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What Hacker News says
- As I see it, the real question for space colonization is "How small of a population can be 100% self-sufficient in manufacturing?" and the smaller that number is the more likely it can be successful. If N=1, the odds are great, if N=10,000,000 it will not succeed.
The basic problem is that you can't export anything from Mars to Earth that makes Mars colonization profitable from a Terrestrial perspective -- so at any time the flow of resources could be cut off, see the Asimov classic story
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martian_Way
The Muskian model that we're just going to send millions of people canned food makes no sense at all.
Eric Drexler's molecular assembler program has foundered but we need something functionally equivalent, living things pull off basically the same trick, maximizing what we can do with them is an obvious path to "advanced manufacturing" together with flow chemistry, 3-d printing and other methods.
- Don't forget Asimov's The Martian Way. First published in November 1952 (!!!), the story is about how Earth refuses to export its water to Martian colonies who are using them as reaction mass on their spaceships. The Martians, in response, fly to Saturn's ice rings and ship a huge chunk back by using it itself for reaction mass.
Asimov truly was legendary.
- You should read Isaac Asimov's "The Martian Way".
- My analysis of Mars colonization is that it is 99% about the people there being able to manufacture 99% of what they need with as small a population as possible and 1% about getting the people there. If 1 person can support themselves the effort almost certainly succeeds, if it takes a city of 10,000,000 it almost certainly fails.
A deep space colony might be able to build megastructures such as solar sails, energy converters and shades and deliver them to places like the Earth-Sun L1 point. You can't make anything on Mars that can't be made on Earth and it's implausible you could bring anything back from Mars that couldn't be made much more cheaply here. You're left with the political situation of Asimov's short story The Martian Way, where a Mars colony is caught off from Earth and forced to become self-sufficient. Even if Earth was interested in subsidizing a Mars colony for the time being, the Martian colonists would want to develop self-sufficiently as quickly as possible.
People who look seriously into the problem of space colonization tend to follow the same tracks that Eric Drexler did. His molecular assembler and nanomill concepts have not aged well but I'd imagine that something functionally similar could be pieced together out of 3-d printing, fermentation, genetic engineering, flow chemistry and other pieces. Musk's talk of sending 1,000,000 and neglect of "advanced manufacturing" makes his plans seem unrealistic to me.
- One thing with the early sci-fi is you will have to pretend you don’t know what we now know about the other planets. Asimov (The Martian Way I think got Saturn’s rings very wrong) and Heinlein (Mars and Venus are both depicted very wrongly and still a very entertaining story in Double Star) had a few stories and novellas.
- > Where did the water come from?
Good question! His story "The Martian Way" addresses this. I don't really want to spoil it from you, but basically: where you'd expect.
> Surely they weren't storing it as H20 on the ship?
Why not? It's stable, it's useful for other reasons, and when you've got free energy and easy propulsion, there's no reason not to. (There probably would be some issues with sloshing, actually, but he didn't get into it. Asimov wrote a lot of stories that could be considered Hard Science, but I don't think he'd consider himself an engineer.)
