SpaceX Announces pricing for Cargo to Moon and Mars

[Vultur]

Re difficulty of raising children: I think I'd fall somewhere in between. I'd say it's likely to be an easier environment than most modern urban/suburban environments, in several ways (Mars settlements will be physically compact, thus no long commute times, which can easily eat up 5-10 hours/week/worker; similarly, physical compactness will probably lead to the kinds of community social bonds that make things easier) but far from ideal.

I get some flack from people of the "We'll never live on Mars because of gravity and radiation" type for saying that the biggest challenge for a Mars colony is going to be density.

It will be expensive to make it not dense,

To a degree ... but maybe not as much as we might expect at first. Depends how much of the construction is tunneled, whether existing caves/lava tubes can be used with relatively slight modifications (sealing, etc), whether  very large inflatable/pressure stabilized above ground structures can be used, whether we need large agricultural areas anyway, etc.

It also depends on how you define density... Are you talking people per square mile (in which case urban = high density necessarily) or residential space per person? A lot of people in the past, and in less urbanized countries today, had/have large families in homes that the average modern urban American would consider relatively small for even one person.

I'd expect Mars settlements designed by SpaceX and inhabited by a largely American derived population to be very dense in the first sense but not terribly dense by world standards (though denser than usual US) in the second sense.

OTOH, I don't think density in any sense is the driving factor. Nebraska, Wyoming, the Dakotas, etc still have a below replacement birthrate, though noticeably higher than the US average. (South Dakota is close to replacement, but still below.) Density seems to be a factor but not the primary factor.

But I do want to plant the seed that early Mars colonies may have lower birth rates than you might expect from the frontier, because apartments, dense living, and lack of open space won't feel like the frontier. 

I agree that birth rates won't be as high as say the US frontier, but I don't think density is the key reason why not.

I also think there will be real and significant attempts to prevent Mars settlements looking/feeling cramped or constrained, because I think that's necessary anyway, both for "marketing" Mars to potential settlers, and also for development of Mars-born children.

How exactly this will work will depend on what kind of agricultural model is used (much debated in the "Scaling Agriculture on Mars" thread) - natural light greenhouses, artificial light greenhouses/grow rooms, bioreactors with algae or whatever as staple, etc.

I think even with the more "constrained" models - if construction and residence is largely underground, which seems plausible, and agriculture is largely physically compact bioreactors*, there will be major use of natural light, "parks" of some sort (Musk has mentioned geodesic domes), etc. People may sleep and work underground, for safety, but they'll spend significant time in pressurized above ground areas - which will be made to look as much "outdoor" as possible.

If there are really large aboveground pressurized structures, or large natural light greenhouses, or really large caves/lava tubes (large enough not to feel 'indoors') that openness probably comes with the main structure and doesn't have to be provided separately.

Regardless, I think you need some degree of this for Mars to be a real (multigenerational) settlement. I doubt there's any way to make EVAs safe for little kids, but growing up in an entirely indoor environment is probably not at all a good thing. There needs to be some "psychologically outdoor", but pressurized, space with plants (distinct from the real agricultural areas, though some of this might incidentally produce food - you might use small fruit trees that are both aesthetically attractive and edible, sweet-smelling edible herbs, etc. for example).

(Probably with relatively bright light, too. Normal indoor lighting is way dimmer than Earth or Mars sunlight, orders of magnitude less; the difference between Mars and Earth is tiny in comparison. That might be important for eye development.)

OTOH, for this purpose the green spaces don't necessarily need to be huge. When I was a kid three or four small trees/large shrubs and some vines were a vast jungle to play in.

*Which I don't think it will be, but that argument deserves to be in the agriculture thread.

And we may need to dedicate more resources to encapsulating more area per person than we initially estimate in order to get growth where we want it to be.

Yeah. Though I think the really dense estimates have other problems anyway.

But early growth will be driven by people from Earth anyway. Probably for at least the first half-century or more.

I think the need for "psychologically outdoor" (and relatively bright) spaces will be important far earlier than the local Martian birthrate.

[Twark_Main]

You don’t need radhard on Mars. Ingenuity didn’t use them. ISS is full of standard laptops and iPads and such, and it gets the same dose as on Mars. Rad hard chips use a much more expensive process, too.

And yes, I agree it’s not necessary to use the most advanced chips. Even 3d printers until a few years ago used 8 bit chips comparable to an original Nintendo.

But if you’re going to appeal to AI as a way to reduce the number of humans needed, you’re necessarily talking about modern advanced chips, stuff built in the last 10 years.

Point being that "university level" fabs takes us back to ~2008, not the 1960s. Chips built in the past 10 years benefit from newer architectures and AI-optimized chip designs, which of course Mars chips could also do.

A lot of the progress on the software side has been about compressing AIs to run on smaller and smaller hardware. So the trend is toward more and more capability even on slower hardware.

How many nanometers is enough for AI? I honestly don't know, but if our answer is "however many nanometers we have on Earth" then of course it's pretty much impossible.

you can get a pretty good feel for this by trying to run some of the quantized models on old hardware. A few gigabytes is enough to run a chat bot useful for helping with programming using a CPU or GPU from 10 years ago. But that’s kind of at the limit. I don’t think it’s really helpful as a curiosity if you go smaller than that kind of model

To be clear, I think it is possible to have far more automation than we have today using just 1980s level processors.

I see this as a rather academic point, because I expect they will build AI datacenters on Mars, and there won't by an embargo (apocalyptic or otherwise) on Mars before that happens.

So if there's already a big datacenter on Mars full of AI chips, and suddenly Earth goes boom, then that datacenter represents a huge stockpile of advanced chips that can resupply Optimus bots (or lesser) for decades-to-centuries.

You want self-sustainability eventually, but you want AI labor multiplication immediately. The timescales don't really overlap, so we don't have to deal with both problems simultaneously like you're assuming (which would indeed be harder).

[Robotbeat]

Thing is, I think advanced chips (barring hard AGI take-off, ie paperclipping and such) probably need around 100 million people.

Mars could get there eventually but probably not for a while.

I think Mars would need to count on a lower level of computation in the meantime. Maximum industrial productivity in any case.

[punder]

Baby-making on Mars will be instilled as a cultural imperative, and will be subsidized by the local government. It will have nothing to do with baseline birth rates in the developed world.

For genetic diversity in a small population, a single freezer full of eggs and sperm would suffice, happily provided by health-vetted earthbound enthusiasts.

[xvel]

Baby-making on Mars will be instilled as a cultural imperative, and will be subsidized by the local government. It will have nothing to do with baseline birth rates in the developed world.

For genetic diversity in a small population, a single freezer full of eggs and sperm would suffice, happily provided by health-vetted earthbound enthusiasts.

Getting eugenics vibes here, you contradicting yourselve, any selection process, intended or unintended is the opposite of diversity. What we currently consider as healthy human on Earth may not be healthy at all on Mars. Selective breeding never ends well, even with the purest of intentions we don't know what we don't know, best way is to just take truly random sample of human population.

[Vultur]

best way is to just take truly random sample of human population.

Zero chance of getting anything like a random sample. It'd be people who want to go, and those people will not be remotely evenly distributed through the world (or US, or ...) population.

That self-selection will be based on ideological and personality factors, not genetic ones, but still.

Genetic diversity issues are entirely irrelevant anyway, as the needed population for that is tiny compared to all the other constraints.

Baby-making on Mars will be instilled as a cultural imperative, and will be subsidized by the local government. It will have nothing to do with baseline birth rates in the developed world.

I don't think so. Trying to avoid getting into politics, but I think the population of a SpaceX-started Mars settlement (as opposed to one started by, say, China for example) will draw heavily from quasi-libertarian / maverick / technophile elements of US society (just because of self-selection effects - what people want to go). I don't think that a society largely founded by that cross-section of the population would want a lot of top-down influence on how many children to have.

Self-selection effects in general would probably have a huge effect on how a Mars settlement works. As long as Earth migration is predominant over local births, you will get a very historically unusual kind of society. People who want to move to Mars are not remotely going to be a representative sample/cross-section of society as a whole, probably in very dramatic ways. (Once the population is primarily Mars-born there'd be regression to the mean, though the cultural template established early on would continue to have effects.)

The strong self-selection may actually be a reason why heavy use of AI and advanced robotics may not prove to be as desirable on Mars as it looks today. The goal as stated is to build a complete civilization on Mars, not just have some people living on Mars. Mars may already have trouble attracting a wide enough variety of interests and personalities to form a full civilization; it may prove to be necessary to convince potential immigrants that there will be plenty of non-IT/programming jobs available and it will not just be "robots do everything". Certainly not in the first years, when there are few people, but in the growth from frontier town size to city size it may be necessary.

I think people look at this too much from the viewpoint of "what's economically efficient" and not enough from the viewpoint that Mars is fundamentally an ideological project. Economics will determine what is possible, but what is chosen within the range of the possible may not be strongly determined by what's most economic.

[Robotbeat]

Baby-making on Mars will be instilled as a cultural imperative, and will be subsidized by the local government. It will have nothing to do with baseline birth rates in the developed world.

For genetic diversity in a small population, a single freezer full of eggs and sperm would suffice, happily provided by health-vetted earthbound enthusiasts.

Getting eugenics vibes here, you contradicting yourselve, any selection process, intended or unintended is the opposite of diversity. What we currently consider as healthy human on Earth may not be healthy at all on Mars. Selective breeding never ends well, even with the purest of intentions we don't know what we don't know, best way is to just take truly random sample of human population.

This is status quo for sperm donation, BTW. I understand the concern (and mostly agree), but it’s not an accusation to throw lightly and I think you’re being a little unfair, especially when every sperm donation program has some kind of selection (often to make the offspring look like those receiving the donation but also things like requiring donors to have advanced degrees and a clean criminal history, no major hereditary diseases, etc). And off topic for the thread.

[Robotbeat]

I do want to say for those hoping for high fertility rates on Mars that it will fundamentally be a challenge to have a high dependency ratio. Dependency ratio is a MASSIVE factor in economic output, not just per capita but also per working age adult. More time raising kids means less time to do industrially productive work. And children who are not given a lot of attention and parenting from adults are not going to be as effective when they become adults. It is not realistic to expect all three: high industrial efficiency and a very high birthrate and an effective next generation. One of those three has to take the cut, or an overall compromise reached. There has to be a compromise somewhere.

Barring AGI hard take-off, of course.

This is partly why I think a Mars city is going to need a lot of people already to be effective if cut off from Earth. It needs high economic productivity (economies of scale, etc) just for survival but also to care for the next generation and for future growth.

[xvel]

Don't need AGI to automate most of the work, current deep learning approaches are sufficient, just needs a "little" effort (scale) to make it work initially (like current LLMs aren't fundamentally different from GPT2 which couldn't do anything useful, they are just bigger in all respects) it will be enough to do repetitive jobs even those requiring a lot of knowledge, but not requiring human like creativity. Mechanical and sensor side of things is a little lacking, but we'll see how that goes when we see first commercially available humanoidal robots with hands and such.

[Vultur]

I do want to say for those hoping for high fertility rates on Mars that it will fundamentally be a challenge to have a high dependency ratio. Dependency ratio is a MASSIVE factor in economic output, not just per capita but also per working age adult. More time raising kids means less time to do industrially productive work. And children who are not given a lot of attention and parenting from adults are not going to be as effective when they become adults. It is not realistic to expect all three: high industrial efficiency and a very high birthrate and an effective next generation. One of those three has to take the cut, or an overall compromise reached. There has to be a compromise somewhere.

I agree with the general principle. However, three points:

- Early on, growth will be overwhelmingly dominated by people arriving from Earth; birthrates don't become relevant for quite a while.

- After that I don't think a high birthrate (by historical standards) is at all necessary for growth, given the availability of modern medicine. Somewhat higher than usually observed in modern developed societies, but not high.

-  Improved 'time use efficiency' of a physically compact settlement vs something like a modern urban/suburban sprawl, and likely increased community role in childcare.

This is partly why I think a Mars city is going to need a lot of people already to be effective if cut off from Earth. It needs high economic productivity (economies of scale, etc) just for survival but also to care for the next generation and for future growth.

I'm honestly not actually sure that the productivity necessary for survival would be that high. A modern large city is already an extremely artificial environment, with an enormous amount of infrastructure needed to make it habitable (water, waste, food transport, etc). On Mars you have to manage air too, and thermal is harder (until you get to large scale, when it probably isn't really harder anymore) but that additional burden may be more than counteracted by the huge advantages of building from scratch with modern (or a little beyond today) technology, not having to work around backwards compatibility with old infrastructure or existing land uses.

[Twark_Main]

Baby-making on Mars will be instilled as a cultural imperative, and will be subsidized by the local government. It will have nothing to do with baseline birth rates in the developed world.

For genetic diversity in a small population, a single freezer full of eggs and sperm would suffice, happily provided by health-vetted earthbound enthusiasts.

Getting eugenics vibes here, you contradicting yourselve, any selection process, intended or unintended is the opposite of diversity. What we currently consider as healthy human on Earth may not be healthy at all on Mars. Selective breeding never ends well, even with the purest of intentions we don't know what we don't know, best way is to just take truly random sample of human population.

Usually isolated tribes have some sort of "totemic" arranged marriage system. The bird clan marries the lizard clan, and their daughter marries the bear clan, etc.

When you graph out these rules, you find that these are arranged as a temporal "braid" which maximizes the internal genetic diversity within the community group. This contradicts your assertion that any sort of arranged marriage is bad for genetic diversity.

Of course these traditional societies also tend to take captives from border skirmishes as wives and husbands, so they employ other methods for maintaining genetic diversity. A similar "hybrid" strategy could be maintained on Mars, using genetic libraries instead of war prisoners.

[Vultur]

Genetic diversity is really, really not an issue.

[xvel]

[Vultur]

I don't mean it's not an issue jn any possible situation. I mean even the highly optimistic ideas of how many people you'd need to have all the skill sets for a complex civilization are far larger than the population sizes were genetic diversity becomes a meaningful issue.

(The famous historical cases like the Habsburgs etc are a case of intentional very close marriages, not a result of small population size/genetic drift. The cases where weird stuff has happened due to small population size involve really tiny founder populations.)

[JaimeZX]

A similar "hybrid" strategy could be maintained on Mars, using genetic libraries instead of war prisoners.

Sorry, Mary, you can't be with Steve.  The computer says you marry Stinky Frank.  Tough luck, Steve, she was a keeper."

[punder]

Baby-making on Mars will be instilled as a cultural imperative, and will be subsidized by the local government. It will have nothing to do with baseline birth rates in the developed world.

For genetic diversity in a small population, a single freezer full of eggs and sperm would suffice, happily provided by health-vetted earthbound enthusiasts.

Getting eugenics vibes here, you contradicting yourselve, any selection process, intended or unintended is the opposite of diversity. What we currently consider as healthy human on Earth may not be healthy at all on Mars. Selective breeding never ends well, even with the purest of intentions we don't know what we don't know, best way is to just take truly random sample of human population.

Uncalled for, and reported.

[Twark_Main]

A similar "hybrid" strategy could be maintained on Mars, using genetic libraries instead of war prisoners.

Sorry, Mary, you can't be with Steve.  The computer says you marry Stinky Frank.  Tough luck, Steve, she was a keeper."

I think we're all aware of what side of the arranged marriage debate Western civilization comes down on, no?

But when the question is "what is possible in an extreme scenario for the survival of the species," we should probably recognize the full breadth of what is actually possible.

Probably we don't want to bet the entire future hope of the species on a freezer not breaking, so it's a good idea to have both backup plans and backup freezers. 

Note that in most traditional societies it's exclusively women (often a council) who can decide on specific marriage matches. Obviously genetic diversity isn't the only factor, but that's so obvious I figured it probably doesn't need to be said.

[DanClemmensen]

A similar "hybrid" strategy could be maintained on Mars, using genetic libraries instead of war prisoners.

Sorry, Mary, you can't be with Steve.  The computer says you marry Stinky Frank.  Tough luck, Steve, she was a keeper."

Who you wish to live with is not the same as who should father your child. This has always been true to some extent.

[Twark_Main]

How about them pricing for Mars and the Moon, eh?   

[JaimeZX]

Probably we don't want to bet the entire future hope of the species on a freezer not breaking, so it's a good idea to have both backup plans and backup freezers. 

Ha! Fair enough. And yeah, my cultural bias is showing. lol