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A City on Mars: Reality kills space settlement dreams (arstechnica.com)

submitted 11 months ago by meyotch@slrpnk.net to c/technology@lemmy.world

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A book review on the latest Weinersmith creation. It’s true, there is so much we don’t know.

Just throwing this out there on this forum because missing technology is the problem that kills the dream of Mars, according to the authors.

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[–] fubo@lemmy.world 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

For instance, supposedly space will end scarcity… and yet, any habitat in space will naturally have only a single source of food, water, and, even more urgent, oxygen, creating (perhaps artificial) scarcity.

Huh? Sure, if we forget absolutely everything we ever knew about reliability engineering.

Take air, for instance. If you're considering a community on the scale of a town or city, expect that it will be naturally divided into smaller physical units, corresponding to smaller social units in the community. Rather than having one big air supply for the whole "town" — which can fail or be sabotaged, creating an existential risk for the whole community — it'd likely be much safer to have small air systems for each household, neighborhood, commune, or other unit. You probably have to have them anyway for emergencies.

[–] tburkhol@lemmy.world 8 points 11 months ago

Infrastructure for distributing the air once it gets to the settlement is one thing. At least for now, though, Earth is the only place to get oxygen in life-sustaining quantities, which is the single source they're talking about.

Maybe you can posit harvesting oxygen from mineral oxides, hydrolyzing water if you can find it, or capturing an ice asteroid. Whether you split every atom of oxygen you breathe out of rust or lift them out of earth's gravity, let alone doing both for redundancy, it's orders of magnitude more energy and complexity than growing potatoes in Antarctica.