Author Topic: How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?  (Read 50474 times)

Offline GregA

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How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?
« on: 04/24/2014 12:42 am »
I've read a few overviews of proposals for small colonies, and the need to be able to build their own habitats etc, but I don't think there's very much on the growth process - essentially, what will the manager of a 100 person colony be focussed on. If we pick a point a bit further in the future as a goal, then the question becomes how the colony will grow to that point.

If we said we want a 2000 person colony, that colony certainly needs lots of space for farming, needs to be able to construct its own habitats, and have people get out and explore (fossick for minerals, metals, water and so forth). It probably needs to be making its own glass (with radiation shielding?), needs some metal processing plant. It'll have reporters and entertainment, solar and nuclear power in some combination - and cover some more human needs like a swimming pool, chocolate shop, bars, child care, low gravity dance classes etc.

So going back to a few years earlier - we have a 100 person colony. How does the colony operate in order to become a 2000 person colony as soon as possible? They'll need to be expanding their food production constantly, they'll need to be building new habitats at high speed, building redundancy in equipment as well as redundant Mars resource utilisation. They'll be mining water and creating Methane of course. Beyond that I'd assume an important focus would have to be making everything that's heavy or high volume on Mars, and import the light and low volume items (unless very easy to make) with new settlers.

Does a 100 person colony have an iron smelter? Is there a reliance on plastics? How many people are dedicated to just growing and processing food? And maintaining the current colony? What technologies are critical (do 3D printers provide usable parts, and what source materials would they need that Mars can provide)? What sort of people are recruited to work the types of jobs that will be needed? How will people remain happy and balanced? (I imagine a great deal of satisfaction will come from building and invention.)

Or does a 100 person colony barely have the ability to keep itself alive, let alone expand - so expansion has to be provided from Earth? If expansion comes from Earth then the justification has to be there, a colony might be tasked to return expensive items etc... Mikesicles started a similar thread focussed more on WHY you would do it and how to be sustainable with respect to trade with earth... a good thread and we can leave Earth trade and similar side to that thread. http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=33104.0

Just wondering whether a colony can focus on growth and how it would function.
« Last Edit: 04/24/2014 12:43 am by GregA »

Offline sdsds

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Re: How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?
« Reply #1 on: 04/24/2014 01:40 am »
How does the colony operate in order to become a 2000 person colony as soon as possible?

It's a little difficult to explain. First, understand that the mommy colonist and the daddy colonist love each other very much.... ;)

Seriously? If population growth is important to the plan, send only fertile women and a large sperm bank.
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Offline Lar

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Re: How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?
« Reply #2 on: 04/24/2014 01:52 am »
I think this is a good question... what things can you shift to ISRU (or partly) and in what order? Most of the first 2000 colonists are going to be arriving from afar, only a few will be born (and those who are, won't be productive for a long time, this isn't Agricola we're playing here).  So the ones arriving as part of the second or third 100 need things. What things in what order should the first 100 be making? And what should be brought along? how does that shift over time? Every gram cost major money to get to Mars...
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Offline GregA

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Re: How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?
« Reply #3 on: 04/24/2014 02:27 am »
Seriously? 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. :)

When Australia was settled by England, they sent 11 ships: 2 navy vessels, 3 store ships, and 6 ships of people (half were convicts, 1/4 marines, 1/4 ships crews) on an 8 month voyage. 1400 people arrived (and while 20 babies were born during the trip, that's not what grew the population), 5% died on the voyage. Convict labour to build with, but they didn't know how to live on the land - the native crops weren't recognised, their own didn't grow well (plus a drought), and the trees had harder wood than the tools they'd brought could handle - they sent some ships to South Africa for supplies, and the colony almost starved to death. The 2nd fleet left England 2.5 years later with 1 navy vessel, 1 store ship, and 4 ships of people - another 1000 people. 20% died on the trip (it had a private contractor in charge), the rest arrived very sickly and were a burden on the colony rather than a help, to start with.

We don't think in that kind of scale for settlement of Mars, but seriously "colonising Mars" is a few steps beyond what Mars One or Mars Direct is looking at. You want transports to bring as much useful product as they can - so do as much as you can locally.

Offline KelvinZero

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Re: How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?
« Reply #4 on: 04/24/2014 09:14 am »
Seriously? 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. :)

I had assumed you meant growth through immigration also.

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 )
« Last Edit: 04/24/2014 09:20 am by KelvinZero »

Offline high road

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Re: How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?
« Reply #5 on: 04/24/2014 11:51 am »
a hundred people on Mars is huge. Supporting a colony that large is impossible with current space budgets. It's only possible if they already have some activity over there that isn't purely scientific. A reason for people to 'want' to spend billions on going to Mars and staying there. Most likely that reason will be profit, but it could be religion, politics, or otherwise. At that point, immigration and private investment will easily allow it to expand. It's easier to get from a hundred people to a million than it is to get from 6 to 100.

Even if the technology becomes available to extract, refine, produce and recycle basic resources locally, high tech products with complex production chains and the people themselves will have to be brought from Earth. Machinery to produce and replace old habitats and greenhouses, mars suits, rovers, mines, refineries, production plants, energy production and storage etc for a hundred people comes down to an enormous amount of money. Getting the entire production chain for that machinery to Mars would be a few orders of magnitude more expensive for a colony as small as a hundred people.

There's always the possibility of a Mars base supported by a few dozen billionaires or (hundreds of) thousands of middle class people that want to spend money to support that Mars base. I consider that unlikely. Those people would already be spending their money on some kind of Mars bound initiative. Either inspiration Mars, Mars One, the Mars foundation or whatever. These projects have little money available in comparison to what's needed to support even a 6 person outpost. So either there aren't enough people interested, or more likely, they don't want to spend that much money unless they can go to Mars themselves. Which only leaves the few dozen billionaires, which does not give you a hundred people on Mars.

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?

Offline GregA

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Re: How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?
« Reply #6 on: 04/24/2014 11:55 am »
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.

Is there an advantage to using a space-ship habitat as your Mars habitat? I would assume it would have unnecessary rocketry (best reused for the next colonists) and possibly be designed to be appropriate in zero G (sleep on any wall or ceiling?). If you can make 90% of a habitat from ISRU then a colonist only needs to bring the 10% that can't be made locally - reducing the supplies needed per colonist.

Building extra habitats will increase room for crops too - edible or for material.

Quote
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.

Absolutely. And in that situation even if you added extra vehicles every year JUST to keep the existing colonists alive, if everyone needs a ton of supplies from earth/year, then the colony couldn't possibly survive. Unless every person can earn $1 million worth of export (which can belong in the trade thread :)

The goal needs to be minimal supplies for any existing colonist. Most food local, clothes local, homewares locally made.

Quote
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 )

I'm not at all convinced about constantly landing habitats. But yes the first goal has to be to keep the 100 colonists alive with an earth-supplied setup and little resupply. Then work out how to use less and less over time. The more in-situ resources you can use the quicker you can grow.

It may take everyone's full effort just to stay alive… if so then growing to 2000 would take a lot longer.

Offline RonM

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Re: How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?
« Reply #7 on: 04/24/2014 12:27 pm »
Improvements in robotics will allow ISRU to provide the raw materials needed to expand the colony. It would only take a few people to operate the robotic factories. Once they have raw materials such as metal, plastics, etc., then skilled labor using additive manufacturing can build the parts to expand the habitat.

Once the colony can build their own basic infrastructure and provide air, water, and fuel, the ships from Earth will only have to bring new colonists and items that cannot be made locally, such as electronics.

1) Research base
2) ISRU to produce air and water
3) Limited agriculture and aquaculture
4) ISRU to produce raw materials and habitat construction materials
5) Expand habitats from local materials

Offline A_M_Swallow

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Re: How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?
« Reply #8 on: 04/24/2014 01:54 pm »
For the first few years ISRU products are likely to be walls, roof, foundations and holes in the ground.  The furnishings will have to come from Earth.  If we pick the right area ISRU oxygen and water may be available.

Locally produced food will require some sort of green house from Earth.  Over a few years correctly designed green houses may produce more food that they weigh.

Offline sghill

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Re: How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?
« Reply #9 on: 04/24/2014 02:08 pm »
Let's not confuse "base" with "colony"

Simplifying the economics of WHY you'd want to start a colony on Mars, or the moon, let's just say that the colony produces "X" (which can be a basket of value-added goods or commodities) in great enough quantities that it is cheaper to produce "X" at the colony than it is to produce it on earth.  OK, once you've established the production of "X" you can focus on growing your colony.  Without X, the colony makes about as much economic sense as growing a colony in Antarctica- something that hasn't happened yet.  Bases there, yes, colonies, no.

Take one of the closest analogies we have on earth to a self-sufficient lunar or martian colony;  Coober Pedy in Australia (http://traveltourimmigration.blogspot.com/2011/10/coober-pedy-australia-place-where.html).  It's a perfect example of a marginal environment (day time temperatures above 120F/ 50C), so people often live in dugouts (underground houses).  It's self-contained in terms of energy and power (not part of the national grid), and the population supports itself by bringing in workers to supplement the very small resident population.  Coober Pedy's reason for existence is its many mines.

OK, so Coober Pedy can make it's own electricity and water, and if they wanted, they could grow their own food, but they truck that in now, so its expensive.  What then is their biggest import need?  Tools and tooling. 

These are essential for maintaining the environmental, production, and support systems, building new systems, and expanding the town.  Early North American European settlements also faced the same issue.  Tools and tooling (the machines to make more tools) were the commodities that were the most expensive, yet most necessary.  So, our colony has to ship these in, and has to make enough of product X to pay for it.  As the colony grows, they have to produce even more of product X to remain sustainable (otherwise, you're looking at an Old West ghost town scenario unfolding).

Directly to the point of this thread, from the colonial governor's point of view, maintaining the colony first and foremost requires two things. 1) Maintaining systems to keep colonists alive, and 2)  maintaining production and transport of exportable commodities.  Those two items are part of the critical path.  Everything else supports them. 

Growing the colony, then becomes an accounting game of adding support systems to support increasing production, and increasing production enough to justify the expense of new support systems.

Side note: now in the 21st century, 3-D printing is going to allow many tools and implements of life to be manufactured on site with raw materials that require little refining (a regolith printed table for example).  However, the tooling (the 3-d printer) will have to be imported, and many of the materials you want to print on site (metal parts or electronics) are going to require a level of refining that require purity and thus smelting. But these sort of things are still just support items for the two critical path needs above.

My two cents though are that even in a perfect world, automated mining and production of "X" will always be cheaper than establishing a full blown colony.  So we may see maintenance and support technicians going and staying for a while, like sand hogs maintaining an oil well head, but full-time personnel will be extremely small.  You don't see the populations of oil platforms growing, and saloons, whore houses, and strip malls popping up out at sea even though oil platforms produce plenty of X (oil) for shipment back to shore... 

No, the only compelling reason for a colony is as a place to put humans somewhere other than earth.  There's simply no need for a self-sustaining colony off-world other than as a people bank. 

OK, and if THAT's true, why would people go there in the first place and not come back?  Because they are undesirable at home of course! 

It's so simple, we can look at human expansion in all cultures all they way back to neolithic times, and see that humans expanded into new locations because they were unwelcome at home for any of a thousand reasons.

If you want to expand humanity to the planets, convince religious, philosophical, economic, and political zealots, undesirables, and fringe groups that there's a better life awaiting them out there- or ship them out forcibly. 

I know this all sounds very 16th-century, but they didn't call that era the Golden Age of Discovery for nothing.

Otherwise it's just robots and thrill seekers out in the dark.
« Last Edit: 04/24/2014 02:32 pm by sghill »
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Offline GregA

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Re: How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?
« Reply #10 on: 04/24/2014 02:15 pm »
I just got very distracted into the question "building from 4 to 100"… but I'm trying to stick to the larger sizes :)

By imagining what a 100 person base would need to be doing to encourage growth to 2000, it allows the smaller question of what does a 20 person base need to look like to grow quickly into a 100 person base. Perhaps it's as simple as a base with a large nuclear generator, mining water and producing abundant air and methane, using local geographic features combined with many tents covered by dirt for agriculture/aquaculture.

I think the ISRU for producing raw materials - cast iron, steel, plastics, glass, agriculture/fabrics - probably needs a bigger size colony (100?) to run many different growth areas in parallel.

The practical requirements of using local resources would probably mean the 100 person colony has 2 types of habitats - the high-tech ones that are more crowded, and the more rudimentary ones that extend living space and support agri/aquaculture.

Low tech… the use of inflatable tents buried under dirt, caves sealed with a Martian concrete or polymer sealant - no windows, so artificial light and an attempt to psychologically help settlers by adding plant-life to the low-tech habitats (green.. but also something practical). Airlocks from the high-tech to the low-tech. Ventilation would be a challenge. People will like having space for personal use whenever it can be done.

So if that gets you to 100, at that point the possibilities are expanding, and you get a support infrastructure appearing. You need enough crops or algae to feed 100 people, farmers working in pressurised Mars atmosphere greenhouses, maybe chickens somewhere for eggs, and fish. If plastics and glasses are being made then there's a group doing that, and someone creating steel - including the powder used for 3D printing.  Maintenance crews continually fixing seals, fans and filters inside and out.

Once you start refining iron into steel (or just casting iron?), producing various plastics, clothing from plants, and Martian glasses there are new ways to expand. And experimentation with creating versions of steel/cement/plastic/glass that are effective and achievable with Mars elements. It could also be that you start seeing high-tech rooms with a hippy look to the decor - even low tech chairs made out of bamboo and hemp, but more so odd coloured glasses and ceramics, iron bed frames with mattresses made locally etc. And while the space is good for people, when an influx of settlers arrive the extra space gets a bit tighter, until the living areas are further expanded.

The growth and survival depends on exploration and expansion - there'd be people out exploring, looking for new mineral deposits or anything usable. Miners actually getting iron or working to extra water from wherever it is. Experimental glider drones - and everything being monitored centrally.

Explorers, farmers, material scientists (plastics, clays, alloys), steel smelter, methane production & polymers, cooks, builders, maintenance workers of all types, miners (via robots). Lots to do.

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?

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?
« Last Edit: 04/24/2014 02:18 pm by GregA »

Offline francesco nicoli

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Re: How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?
« Reply #11 on: 04/24/2014 02:17 pm »
to grow beyond 6 (let alone beyond 100) the "colony" needs to provide valuable assets to its Earth's masters. Science would likely be not sufficient at all, especially if you want private entities involved.

What has Mars of valuable?

this is THE QUESTION. Mars must have something so valuable that you prefer to settle there instead of in the Gobi desert. Everything else follows this single point.

If a commodity (let's call it commodity X) is found that is valuable to return, the value of this commodity should be sufficiently high to justify a trip from Mars to Earth. I let you do the math to account for those costs- let call them costs C. Revenues must satisfy the disequality R>C, so profits P=R-C.
P is the net revenue of the colony. The colony can buy everything it needs out of its P accounts and send back to Mars. Which implies that they must pay back also the round trip besides the hardware.
meaning that the colony should have a P higher enough to pay for the trip back plus the hardware; so P is likely to fulfill inequality P > C (implying R>2C).
so in order to (slowly) develop, the colony must produce something so valuable to justify a roundtrip to Mars and the hardware development.

If you see such a commodity around, let me know :)


Offline A_M_Swallow

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Re: How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?
« Reply #12 on: 04/24/2014 02:21 pm »
{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?


We have never had 20 people in a spacestation.  The first base will be very similar to a spacestation because that is what we know how to make.

Offline Lar

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Re: How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?
« Reply #13 on: 04/24/2014 04:24 pm »
What the colony produces, or whether it is economically viable? Off topic.

This thread is about what do you have to do in what order to grow. Keep it narrowly focused please, there are plenty of other threads for economic viability or colony products or funding etc.
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Offline JasonAW3

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Re: How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?
« Reply #14 on: 04/24/2014 04:45 pm »
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.

      This could be done with a series of smaller rover and manufactoring robots that could be launched on "tag along" missions with other satillites, landers and rovers meant for a more scientific regimine.  (By sharing launch costs with eithe NASA or universities sending their own probes, you lower the cost for both groups, although the overall cost will increase).

     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.

     Humans are social animals.  The smaller the group, the more likely there will be psychological issues, the larger the group, the less likely psychological issues are to erupt.  This is due to socialization.

     With too small a group, people start getting on each other's nerves in a fairly short time.  Current Antarctic bases are an example of this, as they tend to be manned by larger groups of people. (typically exceeding 10 people per base).

     As with these Antarctic bases, the facilities will need to be large and friendly and the larger the better.  If these people are going to effectively spend the resat of their lives in a petri dish, then it had better be either a very large petri dish or many smaller ones within a reasonable days travel from one another.

      Without sufficent facilities that they could simply move into, life for initial settlers will be FAR harder than it really needs to be.
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Offline JasonAW3

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Re: How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?
« Reply #15 on: 04/24/2014 05:02 pm »
     About the only viable commidety that Mars could produce in quantity, in a fairly short span of time, would be foodstuffs.   While it is ackowledged that growing food on Mars will be difficult as it is, growing it in sufficent quantities amy not be quite as difficult as it would seem.  Water can be extracted from the soil or shipped down from the polar regions, aeroponics would use a small fraction of the water and minerals needed for farming, and with the addition of "Meat Vats" (Which, admittedly, are still in development) such a colony could provide food for both government and corporate interests at a fraction of the cost that shipping it up from Earth would cost.

     We are not talking about being the Solar system's bread basket, per se, but with 1/3rd the gravity well that Earth has, sending food into space is vastly cheaper than sending it from Earth.  In fact, space craft that would reload on food at Mars would offload their waste products to be recycled into food and new equipment. This assumes that repair work on damaged or worn out equipment could likelwise be accomplished at the colony.  With the mineral potentile of Mars itself, this would seem to be a workable proposition after the first few years of set up.

    Whole industries would slowily evolve from an agrarian society to a full blown manufacturing society, having orbital factories that are provided the raw materials from the nearby asteroid belt, providing spacecfraft and equipment throughout the solar system. 
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Offline sghill

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Re: How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?
« Reply #16 on: 04/24/2014 06:09 pm »
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.

     

You bring up two good points here.

1) Galactic and solar radiation levels on Mars means you're going to be underground (http://www.wired.com/2014/04/radiation-risk-iss-mars/).  Ignoring the economics and/or purpose of a colony for a moment, the early activities of martian colonists are likely going to be devoted solely to making more room underground for more colonists.  A mix of automated diggers and people-operated machines to carve out caverns may toil for years before the first permanent colonists arrive to occupy them (Unless you make a Genesis Cave.) :)  The next phase would be to develop sustainable life support (including food) systems in the spaces you've dug out.  This would be your second wave of colonists- systems specialists and farmers.  Your third wave would be to expand on the reason and purpose of your colony in the first place-  whatever it may be.  Of course, there'd be overlap like anything else humans attempt.

2) Humans are social, but like other social mammals we're also hierarchical.  Without clear leadership structures we descend into yelling pretty quickly to get our points across.  To grow a colony, social rules that work in the context and environment the colonists are living in will need to be adopted the moment they step off the boat.  Biosphere 2 was a perfect example of failing to do this.  Those guys tried running that place like a bunch of tenured professors sitting at a round table.  Everyone had an equal vote, so they were collectively reduced to yelling at each other (in and of itself a valuable experiment).  A military command structure, or even appointing one person who got the final word, would have stopped most of their social problems.  If the Navy had run biosphere, the technical problems would still have existed, but the social problems would not have, IMHO.  Jamestown, Roanoke Colony, and Plymouth- to name a few- all had compacts that the settlers and their sponsors made before they landed, so once they were on the ground everyone knew their rights and social responsibilities in the New World.  Everyone was under the captain's orders while in transit, but sealed orders were commonly opened upon arrival appointing colonial authority, and setting up a succession structure.
Bring the thunder!

Offline scienceguy

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Re: How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?
« Reply #17 on: 04/24/2014 06:30 pm »
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.
e^(pi*i) = -1

Offline guckyfan

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Re: How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?
« Reply #18 on: 04/24/2014 08:08 pm »
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.

Airpressure at sealevel is about 1kg/cm². On first approximation that means we have 1 kg worth of atmosphere above us.

Offline RanulfC

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Re: How would a 100 person Mars colony grow to 2000?
« Reply #19 on: 04/24/2014 08:08 pm »
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.

Further study on the original proposal by Marshall Savage of a "water-shield" found some issues with the needed depth and light transmission IIRC. There's probably more on the "The Millinnial Project 2.0" website: http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

But in essence the depth of water to provide the needed protection really red-shifted the lift transmission and dropped the overall light level to far. You really need to "direct" the light in with mirror/light-tube arrangments where you can put a 90-degree bend in the path allowing the light but not the radiation through. You're going to need to concentrate the light anyway as well as provide an efficent way to add or adjust suplemental light as well so the light-wells concept for directing light makes a lot more sense than a "dome" concept.

In addition contrary to popular belief CO2 isn't really that good of an insulator, you'd probably need some sort of interior movable insulation or a layer of argon gas (MUCH better insulator) for insulation.

Randy
From The Amazing Catstronaut on the Black Arrow LV:
British physics, old chap. It's undignified to belch flames and effluvia all over the pad, what. A true gentlemen's orbital conveyance lifts itself into the air unostentatiously, with the minimum of spectacle and a modicum of grace. Not like our American cousins' launch vehicles, eh?

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