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Elon's checklist for getting us on Mars
[ ] Solve propulsion problem to allow us to get to Mars
[ ] Solve renewable water problem
[ ] Solve renewable oxygen problem
[ ] Solve renewable energy problem
[ ] Build Starbucks
[ ] Transport people
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I wonder how he will space these activities in time from now until 2050. And what would happen if Starbucks is bankrupt before they get to that point?
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F-ES Sitecore wrote: [ ] Solve propulsion problem to allow us to get to Mars
Starship SN01 is being built in open sided tents in Texas today.
[ ] Solve renewable water problem
Land at a location where orbital sensing indicates large amounts of water frozen a few meters down in the regolith. Then start mining. The amount needed as an input (along with CO2) to the sabatier process to create the methane needed as fuel for the trip home and as a backup power source during sandstorms will dwarf that needed for human consumption.
[ ] Solve renewable oxygen problem
The previous step gets this one for free because you want to run your rocket engines fuel rich in order to keep the chamber temperatures low enough to avoid melting and burning them.
[ ] Solve renewable energy problem
Tesla and Solar City.
[ ] Build Starbucks
I'm pretty sure he can get Starbucks to pay him for the privilege of being the first franchise opened on Mars. (Just threaten to go to Dunkin Donuts, McDonalds, etc instead.) 
[ ] Transport people
Build a bunch of Starships. To fund doing this he's building Starlink; which is expected to a be $15-30bn/year printing press for money.
And although you neglected it, The Boring Companies tunneling machines can be used to dig the large underground vaults needed to build habitats on Mars.
Elon's reach may exceed his grasp; but all of the projects he's juggling feed into his long term goal.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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You gotta love an optimist... 
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There's a reason why space geeks joke about "Elon Time". 
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Um, yeah, my post was just a joke to highlight how all major tech innovation seems to power nothing but vapid consumerism.
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did he actually say they would be alive?
scattering ashes in space was a thing for a while till the satellite makers complained that bumping into orbital detritus may affect their ability to um ...spy on the still living.
why not dump that useless crap (and more) on a useless rock that only sci fi writers and clueless dreamers care about?
after many otherwise intelligent sounding suggestions that achieved nothing the nice folks at Technet said the only solution was to low level format my hard disk then reinstall my signature. Sadly, this still didn't fix the issue!
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If you are into science fiction books I highly recommend reading the Mars series of books by Kim Stanley Robinson. It is about the process of terraforming and settling Mars. The trilogy of books takes place over several hundred years and is quite fascinating. The books are titled Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars.
Highly recommended!
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
modified 22-Jan-20 11:10am.
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Rick York wrote: Red Mars
OK...
Rick York wrote: Green Bars
I'd have thought "Green Mars" would have been a better title. But OK...
Rick York wrote: and Blue Blue
OK, now it's just getting silly.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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green bars? where they serve alcoholic health drinks and smoothies?
kale liqueur with cauliflower on the rocks please sir ... make it a double smoothie!
after many otherwise intelligent sounding suggestions that achieved nothing the nice folks at Technet said the only solution was to low level format my hard disk then reinstall my signature. Sadly, this still didn't fix the issue!
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I do read a fair amount of SciFi, but consider them science fiction. The author is free to ignore any law of nature, any technical problems, and may assume whatever issue "solved two thousand years ago". Most (high quality) SciFi does not aim to solve practical issues, but to create a setting for discussing a large set of other, usually non-technical issues.
So while I might pick up that Mars series (I am not familiar with it), what I am curious about this time is the Science part rather than the Fiction part.
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Generally, that is true. KSR is a little different in that he describes the science behind most of his premises. David Brin does that quite a bit too since he is in fact a scientist.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Sidetracking a little here: I will say the same about James P. Hogan. I have a Comp.Sci Masters degree and 40 years of experience, judging his books from the perspective of a computer expert. I picked up the 1979 "The two faces of tomorrow" again not too long ago, and it still holds up. "Realtime Interrupt", 16 years later (but 25 years old today) still raises essential questions that cannot be pushed aside. (And a few of my collagues, to whom I have recommended the book, have had nights of bad sleep, essentially because the comp.sci parts still holds water after 25 years.
As a computer professional, I know that the issues are real. People with less background tend to laugh it off as more or less pure fantasy. If I read books too far out of my own field of expertise, I would like to have other experts confirm the realism. For a Mars settlement, there are so many issues that it would take a large flock of experts in different areas to confirm the realism of it.
That is what Weisman did with "The World Without Us". While he wrote the text, and is fully responsible for it, in every chapter he leans heavily of one or more top experts in the field. (Hogan also use to include thanks in he preface to those experts that have read through the manuscript to verify that there are no factual errors or impossibilities in the story.)
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A little farther aside - have you read anything by William Gibson? He was writing about virtual worlds decades ago. In the movie "Hacker" they called the supercomputer the Gibson in honor of him.
"They have a consciousness, they have a life, they have a soul! Damn you! Let the rabbits wear glasses! Save our brothers! Can I get an amen?"
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Neal Stephenson too. In 1992, who'd have thought of a cyberpunk world where some rich dude is buying up ancient Sumerian artifacts for nefarious purposes? (Snow Crash) And yet, here we are.
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KSR wrote what was reasonably solid hard SF at the time in designing the initial colonization ship and terraforming program; the biology stuff (anti-aging and brain reset) used to help keep some characters alive for centuries was always a bit iffier. The bigger issue at this point is just that he started writing in the 80's and some parts of his science/tech have become dated since. ex the first Mars ship was build out of US and Soviet Space Shuttle external tanks, and he totally missed the last 20 years of laptops and then phones providing computers everywhere.
Caveat, it's been at least 15 years since I last read the books.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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One person is seven or eight trees’ worth in terms of oxygen. But distance from the Sun will definitely be a factor here.
Martian polar caps are mostly CO2, no luck here. Maybe there is some frozen water underground. Or you can get some water from comets if you can make them crash on Mars.
Sun will be our only energy source so electricity will power everything.
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Tomas Takac wrote: Martian polar caps are mostly CO2, no luck here.
Scientists may not have reached an agreement, or your sources may be outdated, or Wikipedias sources may be outdated: Wikipedia states, in the introduction to the "Mars" article: "The two polar ice caps appear to be made largely of water".
This is so far from my own field of expertise that I will file both alternatives under "Some say this, some say that".
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I checked Wikipedia and the permanent polar caps are made of water ice. The seasonal cover is from frozen carbon dioxide which sublimes in summer. I didn't know that. So you are right, there is enough water for a colony, but you'd need to melt it and transport to the colony in pipe I guess.
I read somewhere there might be underground deposits of water ice which can occasionally melt during summer and even flow on the surface for a while. I don't have any reference for that however.
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Tomas Takac wrote: One person is seven or eight trees’ worth in terms of oxygen.
Thanks! That directly answers one of my intial questions.
Of course this is only a microscopic fractions of the questions that must be answered to build a Mars colony - but on the other hand, the answer has a great value here on earth as well!)
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Fred Pohl's Man Plus covered most of the problems, years decades ago.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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May be an interesting read - but it is classified as science Fiction, not a science.
I pointed to "The World Without Us" because it is classified as Science (although somewhat popularized). The author (and his informants) have not take the freedom to ignore nature's laws when they are a hindrance for the progress of the story.
I haven't read Man Plus, and the book may have a general respect for scientific knowledge, but when it is labeled as fiction, you cannot be certain of it. (And, the Wikipedia article does not give any impression of this story carrying any realism. E.g. the brain is one of they body's major consumers of oxygen, and that will prevail even if you create an artificial body.)
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You're obviously not familiar with Pohl's work. He used to research more stringently than 99% of astronomers, and make up less cr@p than 100% of them.Member 7989122 wrote: the brain is one of they body's major consumers of oxygen
It also consumes (AIRI; can be checked) between 70 and 95% of all the glucose you ingest, depending on what you're doing, and harvesting monosaccharides is a tad more destructive to the plants than just letting them produce O2.
Just find a list (there are probably hundreds of instances of them on-line) of nutritional needs at the biochemical level, and you'll easily be able to roughly classify them according to difficulty.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Ever notice how there's entire flock of people who fawn over every word Elon says without thinking about what he's saying? Yeah, this is one of those cases.
All marketing. No substance.
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Dave Kreskowiak wrote: All marketing. No substance.
I don't know about that. While I'm absolutely no fanboi of his, he did deliver on electric cars. And reusable rockets. And his tunnel boring machine.
Any one of these is a lot more than most of his critics may have delivered.
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