Another warning for another audience. I have said that I have been known to be a tad obsessive in my writings. Many others do not share that ritual interest, only requiring an introduction, not a textbook. That is why I have prepared a summary of my exploration of planetary settlement that follows. I have recapitulated the subject headings of my monograph and indicate what I found most interesting in my speculations.
The manner of construction of the colony and the collection of resources for it are simple and are discussed in the sections in the sections on Mars station one, resource acquisition, and food.
The Mars inquiry led me to two insights. One is the application of comforting measures that have been described in my earlier monograph on the Moon. As would be the case for any other settlement, the matter of attachment to the land is much more interesting and complicate than the actual construction of the settlement. That involves mundane solutions to environment challenges onsite. Everyone who feels at home loves that home. On Mars, as they did on the Moon, our colonists must be given the same opportunity or they, too, will be exiles in a strange land forever. The job of homemaking seems slightly easier on Mars, because it is a more Earth-like planet. But it is so much farther away than the Moon that it will offset any such advantages.
Mars has many magnificent sites to rival any on the Moon, but the colonists will still face the same enforced isolation from their environment as did the Moon colonist, alongside a similar exile from familiar Earth. They must face the same inside life as did their peers because the surface conditions on Mars are no better for outdoor travel than they are on the Moon. Mars has a different natural majesty and different unique properties to offer its inhabitants that can their enrich lives too. We must plan for that as conscientiously as we did for our Moon colonists. It may prove even more important on faraway Mars.
The second insight I was favored with came as a result of serendipity that led me to a site discussing Martian airships. This might seem to be counterintuitive because it is often noted that Mars’ atmosphere is very thin. How then, could it possibly support flight by lighter than air ships? It amazed me too, but such transport provides an inexpensive and convenient means to travel on a planet with no roads and precious little navigable terrain. That fascinated me and I have tried to convey its practical engineering applications in the transportation section.
Just as I began with our Moon Colony piece, I must beat the water drum again. Our colonists will need access to sufficient water for a colony as an essential requirement. Mars, with its multiple unmistakable indicators of water both past and present, is much more likely to have available water than has been proven for the Moon. There, there are indicators of its presence, but no certainty of sufficient quantities. There may be only traces. Exploration will tell the story. As is the case with a Moon settlement, no settlement can aspire to sustainability if the one essential for life is not available. More so even than for the Moon, it will never be practical to shop any appreciable quantity of water to Mars. Without some sufficient source of water, better not to establish a doomed settlement.
And, as is the case for the Moon, there must also be some economic rationale. Like everyone else, space colonies must eventually make a living. Mars, with its Earth – seeming environment and Earth length days offering familiar light distribution in an atmosphere is promising. It is superficially, ‘normal’. But looks can be deceiving in space. They shall find that it is dangerous.
Mars almost certainly has deposits of minerals as easily available as those on Earth, likely of a quality and purity no longer available on Earth. After all, it is a virgin planet. And, if it can yield minerals, the cheap land will easily enable factories for the manufacture of things from those minerals. It will be easier than on the Moon because transport will be relatively cheap, as we shall see later. And the market will be the Moon, and the near Earth orbit colonies space life will enable. Unpowered pods will be pushed insystem, slow, but sure. In addition to that, it may prove practical to send high value products down the gravity mountain to Earth with the cooperation of the Earth orbit colonies. And, although it will be hard work to manufacture soil with poisonous chloride likely pervasive in Mars dirt, it will produce food too. More on that later. So, they have the primary economic viability, that critical link between need and acquisition, solved, in theory, at least.
With the Moon’s low gravity, reciprocal shipment to Mars would also be slow, but cheap. The same kind of pods could be lofted using magnetic launchers and sent on course to Mars for pickup. Mars could do the same thing in reverse and export many products that the Moon would be less fitted to make. With lots of land available to roof over with scooped up Martian regolith, facilities would be relatively inexpensive. Since Mars will most probably have more water available than the Moon, many more methods of processing would be feasible there. Although the Moon would need to provision the Mars colony at first, the favor would be returned when Mars ramps up its production. Mars has more resources and would benefit from the free use of water. With its varied geology, Mars would likely be a promising place to mine minerals and to refine them into metals and manufactured products. Mars could trade with the Moon and the Moon and could transfer goods on to the low Earth colonies that would enable them to pass them down to Earth using inexpensive downpods for high value goods. Middlemen rarely suffer from trade.
Mars could carry its weight in a new triangular trade association. Optimistic assumptions you think. But that is how progress is made.
Mars is really far. Even at its closest point, it is still thirty-five million miles, or, if you prefer klicks, fifty-six million kilometers. That’s about one hundred and forty times as far as the Moon. And it doesn’t stay that close. It orbits our Sun one slot farther out, and it does it much more slowly than our own comparatively speedy planet. It’s close only once in two years. It can be as far as sixty-two and a half million miles (almost one hundred million and one kilometers) when it is on the other side of the Sun from us. So, it’s not usually so accessible as it is at this writing in October of 2024, when it is in apposition, close as it comes.
With present technology, even augmented by lots of expensive preparation and equipment of a transit vehicle in space with lots of supplies, our colonists are left with a seemingly insuperable problem.
It’s dangerous out there. The shortest trip that they could manage with present tech would take about nine months. That’s nine months through the killer radiation of deep space even at the quiet times. Right now, with a solar storm orders of magnitude above the intensity of ‘normal’ solar radiation, it would be fatal to take a long journey in interplanetary space using what they have. And they have no control over the Sun.
NASA had made plans to safeguard Astronauts from such events using water shielding in areas of the ship, but they can’t do that for the whole ship. And there is another kind of radiation to worry about, so-called Cosmic Rays that are very energetic heavy nuclei shot from stars that can easily get through anything they have for shielding in space. To stop that would require very thick (and heavy) shielding, stuff heavy enough to put inconvenient limits on rocket systems that must operate at maximum effort already.
So, the simple answer is that they can’t start from Earth. Such a flight must be launched from space. I would speculate that such flights would be launched from Moon space. Even then, they will need to go very fast to reduce the risk to acceptable limits and be able to carry the shielding they will need to protect the passengers. With a space launch, that is a possibility. It won’t need any power to climb out of the gravity well. All the thrust they could muster could barely generate the speed needed to make the journey physically possible. We can hope, though, that the passage of time until our distant takeoff allows us to develop better propulsion systems in the meantime.
Without effective radiation protection, it is highly unlikely our ‘Marsnauts’ would arrive at the top of their form. Sick or dead are the alternatives under such conditions. Neither of these would be conducive to the completion of their mission. Protection is necessary to safeguard the passengers of our ship. They must arrive in good health and ready to do what they need to do.
I’m going to discourage you again when I tell you that the lack of gravity for our astronauts is going to be a big problem too. One that will need solving if they want them to do anything but lie flat on Mars. Their bodies will inevitably weaken without the constant stress of gravity, even with intensive exercise that would divert the astronauts from essential activities. The ISS Astronauts’ experience has clearly shown that. Space agencies don’t like to advertise that it takes a year to rehab an astronaut to normal life on Earth after a long stretch in space, but we can’t ignore it.
Two things can be done to counter that. I don’t mention exercise because they’ve seen that is not enough. No treatment centers show in the phone books for Mars.
The first of those provisions that can counter the ill effects of weightlessness for a long period is a centrifuge that provides the artificial gravity of centripetal force. It would need to be incorporated in the structure of the ship the way it was in the movie “2001’. It’s cool tech, but it does have obvious disadvantages.
The second of these would be a rate of acceleration that would make it possible to attain speeds approaching one gee. Such speeds would also curtail transit times to practical numbers. Expensive and failure-prone centrifuges would be unnecessary, albeit at the cost of rotating a space craft to slow down. You don’t want to smash into your destination. There would be no point in building two engines, and they are going to achieve considerable speeds under a constant one gee that they would need to scrub at the end of the journey. It might even be possible to have regularly scheduled flights. Something like that would make the whole project much more manageable. And being restricted to flights once every other year won’t allow anyone to collect many credit card travel rewards. To do that, even with our space launch, they’ll need to develop more powerful and efficient alternatives to chemical rockets. It’s probably on the way with plasma drives, but that’s not necessarily around the corner. Patience is the word they’re given. Here it’s an advantage that they have a long way to go before they start for Mars.
As if the transport issue was not enough, there’s another almost insurmountable problem when you get there. No point in being there if you can’t land. For a powered landing with delicate humans as cargo, you can’t use elaborate and failure-prone procedures. They didn’t call it ‘seven minutes of terror’ during the Perseverance landing for nothing. It was the first rocket powered soft landing on another planet, but you couldn’t use it to land humans. It was too complicated and had so many parts to it that had to go in exactly right to stick the landing. It worked, but it’s not something you would want to bet a crew’s life on. Yet you can’t let them bounce around on the surface the way you can for the rovers.
Mars has just enough atmosphere so that if you use a heat shield to slow you a little, you still have a shield problem. But you can’t use it to fly you in like you can on Earth. It just doesn’t have enough density to allow flight. Think of all the trouble they took for the Mars copter, Ingenuity. And you need to conserve fuel at the end of a flight. That’s why you use heat shields. But after that, you must power your way down because wings can’t gain enough purchase in the thin atmosphere.
Does that sound like an impossible conundrum? Don’t despair. There is a way around it that has been suggested more than once.
You can avoid the problem entirely by landing on a mountain top. That way you won’t need to reduce speed with a heavy heat shield. Those high mountains practically stick out into space. They are high enough to be above most of the atmosphere, so you won’t need that heat protection. One of the shield volcanoes in the northern hemisphere would do nicely. They feature huge plateaus to allow miles of landing room to slow down. That would allow magnetic resistance to brake a ship without the danger associated with powered landings. The slopes of such mountains are shallow enough to allow safe descent and ascent using conventional means such as cables. Eventually they might use arrangements like old fashioned funiculars creeping down a track. Probably the comforting clack of the cog wheels would be welcome on a hill twenty kilometers high, and it would be much safer.
Of course, the first landings would be much more bare bones. You could use unpowered drones to land the first equipment. The first manned landings would need to be powered to be able to land without any facilities. Once landed, they could start building our space port. Lacking the means to fashion them without local facilities, they would use prefabricated structures sent from the moon into Mars orbit. You see how logical it would be to start with a Moon colony. Unmanned pods to be turned around for the mountain landings could be recovered from orbit. They won’t go anywhere. All this without risking a single life.
It might be convenient to use the natural ‘space stations’ already orbiting Mars – its moons. They could be way stations for the trip down to the surface of Mars. They are exceedingly small moons. Even Phobos, the ‘big’ one close in, is not big enough to have much gravity. Yet it is big enough to host a habitat to allow storage and transfer. The low gravity would facilitate sending vehicles down to a mountain top. It has the advantage of inherent velocity to give its takeoffs a shove. and might launch the landers using magnetic impulse rather than rockets. That would maximize the cargo capacity of a lander. It would be a ‘glider’ down. Omitting a main engine would save space and weight on the lander at no cost to safety. No people, no problem. Anyway, Newtonian physics is pretty dependable.
The landers could be disposable since they would be relatively cheap. Initially they could be used as a source for metal for initial fabrication of necessities. Later, no doubt, the landers would get more capable. Avoiding the vagaries of a powered landing would be an advantage and increase efficiency. Of course, the landers would come in extremely fast, but automated landing hardware and software would likely be able to handle it, even at its present stage of development. If that doesn’t suit, our settlers might choose to use different models for people and cargo. The safety requirements would be lower for cargo.
And the first base should be at the bottom of the slope.
This will be where the settlement of Mars starts. They will need to build a redoubt to live in while the settlers prepare to go to their primary destination, the first city on Mars. Standard cut and cover construction techniques can be used to enclose a suitably large habitat. No tents will be used here. Data from the InSite lander have shown that the surface of Mars, unprotected by atmosphere, gets hit by at least six high-speed basketball-sized meteorites every day. And they’ll be near the equator where the risk is biggest. That’s where the most mass is presented to incoming impactors. They may even decide to go deeper under shielding when they get more data.
The surface of Mars, while seeming hospitable to the eye, is no more accommodating than the forbidding surface of the Moon. Appearances can deceive. Its seeming similarity to deserts on Earth blinds the understanding of its real nature. It is cold and airless, and you could not draw a single breath. The atmosphere of Mars is not nearly thick enough to form the protective blanket of shelter that our own much thicker atmosphere provides on Earth. The only oxygen in it is bound tightly into carbon dioxide gas. And there is no magnetic field to form a barrier of shielding energy like the Van Allen belt. Energy streams off our Sun unimpeded by the vacuum of space, and cosmic rays flood in from the exploding stars that dot out galaxy and populate our Universe. They hit Mars with practically all their force. Bare shelter on the surface is not a place to live for any period of time. Not if our settlers want to keep safe and healthy.
As on the Moon, you must be protected by at least five meters of passive shielding. Cheap to put in place, but expensive to forget. You can’t feel the effects of radiation until it is too late; we have no sensors for that in our bodies. Our previous astronauts, exposed to that radiation, have, to their own disadvantage, proven that for us. If for no other reason, we should honor their sacrifice by ensuring that what happened to them does not happen again to their successors in exploration. So our settlers will only be going outside for absolutely essential work that cannot be performed by the drones they will use for most tasks. They will need to get their outside experiences from them. There will be more on that later.
Mars Station One will be provided with every necessity of life, but it will, necessarily, be short on measures for ling-term sustainability because it is only a first step to the final destination. That is, the first city to be built on Mars.
They will need to prepare to get there. That will require means of transport on a world entirely without it, strewn with rocks, craters, and sand pits that make travel extremely difficult. Without means of mining and manufacture at first, all this equipment will need to be shipped from the Moon in pods. It will be expensive, but not as expensive as trying to manufacture it on Mars with practically no way to access resources. Industry takes time and materiel to build. Initially there will be none of either on Mars.
The easiest build to get to the Valles Marineris where the city will be situated would be a traditional railroad adapted to local conditions by slightly elevating the track to stay above the shifting sands. It is low tech, and the simple components could be assembled on site using basic tools. They will have the raw material in the scavenged lander material. After all, our ancestors built many railroads with much less than they will have there. The railroad would be better than a simple road, even though the base cost of such a road would be cheaper. A road would be almost as expensive and still leave the problem of the vehicle transport. Trains can transport heavy loads with greater efficiency than roads if there is only one destination. They do leave the problem of what happens if there is a train accident. This would be solved with dual tracking, keeping rescue vehicles at both ends.
While initially attractive as a suspension and propulsion system, magnetic levitation will likely be impossible on a world of ferrite dust. The magnetic field would attract enough dust to clog it hopelessly almost immediately. They’ ll need to use the tried and tested for our first road. They can get fancy later when the colonists have the productive capacity.
Of course, a suitable site will have been selected long before arrival using remotely programmed Mars Copters taking detailed pictures of likely sites. They will choose a low-lying stratum of soft sedimentary rock in the towering walls of the Valles Marineris at its eastern entrance closest to the mountain spaceport and Mars Base One. This is done for a multitude of reasons. Examination of the surface of Mars, which is much closer to the asteroid belt than Earth, has revealed that there is a greater incidence of asteroid hits on Mars than previously thought. As cited above, studies by the ESA based on InSite data have confirmed this. Mars is being hit constantly by objects of considerable size coming in at high speeds. Next in from the asteroid belt, this propensity recommends a permanent city be built in a well protected location under kilometers of rock. Such a site will also obviate any extra consideration for shielding. The cliffs of the Valles present a rare opportunity to get under all the rock they will ever need. Any impact at such a site would need to drill through kilometers of rock. It as good a site as is possible under the circumstances.
Of course there is a price for all the free protection. There is to anything. But creative engineering can provide an answer. Such problems have been faced many times on Earth. Every mine is such a site. Not to speak of protective facilities used in war. It is technology well proven.
If they have chosen well, our soft sedimentary layer will be thick enough to allow us to carve out a large interior space with lots of loft. Our colonists are going to spend their entire lives inside, so it should be a space that doesn’t feel confining. They are going to be presented with enough challenges. They don’t need claustrophobia among them. High and wide is the ticket for interior spaces, and this will be the perfect opportunity to provide them. There are many other things they can do to give the impression of the outdoors. Many relatively inexpensive measures could be taken to facilitate the settler’s adaptation to living their life indoors. Even though they live inside, they can be virtually connected to the surface of Mars.
A desirable feature that could be provided to connect the inside to the outside is a representation of the terrain of Mars linked to their interior space. It will never be practical to provide windows to the exterior. Pressure differences and susceptibility to radiation streaming through would require any windows to be so thick, and so opaque, as to be practically useless. Such ‘windows’ would only highlight the settlers’ isolation.
Since the city is going to be next to the canyon, it would be easy to record a continuous scene of events there. I am assuming that, by the time that Mars is settled using the Moon to provision it, technology will have advanced to allow inexpensive screens of practically unlimited size. Considering the large screens now used at sporting events, I do not think that this is much of a stretch beyond the Jumbotron. Such a screen would require image processed scenes to reform the view. Even now, imaging software can effortlessly change the color balance and brightness of scenes. They should show the scene in the canyon, as a friendlier, more colorful version of Mars that looks more Earth-like.
Placed as it is farther from the Sun, with less solar intensity than Earth, the real, unvarnished, Mars will be a dim planet indeed. It would not be an unforgivable lie to polish its image when they want to connect our settlers to it. If they do it right, it will look like a window on a majestic world and still provide absolute safety. It will help to make them feel at home. The image’s radiance should be augmented with heat rays so that it feels like the Sun as well. They may even have sun-tanning cots and little tables in the heat of the ‘Sun.’
The interior could be designed to resemble a cliff dwelling, with individual apartments open to the virtual courtyard afforded by the large interior space abutted by the ‘window.’
Another way to provide an outdoor experience would be to seed patches of the surface with miniature cameras that would feed into monitors displaying a video game in their units allowing people to ‘walk’ around on the surface, as was suggested in the monograph on the Moon. Sprinkling the cameras at photogenic spots, allowing people to tour them might be popular and therapeutic, giving an opportunity to imagine being outdoors without the inconvenience and danger of surface suits.
The colonists will need to exercise constantly to counter the effects of the forty percent gravity of Mars, which will take its toll, even if geneticists are able to modify their genes for the heavier bones that some people have naturally. To do this, they will need a gym with exercise machines and a swimming pool. As I have said elsewhere, swimming is one of the few activities that can be enjoyed under low gravity conditions the same as it is on Earth. There are a many swimming games that can be employed to make the necessary exercise more enjoyable. Intramural competitions in athletics should be encouraged.
The low gravity will change the action in many other sports. Gymnastics, tumbling, track, and all varieties of sports will have intriguing permutations under low gravity conditions. Imagine the high and long jumps! In the Gym, as well, facilities should be provided for low gravity trapezing and trampolining. The sports would have unique attributes on a forty percent gravity planet.
More possibilities for surface-oriented activities would be exercise machines equipped with video games features that would allow riders to imagine they were riding or running outside on the surface of Mars. Such machines are available currently. These games could be fed with images from cameras spotted in likely locations like hills, or plains. The games could also be programmed with recreations of times in the past history of Mars when it had heavier air and water on the surface. Using such equipment, you could go sculling on the ancient oceans of Mars. The sculling machines could be suspended on springs and gas cylinders to mimic the movements of rowing and pitching and rolling on the water.
The general idea is to attach the colonists to their beautiful planet. They will need to do this virtually rather than actually. Virtual reality is a fact now. How much more convincing will it be in fifty years? As for many other undertakings, difficult does not mean impossible. It will not be the first time that our imaginations exceeded our grasp. Not everyone will have reason to venture out virtually in drones that picture that surface in their controls and get their exposure in ‘real’ life.
Millions of people in our society have adapted to an indoor life with minimal travelling. They have learned to appreciate the mind-expanding experiences of virtual life. There are continuing complaints that this has enfeebled a generation. But are they right? Is there any denying that people have learned to expand their definitions of real life? Will the people of the next generations be different? That is why I do not think that our Mars colonists will be troubled by the restrictions of interior life when they are offered satisfying alternatives.
Sometimes obstacles can become opportunities. We discussed earlier the problems that the diffuse atmosphere imposed on spacecraft seeking to land on its surface. There was a real problem because the atmosphere was dense enough to require protection from its frictional heating forces but was thin enough to prevent a gliding landing. That required us to avoid the challenge of its properties and land on a mountain top.
These same properties were examined by several innovative groups hired by NASA for a study about transportation on Mars. They saw an opportunity in that obstacle. That came from the very properties of the Martian atmosphere that make it difficult to land. It does that, but it makes it quite easy to fly there. That may not seem immediately obvious, because they just said the atmosphere was too thin to support aeronautic flying using wind surfaces. Atmospheric density using Bernoulli’s principle of the lifting capacity of differential pressures works fine on Earth, and, potentially, on other densely cloaked planets. It doesn’t work on Mars, because of that low pressure atmosphere. That is why the Ingenuity had to use such radical means enable the small amount of lift it could generate. A high speed of wing rotation and a light load just barely accomplished that. It wouldn’t lift any cargo though.
But there is another method of lift that does not depend on speed through the air or sufficient air density. It is flotation, used in lighter than air balloons. It doesn’t matter what is inside the balloons. It just needs to displace enough air to make it lighter than the air kept out. Then, in the same way that boats float on water, our airships will float on Mars. According to the engineers, they will float a lot of weight. The difference between what is outside and what is inside is what counts. The atmosphere of Mars, very diffuse, is only one-hundredth of the Earth’s. But its constituent gases, mostly carbon dioxide, have a molecular weight of forty-four contrasted to Earth’s dry air weight of twenty-nine. That’s heavier than Earth’s air. So, if you displace enough of it with something much lighter, there’s enough flotation power there.
There’s something else very convenient about Mar’s atmosphere. Being very diffuse, there’s not much air pressure. One of the factors to take into account for airships on Earth is the pressure on the envelope. Here, they fill the envelope with enough gas to counter the compressive force of the atmosphere. That means they need to fill it with more gas than would be optimal, because even helium or hydrogen gas weighs something. The filler gas is still lighter than air, though, and they aren’t losing much. But they can’t use vacuum because the heavy stiffening using internal struts for the envelope would reduce the payload still more.
On Mars, they won’t use gas at all. The lightest filler is nothing, vacuum. Since the atmosphere is pretty close to vacuum already, they’ll only need a pump to exhaust the Martian air inside. With almost perfect vacuum outside, you won’t need much structural rigidity to prevent collapse of the envelope. Several lightweight methods of stabilizing the envelope have been described by the NASA nobs. The figures used indicate that an airship the size of a football field would be able to lift sixty tons. Maybe an average cargo ship on Earth can carry about twenty-five thousand tons. So, what? A fifty-car train, about half the length of a standard train on Earth, could carry about three thousand tons on Mars. Not a lot by Earth standards, but more than enough to move bulk cargoes like ore. So, they have the capability to move freely across a planet without roads presenting many obstacles to movement.
It’s a great advantage to be able to fly over obstructions, lifting loads that don’t depend on ground conditions. Admittedly, the engineers indicated that really large ships would be difficult to manage as free flying vehicles. It is a fact, though, that large loads need large ships. Our ships will be tethered to a track, with fewer such limitations.
There is another advantage to using the vehicles in the deep chasm of the Valles where the air pressure is greater than on the surface. You get more lift.
Using vacuum as a lift ‘substance’ has other advantages. If you have a leak, you can fix it and replace the ‘gas’ very easily with the vacuum pump. No need to go back to base for a refill. And since there is no gas, adjustments to ‘inflation’ (hence lift) can be more subtle than a gas alone would allow. You don’t need to reduce the volume of the gas to reduce lift, worrying about where to put it when you do that. You just let a bit of ‘air’ in. The lack of weight of the lift mechanism, nothingness, means that the payload can be almost equivalent to the maximum of the atmosphere displaced, less the weight of the envelope, of course.
There’s also something else that is handy about vacuum for lift. Its based on limitations rather than advantages. With gas lift envelopes, you need to factor in temperature and pressure to manage the lift properties and go up and down. On Earth, say, the lift in the separated gas envelopes used for lift increases with height as the air pressure goes down with elevation, expanding the gas bags they use here. Yet as the ship rises, the air gets colder and the gas contracts as it cools.
That makes it a lot more complicated to operate an airship than it appears to the observer. Vacuum presents no such complex balance calculations because its properties don’t change. Of course, our tethered airships will be changing altitude, but not very quickly. The Valles isn’t flat. Its floor does change altitude from place to place. Yet there will be no call to control lift by dumping ballast that can only be done one time. With a rigid skin, there will be no pumps to regulate pressure for stiffening at the bow like flexible ships need. Since the ships are tethered, there is no need of powerful engines to help raise and lower the vehicle. That will allow simple stress gauges in the tether lines to regulate lift with fewer complications.
They will use that unitary, simplified, lift to control the stress on the tether lines and the rail. They would balance the lift of the airships on the rail and pylons. But that control isn’t responsive enough to control resonance. It’s too slow for that. That’s why you have a rigid rail, just heavy enough, anchored to pylons.
The envelope material’s longevity raises the spectre of our old shibboleth, radiation. They will use the skin of the vehicle to carry solar cells to generate at least some of the power they require, and radiation will gradually degrade the panels of the envelope. We do not know yet what materials they will use fifty or so years out. Maybe they will have solved the problem by then. If not, they will need to replace it like they do with the depleted parts of other machines.
How they get there after they’ve floated all this stuff is the next problem. They have functioning air ships, but they still need to power them someplace. Rockets are expensive and dangerous. And remember the problem NASA had getting Ingenuity to fly using propellers in that thin air. Propellers were postulated by NASA but would never work to move any effective weight of cargo. They do have highly reactive ‘jet’ engines that can grab the oxygen from the carbon dioxide atmosphere, but the materials they use are so volatile that you’re hardly better off than using rockets. For cargo, and routine personnel transfer, you need something tame and dependable, not an explosion waiting to happen.
That brings up an old-fashioned solution again. For reliability, there’s no tech like proven tech. Ever ride an electrically driven subway? Well, our colonists might wind up using an update on that, something like the monorails that never quite caught on, but upside down. Our air trains could be easily, safely, and cheaply, pulled at great speeds in the thin Martian air. Since there is so little air in the air, there would be minimal turbulence or friction. Those great speeds could be high enough to minimize the travel time of the great distances that Mars presents. Yes, it is substantially smaller than Earth, but it’s all land.
Since they would not be free air ships, but captive of their rails, they would need to have a destination worth building a track to. Like a mine, or perhaps, a strategically located sister settlement. But the track would not need flat land or an expensively prepared track bed like a standard train, or road.
Such a train would require those pylons I mentioned installed at appropriate intervals connected by those (heavy enough) rails, elevated and powered, to feed the electric traction motors it would use front and rear. They would control the cars as they move along, speeding and slowing where required. As was the practice in building railroads on Earth, the existing line could be used to access the newly laid ‘track’ as it is built. The engineers would need to keep in mind that the single track restraining and pulling the cars must also control their resonant movements. That would not be much of a challenge for people used to such tasks. Bridge building here on Earth commonly presents such resonance stresses. With multiple airships tied together, that will be an important consideration. You don’t want the cars to shake together and pull their lines. Don’t worry, though. The science will be up to it.
For individual ship exploration, a dangerous but necessary risk on an unknown planet, our colonists would probably use low powered rockets. They wouldn’t need them for lift, and their lifting material isn’t at all flammable, so some moderately explosive duo like methane and oxygen would be enough for acceptable propulsion. There is evidence of some seasonal releases of methane on Mars, so it is conceivable that there may be local sources for raw methane. Although somewhat expensive, it is easily synthesized if there is a cheap source for carbon. In the absence of that, hydrogen peroxide may be used. It would be easily fabricated from demonstrably available materials on Mars, and ‘burns’ as steam. Using something highly volatile like hydrogen-oxygen wouldn’t be prudent for local travel on a largely uninhabited planet. There are few rescue resources there.
Any industrial civilization they establish on Mars is going to need these in enough quantity to manufacture the requirements of life on an undeveloped planet. It will require considerable ingenuity, but not more technical expertise than they command at the present. I don’t need to tell you that. Anyone reading this article has more interest in this subject than the general run of the population, and you are likely to know of the exploits of the scientists who have created the rovers that they have sent exploring bits of the surface of Mars. No person has ever landed on the planet, and they know at least as much about Mars as they know about the Moon, which has been visited by twelve people. Drones are sometimes more useful than people. They are certainly a lot safer and cheaper.
The geology books describe three main mechanisms for the formation of mineral deposits. They are the resources for mining and the creation of the material necessary for fabrication of useful things. You need to address some sort of concentration to make mining worthwhile. There’s twenty million tons of gold in the oceans, but no one has ever mined that.
Now, on to likely sites.
The first mode of concentration to look for is deposits formed by chemical means, usually facilitated by volcanic activity. Aqueous concentration of minerals, deposited by water movement is the next. Finally, biogenic deposit of materials facilitated by living organisms must be considered. Depending on the structure of the creatures leaving the deposits, these formations can be very concentrated. Limestone is usually mentioned as a prime example of this action.
The surveyor drones ranging over Mars have shown that the first two methods of concentration are manifest on the planet. It has all the hallmarks of volcanic activity, and there is some evidence that these processes are still going on. There have obviously been massive flows of water over the surface of the planet, and evidence of water mediated materials like gypsum have been found. It would be surpassing strange if there were not others.
Since they have not found signs of life yet, the last means of concentration may not have operated there, but periodic methane emissions seem to indicate that such means of generation are a reasonable possibility. They are common on Earth, our only source of comparison. It is not certain, however. Chemical creation of methane without the mediation of life is certainly possible. You only need water and olivine, both known to be common on Mars.
So, it is close to certain that diligent prospecting would discover deposits of valuable minerals, perhaps convenient sites. These sites would allow the development of a mining industry that extracts materials the colonists would need for their survival and prosperity.
Materials technology has already been developed that enables the refining of materials in an anoxic environment. Oxygen is a highly active gas, and its presence can contaminate many chemical reactions. In fact, such an environment might well enable the production of superior products on Mars, just as they saw was the case for the Moon. Many types of refining already restrict the content of elements that are ubiquitous on Earth, like oxygen and water. For example refining iron using the hydrogen reduction produces superior metal without coking, and glass can be much stronger without weakening inclusions of water in the crystal structure. In addition, low gravity conditions facilitate the mixing of immiscible ingredients that can produce products unobtainable at Earth gravity. With proper production techniques Mars’ forty percent gravity may be used to material advantage, no pun intended.
It would not be practical for the Martians to import their food, beyond unavoidable initial supply. It’s too far and there would be too much cargo for an undeveloped colony. They must produce it on site. Theoretically, it would not be difficult. Hydroponics is a well developed branch of agriculture and will be heavily used on Mars for many vegetable crops, but it will not be enough.
The native soil, as we noted above, is contaminated, and cannot be used in its original state because it contains perchlorates. It would need to be treated to remove the harmful chlorine by washing it extensively before use. That would take a lot of precious water. It may well be cheaper and easier to crush rock and supplement the resulting protosoil with organic constituents rather than treat the Martian regolith. Not much drilling has been done and they do not know whether the deeper soil is also contaminated.
If it isn’t, artificial soil production, rather than soil washing, would be indicated for crops that must be grown in soil. Many important crops, such as staple grains, including astoundingly productive rice, and root crops, like potatoes, carrots, and onions, are not suitable for hydroponics. Of course any tree crops would need soil too, as does bamboo, essential for lignin and cellulose production because of easy cultivation and incredibly fast growth. It is also easier to use soil because it is simpler to manage, more tolerant of error, so, plenty of soil technology would still be necessary for agricultural production. The simplified pictures of horticulture they see in popular fiction just won’t cut it.
I have mentioned the importance of good food to morale, and I will say it again here. Experts chefs are a necessary investment when you are isolating people form everything they know. As well, the food they are able to grow on large tracts of land they are able to enclose economically on Mars will be a factor in its morale value. They will be able to grow the tree and bush crops that are known as delicacies on Earth and add to the wealth of their dietary choices. Maybe they will be exporting some of those foodstuffs to their fellows in Earth space. As for the Moon, they will be able to integrate aquaculture with their agriculture and produce fish of several varieties. Just because livestock production is impractical in space does not mean that they must eschew animal protein. Every detail will contribute towards making life satisfying and supportable in sensually deprived circumstances.
In order to stay connected with the rest of Humanity circling Earth, and to minimize feelings of isolation, they will need to provide an illusion of linkage for Mars. It will need to maintain a constant connection with the internet on Earth. Since the travel time even for light-speed radio signals can be twenty minutes, the standard for immediate connection possible for the Moon will not be possible for Mars. The connection will be much slower than the original connections by telephone modems used at the beginning of the internet age.
Yet, although the internet is always changing, most of the information on it does not change as often, and a server for Mars that stores the basic information on the nets would be enough to give the impression of constant connection. I am assuming that the computers of the future have greater power than the ones they now have. I do not think that is an unreasonable expectation. Of course, communications like email and social media sites would not be as immediate in their connection as is the case on Earth, but the Martians could get used to that. We have. How many of us read all our communications as they come in all the time? We are so recently out of snail mail that I think they could manage. At light speed the time ranges from three minutes or so to twenty-two minutes when Mars is on the other side of the Sun. The differing orbital speeds are responsible for that. Good thing, too.
Yet, even twenty minutes is not overlong. Granted, it is too slow for conversations, but that too could be managed. Some sort of texting program with collated responses would probably be the most convenient. Video conversations, though possible, would be painfully punctuated.
When the scientists and explorers on Mars have some time, scientific investigations would be fascinating. The chequered history of Mars, with Eons of an atmosphere thick enough to allow liquid water on its surface, and a magnetic field to protect that atmosphere, suggest that life could have emerged on that planet, as it did on Earth. Perhaps it was not multi-cellular life, but it is easily conceivable that, like on Earth, life could have developed a million years after its formation. That could have given it plenty of time.
If it did, and lost its biota when it lost its atmosphere, they might be able to learn more about the conditions under which life could emerge and disappear. Two examples could give us some perspective on our own planet and the development of life elsewhere. This is saying nothing about the implications of the shattering discovery of alien life. They might even find out that it is not so alien after all. Whatever they discover about Mars and its development would be momentous contributions to science.
And it is possible that life persists on Mars below the surface. There is abundant life below the surface on Earth, Mars had an atmosphere of similar thickness to Earth’s for several billion years. Maybe life went underground on Mars when it lost its thick atmosphere in its own catastrophe. There are still signs on Mars that could be indications of life. Each Spring, methane blooms are found at certain spots leading to higher levels at the end of the summer. No one has proven that these are signs of life, but such emanations are often associated with life on Earth. As mentioned, they can also be produced by geologic processes, so it is far from certain that they are the result of biotic action, but it is possible.
Even if no life, is found on Mars it would still be a remarkably interesting planet because of its similarity and its differences in development with Earth. For the first few billion years of its history it was a an actively volcanic planet just like Earth, with a magnetic field and atmosphere just like ours. When it diverged and became the arid planet it is, and the changes that wrought is extremely relevant to the future of our own planet and the study of them would be very instructive. Its shield volcanoes that probably reach right down to the core of the planet, similar in type but different in form to our own shield volcanoes, would give us the perspective to understand our own world better.
The site we have chosen for our colony cities, the Valles Marineris, with its abundant evidence of water flows, would be a prime spot for such exploration. It would not take us too much out of our way while building our airship line. An afternoon jaunt to discover new life wouldn’t be a great imposition.
Another very fruitful study on Mars would be a look inward to our own adaptation, to study the expected differences in healing and development of mankind under the lesser gravity of Mars. Everything from birth to death would be different under its influence and that would teach us a great deal and help us adapt to other low gravity environments, and, who knows, about other subjects.
It is no exaggeration that Mars would be a promising place to do science. And with its accessible moons and thin atmosphere, it would be almost as good a place to place telescopes as is the far side of our Moon. There’s more out there, and it comprises most of the mass of our solar system.
Eventually, our purpose would be building a planet-wide civilization. Because the Valles is settled first, it would no doubt be the focus of our settlements. Since Mars is located near the asteroid belt, it appears that it is more likely to attract rocks from there to its gravity well. That would make deep-buried installations inherently more survivable than dwellings on the surface, but it would make human development different there as well. We were born on a planet open to the sky, and although our planet’s belts of protective resources guard us from its worst excesses, we are still subject to its influence through mutation due to genetic changes from radioactivity. That persists even under those protective blankets and has decisively influenced our evolution. What would happen if we were completely sheltered from its influence under miles of protective rock at the bottom of a cliff?
Another possibility would be the development of an outdoor life. In order to enjoy the largely unimpeded access to the surface, they would not need to terraform the whole surface. The canyon formed by the Valles is planet-sized in itself. It is several hundred kilometers wide and four thousand or so long. That offers enough open space to satisfy anybody.
The surveys show that the atmospheric density at the bottom of the chasm, five kilometers deep, is about twice that on the surface. Not impressively high either, you might say, and not much of an improvement over one percent, but it might be increased to a usable pressure if a cover were suspended over a part of the canyon. I am not saying that this could be done immediately, but it could be a long term goal. The lower air pressure of the air on top of the barrier would keep it inflated without internal supports. Carbon dioxide is half again as dense as air and it would be more effective as shielding, especially at higher pressures. Pumps on top of the cliffs could pressurize the gas and pump it down below. At first, only a small section would be covered, but eventually, comparatively large sections could be inflated, offering access to the surface. It may be that someday people could move around with only ventilators and tanks for breathing, like scuba divers do in our oceans. That’s the kind of thing you see in SciFi movies.
Mars is the outermost of the inner planets, and beyond it stretches the far expanse of the solar system. The resources the outer range offers would be complementary to that of the inner planets, like water and organic chemicals. The asteroid belt with its mineral riches sits right next to it. Ceres, a small planetoid in the belt, might be spun up and colonized to act as a prospecting center.
Father out, Saturn with its huge Moons, especially Titan, laden with organic liquids to dip off its surface, and Enceladus, another moon, with plenty of liquid water, and conceivably, life, await.
Jupiter is a vast storehouse of resources. It has, among its satellites, two promising Moons, Ganymede, and Europa. Both of these have plenty of water, along with silicate rock, probably containing many valuable minerals.
There are, however, severe challenges to living there. Both of these giant planets emit vast amounts of radiation that would require extensive shielding for anyone who needed to live on their planetary-sized moons in proximity to that pervasive energy. They would require amped up versions of the protective environments that were needed on the Moon and Mars. For want of solar sources, the energy required to run the settlements would need to be self generated unless we found a practical method of using those vast energies. They are not sufficiently understood yet, but their existence may prove to be a consideration. Out as far as Jupiter and Saturn, the radiant energy from the Sun is much lower than Mars gets.
It would not be easy, living there. The distance from the Sun is much larger, and the isolation, both actual and psychological, will be much greater. People who live there, such a long way from the rest of mankind, will need to endure. But there will be the satisfaction of historic accomplishment to garner, and the view will be magnificent. To do great things requires great people.
After that Neptune and Pluto await. Then on to the edge of our local creation, the Kuiper Belt, and then the Oort Cloud. They could have supplies from that Cloud halfway to Alpha Centauri. Imagine that!
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