Hi there, I’d like to connect with people to discuss technical aspects of settlement of mars.

I’d look at a house on earth and ask: what things have to be supplied from the outside; what things can be produced inside the house? Houses on earth have piping for water, and cabling for electricity.

Plants can be grown in a green-house using these two ingredients, and the people can sleep in a spaceship.

Comment whatever comes to your mind.

  • harsh3466
    19·
    4 months ago

    Not sure if this falls within the scope of what you’re thinking, but radiation shielding is gonna be a big part of figuring out how to make it on mars.

    • viking@infosec.pub
      11·
      4 months ago

      I honestly think the best approach would be to use old magma tunnels to establish a base deep underground. That provides sufficient shielding, and also gets the settlement closer to water reservoirs.

      • Pennomi@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        4 months ago

        Temperature is also a lot more stable underground… there’s a lot of good reasons to build in a cave or lava tube. Works on the moon too.

      • EpicMuch@sh.itjust.works
        5·
        4 months ago

        I agree with you as tunnels would address many concerns but I also find it fantastically ironic that once we become advanced enough to colonize another planet we right away go back to living in caves

    • Nightwatch Admin@feddit.nl
      72·
      4 months ago

      … and the cold, and the storms…
      hmmm

      When, exactly, were we going to ship the rich people off to Mars? Asking for a friend.

      • threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        5·
        4 months ago

        Chlorates and perchlorates are fairly unstable, and readily decompose into chlorides + oxygen gas when heated. Could we solve two problems at once by washing the perchlorates out of the soil, and then decomposing them to produce oxygen for breathing and propellant?

        • NegativeInf@lemmy.world
          2·
          4 months ago

          Sure, just gotta dig 11.5 to 20 km down to get to some water. Or melt the ice caps, which probably already have the perchlorates frozen in them.

      • nikaaa@lemmy.worldOP
        1·
        4 months ago

        I don’t see perchlorates as a big problem.

        After all, plants grow quite well without soil, like hydroponics, I guess.

          • nikaaa@lemmy.worldOP
            3·
            4 months ago

            I was thinking three options:

            • mining from underground (hoping that there’s enough ice underground/water in the mineralic crystals that can be thermically released)
            • water from the atmosphere (believe it or not but the atmosphere in the early morning is actually saturated with moisture - about 0.25 mbar iirc) so it could be extracted through something similar to a room de-moisturizer
            • polar caps (unrealistic in the early game)
    • nikaaa@lemmy.worldOP
      51·
      4 months ago

      Yeah, I guess. I’ve read on Wikipedia that a year on Mars gives a human 200 mSv of radiation. While the limit for US radiation workers is 50 mSv a year. So that’s 4x the allowed dosis.

      Still, I wonder how much that can be alleviated by metal shielding. A spaceship’s outer walls are 5mm solid steel, and I’ve read somewhere that most of the radiation is particle radiation (not electromagnetic radiation), so that can be stopped with solid steel quite well. Unfortunately, I don’t have any actual numbers, though.

      Edit: Source

      Edit:

      250 mSv: 6-month trip to Mars—radiation due to cosmic rays, which are very difficult to shield against

      Apparently I was wrong. It’s not just particle radiation, it’s actual electromagnetic radiation. Which is much more difficult to deal with.

        • nikaaa@lemmy.worldOP
          1·
          4 months ago

          the current attempt seems to be that ISS is low enough to be protected by earth’s magnetic shield (which, as I understand it, only protects against particle radiation, not EM radiation). So that would stop most radiation from hitting the ISS and astronauts. So the radiation dose is a bit lower than in true (even-farther-out) outer space, and then pray for the best, basically.

          Edit: Ok, now I’m thoroughly confused. Multiple sources contradict one another about what kind of radiation is actually most prevalent in outer space. Most say it’s particle radiation (which would be easy to protect against), but some say it’s electromagnetic radiation, which would be way more problematic.

    • nikaaa@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      4 months ago

      Hmm yeah, airtight buildings are a challenge to construct.

      That’s why I’ve favored the people on Mars living in the spaceships. The building already exists, and is naturally air-tight (after all, it has been airtight for 6 months in outer space). But that has its downsides: less protection against radiation, mostly. (due to only having 5mm of steel and 200 kg/m² CO2 above your head instead of meters full of dirt and rock.)

  • ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    4 months ago

    Off the top of my head, you could get some solar power with a massive array. It’s possible to generate oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, as NASA recently proved.

    I would think any permanent structure on Mars is going to be more like the ISS except underground. So, basically everything will have to be resupplied from Eart. There could be some in-situ resource utilization but it’d be challenging.

    • nikaaa@lemmy.worldOP
      3·
      4 months ago

      I think that water is an important resource. Once that you have water and electricity, you can produce oxygen easily. And you need large quantities of water anyways.