How does the colony operate in order to become a 2000 person colony as soon as possible?
Seriously? If population growth is important to the plan, send only fertile women and a large sperm bank.
Quote from: sdsds on 04/24/2014 01:40 amSeriously? If population growth is important to the plan, send only fertile women and a large sperm bank.Population growth won't come from breeding. 100 fertile females birthing say 6 kids each and raising them would take a lot of effort, and doesn't allow for the farming, exploration, and general colony growth to support it.
This came up in a recent thread. I dont think the problem is in building new living area etc but in reducing the supplies from earth per colonist per year.Each batch of a hundred colonists could arrive with essentially the same proportion of infrastructure as the 100 before. This might mainly consist of the habitat that kept them alive during the voyage, plus some inflatable modules deployed on the surface for example. If you can do it once you would expect to be able to at least keep doing that.
You might hope to do better than this, with things getting easier for later colonists, but before aiming for that you have to overcome the problem that could lead to you doing worse:A single reusable vehicle could drop off another hundred people every 2 years or so, but a single vehicle still does not allow linear growth of the population if each new colonist needs a ton of supplies from earth/year. In that case you would need 200 tons of supplies the first mission, 400 tons of supplies in the second, 600 in the third and so on, requiring a growing fleet of vehicles leaving each window.
Since we are talking about rapid growth I would just worry about how a group of 100 colonists could survive for a couple of decades with very little resupply. Just worry about basic recycling of food and oxygen, then the next most obvious consumable and so on. You dont need to worry about large construction industries such as building more habs until population growth comes from babies instead of landing more habs.(edit: if you are sending 100 every 2 years I guess your basic goal is 40 years of life support with very little resupply, just to get you to that 2000 figure. Obviously by the end you would have to have a second better solution in place )
The real question is: how does the colony/outpost grow beyond the 6 (or at most a few dozen) scientists and technicians on a two-year tour of duty, to a hundred people?
{snip}That is definitely also an interesting question. Though I don't think you grow an outpost of 6 to 100… you start with 20 or 30 don't you?
Put simply, If you want to set up a colony on Mars, especially one that can expand to handle over 2000 people, you're not only going to have to preposition a substantial amount of supplies, but you should prefabricate as much of the living structures that you will need in advance as possible. This would include prefabricating the structures needed for farms as well as habitats. 2000 people are going to need a LOT of room, as they will pretty much be spending about 85% of their lives indoors. Simulating an out of doors environment will be psychologically crucial to the mental well being of the inhabitants. Typically I go into the early 20th Century polar explorers as an example of this sort of issue, but Biosphere 2 actually seems more of a relavent situation, in that all eight of the initial inhabitants were considering violence against one another in the first six months to a year. Even while still on Earth with help just on the otherside of the glass, the people started to go nuts.
I read once that our atmosphere gives us about 14 feet of reinforced concrete's worth of protection at sea level against cosmic rays (someone pipe up if that's in error). So on Mars, you're talking about an even greater amount of simple bulldozed dirt. You might as well be underground at that depth, and rely on tunnel borers rather than bulldozers to expand your colony.
Would the colony really need to be underground for radiation protection? What about a plastic dome with sections of water for radiation shielding? The water could be kept liquid and hence transparent by another layer of Martian air (which is a really good heat insulator). Please see diagram.