural fibres like hemp or cotton or plastic fibres. Sheep, I think, will be right out. Mars is vegan.

- An enormous amount of greenhouses (a lot of glass) or grow houses (energy, insulation) for growing the vegan diet. I assume a Martian colony will look something like this: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150070/almerias-sea...

I am not that worried that petrol can be replaced for "petrochemical" applications. Somewhere there is going to be a carbon processing system that harvests CO2 from the atmosphere and either feeds it to plants or cracks it into CO + O2 and builds up larger molecules. Between Fisher-Trospch type chemistry, pyrolysis of waste products and other methods, not to mention advanced biotech, quite a bit should be possible. If we're ever going to have carbon neutral chemicals we'll have to figure this out for terrestrial use.

Nice! Would that fit (unmounted/folded) inside a reasonable number of rockets?

Wonder also what’s the plans to process those chemicals to finite products, in quality high enough to leverage auto-production for those facilities (some) spare parts.

It's basically the same stuff the rockets themselves are made of. Large towers with miles of plumbing and corrosion resistant tanks.

I did a lot of analysis for asteroid mining and one of the things I worried about the most was what to do with the volatiles that come out when you start digging into the asteroid (believe it or not some of them have a lot of trapped gas.) In fact you might want to separate the volatiles out first thing but that involves having storage tanks to put them in.

Once you got a metals line running it wouldn't be hard to make storage tanks (they don't need to be very strong) but you don't want to waste valuable volatiles plus the volatiles could even be dangerous.

On Mars it is different. Water is precious but martians are likely to vent waste CO2 to the atmosphere because you are going to get all your carbon from that atmosphere.

Either way you are going to need storage tanks for resource extraction, chemical factories and such and the quick way to get them would probably be taking Starships apart at least until they have steelmaking working.

Starship can land 100 tonnes on the moon if it can use all its fuel on the way down, it doesn't do much better than the Apollo LEM did if it returns to cislunar space. It's a reasonable plan to land a Starship with a bulldozer on the moon, lay it down into a trench and cover it up with regolith to make a habitat.

for a lot of stuff we make from rubber various types of silicone polymers would probably work too.

>Today I think it is a profitable research area to look into manufacturing techniques that might let a colony of 15,000 martians be largely self-sufficient in that this research could pay off here on Earth.

I don't know how they will be able to manufacture CPUs on Mars, I'm guessing 8-bit CPUs will be more possible than modern day CPUs. I think even Motorola 68K will still require advanced manufacturing equipment to transport to manufacture.

I guess with close to 50 years of CPU design knowledge they would be able to design a decent 8-bit CPU with 16-bit address space. Maybe they would use first 512 bytes as a data/code cache to speed up certain calculations (trig functions) (Not a EE, studying Mechanical). Although there is a lot of code available for Z80, 6502, 8080 CPUs.

I think rather than experimenting with fabbing on Mars, you would probably be better off sending an absurd amount of CPUs from Earth. A 300mm wafer weighs 150 grams and can fit 30k Raspberry Pi Nano CPUs on it, 2mm^2 on 40nm.

If you send up a wafer per person, which can be laser cut and placed into more easily constructed electronics locally, you've got hundreds of years to solve the fab problem in a worst case, Earth no longer exists situation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com