Asteroid Mining Is Our Best Hope for Colonizing Mars

its not hard to imagine mars needing more water due to increased human activity. i mean earth is mostly water, and it still has a market value.

I'd assume we'd do it the same way we do it on the space station, except on a larger scale. We tightly control water consumption and what leaves the life support systems.

Also, the water doesn't need to be exposed to the Martian atmosphere - it can be stored in tanks until needed. Farms wouldn't be in open air anyway.

At a later point, it may prove feasible to reduce the incidence of solar winds using one or more deflectors at the Sun-Mars L1 point. A cool idea would be to slow down instead of deflecting so the particles would land on Mars and become part of the atmosphere instead of blowing it away.

But this is way past the science-fiction line for now.

mars has an atmosphere even now. the processes stripping it off work on geological (or longer) timescales. if you can import (or free) enough water to make a difference in the first place, then keeping up with the losses should be pretty easy.

A way to protect the atmosphere of Mars with a magnetic field has been suggested https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmo...

Honestly I think getting someone to Mars and back at this point is an engineering problem in that:

1. Humans can live in space for extended periods (eg the ISS);

2. We have the capability to land something on Mars and take off again, rendezvouzing with an orbiting spacecraft. We did this on the Moon;

3. We have the capability of getting enough fuel and payload into orbit and then sending that to Mars and back. Now this part is tricky because every pound of payload you need has a knock on effect in terms of more fuel needed plus more fuel to carry that fuel. This I think is actually the trickiest part but largely comes down to a function of launch costs.

That all being said, it looks like it'll cost hundreds of billions of dollars and be an active mission for ~2 years. Is it worth it? That's a reasonable question to ask given how many unmanned probes we could send for that same money and what the value is of sending a meat bag to another world.

Now colonization is a whole other beast. My definition of colonization is that the colony is self-sufficient. For this, IMHO we simply don't have the technology. Far from it. Too much of what we rely on is provided "free" by the Earth. Air, water, plants and animals. Resource extraction is ludicrously cheap compared to anything in space or on another world.

But think about the daily things you need: clothes, food, computers, shelter, transport. There's a complex web of dependencies on any one of these things such that a good portion of the world is needed and a pretty significant number of people are required.

Also, does Mars even make sense? It has almost zero atmosphere. I've read that Mercury may in fact make much more sense. For one it'll solve the energy problem (solar on Mercury, anyone?).

Not that living on Mercury is without problems of course.

> This is assuming we can even get a person to mars, which has not been demonstrated as feasible. Let alone a whole community.

Landing per se shouldn't be impossible. We landed people on the Moon a long time ago. Recent advances in magnetic shell aerocapture are really exciting and make landing on Mars more feasible. The real question is whether we can learn how to do it in an economic and sustainable way; unlike Apollo.

> It would be better to colonize the moon

I agree with this. Going straight for Mars seems unwise. We should expand slowly out into the Solar System, step by organic step. Even better than the Moon would be Low Earth Orbit. A colony in LEO would have same-day access to Earth in either direction, and would benefit from being inside Earth's magnetic field, which would allow the designers to cut the mass needed for shielding significantly. Big savings.

A LEO colony would be close enough to Earth that people on Earth could teleoperate robots in the colony in real time with minimal lag, allowing it to circumvent the bootstrap question of "Where do people live while it's being built?"

A LEO colony would also have to built using bulk physical resources from the Moon or the Near Earth Asteroids, building up our manufacturing base there, and serving as a "shore leave" destination for people working further up in Geosyncrhonous Orbit or elsewhere Cis-Lunar space.

Once we have a basic torus capable of holding, say, 10,000 people, it could serve as a staging area for venturing deeper into the Solar System, such as Mars. But personally even then, I wouldn't advocate for Mars. After all that work of moving humanity out of a deep gravity well, why climb into a new one? Space is where all the solar energy is, and all the resources of the asteroid belt and the moons are (gravitationally speaking) close at hand.

> It’s a massive waste of resources which could go towards making earth better, where we’re all stuck anyway.

Now here's where I disagree with you.

1. In no way did colonizing Australia or North America prevent England from improving the homeland. You can do both! Heck, Elon Musk is already doing both. The whole point of Tesla/Solar City is to move humanity off fossil fuels.

2. Space colonization can be part of the solution. Imagine industrial processes that have very polluting intermediate steps; they could be done on the Moon where you don't have water or air to worry about polluting. Earth could be cleaned up by exporting those industries to space. The Moon could also serve as a much better repository of high-level nuclear waste than Yucca Mountain.

And of course in the very long term, the Solar System has the energy and material resources to support a human population 10,000x bigger than Earth does. As much solar energy as Earth receives, space receives a lot more. As much iron and PGM and carbon and water as Earth has, space has more. Europa alone is estimated to have 2x as much water as Earth. And so those resources can support more people who have more ideas who solve the very problems you want solved.

I think there’s a bit of tail wagging the dog involved, in a good way.

You are correct, mining asteroids would be necessary for colonizing Mars. But mining asteroids would also bring Earth much closer to post-scarcity (maybe even as necessary!).

So if building a private beach on Mars for Musk and Richard Branson and Taylor Swift is what it takes to get an asteroid mining economy rolling, then cool, that's a plan…

Gravity, Atmosphere, Aesthetics (for population expansion), research... all sorts of reasons.

But yes, once you've gotten reliable mining operations the pressure will be less. But the novelty will always be in high demand.

They are talking about mining for water not precious metals, which there may not be enough of on Mars to sustain the colonies.

But I think you are right about what they colonies will look like. Subterranean for the most part with some farming glass domes on the surface.

There are dozens of research bases in Antarctica. Establishing a research base on Earth isn't comparable to an off-world research base anyway, if you're looking to study said remote world or establish a lifeline for humanity in case the Earth is devastated.

If you mean "colonize" in the sense of "go exploit local resources to create an economic engine which justifies independent existence", then Antarctica is actually a much harder sell.

If you mean "have a presence", we already do.

This is a rather lazy critique that doesn't acknowledge any of the actual motivations of those looking to expand the reach of humanity to Mars (and beyond).

I'd assume any ppm needs to be corrected by an "economically accessible" factor much <1. After all, we're not running the entire crust through a separator and ending up with piles of its different constituents.

The risk isn't "running out", it's that the cost of extraction becomes prohibitive. As a rule of thumb, asteroids are generally much richer with heavy metals than the Earth's crust because heavy things sink on Earth but they have no where to go on asteroids. These metals persist in small quantities in the crust mostly when they are bound to light elements. So the density and types of ores on asteroids are completely different, vastly changing extraction costs.

Whether the benefits of asteroid composition outweigh the costs of space mining is complicated and time-/tech-dependent, and cannot be guessed by just noting that in principle there are sufficient atoms in the Earth's crust.

Yes, but why tear up our planet to get at its metals and minerals? Better to move mining and heavy industry into space, and avoid the environmental damage to Earth.