Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I would suggest to people that want to colonize mars that we try a self-sustaining colony at Bir Tawil first. Of course it would need a sufficient budget, in USD or EUR per year, and cooperation from the adjacent governments for over-land transport of supplies and construction materials.

Not for the purpose of trying to claim it as a sovereign state (silly idea), but as a proof of concept on the volume of material/logistics involved and to stress-test the technology for self sustaining colony infrastructure.

Note that I am not saying we shouldn't also attempt a mars colony, but rather that running a pilot project/proof of concept at Bir Tawil or some similarly harsh environment would be a minuscule cost compared to the actual thing, and may prove very instructive.

It has the advantage of:

standard earth atmospheric pressure and air you can breathe

can go outside without a spacesuit

magnetosphere for radiation protection

ability to extract some drinkable water from the air, even if very arid, if you have sufficient amounts of electricity

relatively easy to transport dozens of tons of cargo to, likely using something like military-type 6x6 5 ton trucks

access to earth based telecommunications systems (geostationary satellites, iridium, inmarsat, etc)

photovoltaic systems can be installed that don't need to be hardened for vacuum

Unfortunately all those advantages also mean that the experiment would be less than useful for simulating a Mars colony.

There have been many attempts at self-sustaining/closed ecosystems over the years, with a distinctly mixed track record.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/mars-sim...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARS-500

I think the point of the experiment would not be to see if you CAN give it a go on Mars, but rather an early indication that you can't. ("If you can't do it here, you can't do it there.")

to really attempt a simulation at it you'd need to build something along the same general concept as biosphere-2 (but much bigger, with more supplies, more redundancy, higher budget etc) and then put it at the very far end of an extremely difficult and arduous logistics chain for periodic resupply.

Winter in Antarctica is getting closer.

This is getting further off topic from the article but your post reminded me of a random idea I had along the same lines - if one of these billionaires who wants to colonize Mars wants to take a practice run, they should build a city in Antarctica. Not just a little scientific outpost like we have now, but a full small-city-sized settlement away from the shores that people can actually live in year-round enjoyably without being insanely depressed or repressed. Seems like a tall order, but still way simpler than doing the same on Mars.

My suggestion has long been a viable, long term colony at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Far more hospitable than Mars and exceedingly cheaper to get to and resupply. And as bonus, is an equally pointless waste of resources and possibly lives...

Is that actually more hospitable than Mars? You can't breathe either place, but one has crushing pressure.

At least the trench doesn’t have radiation you have to shield yourself from constantly.

Very true, but it also has no useful radiation, like, um, light.

But it does have water, lots of water, which could be useful in all sorts of ways.

Ultimately conditions are different enough to Mars to make knowledge gleaned from one to be useless in the other.

The most crucial difference being that on Mars your engineering to stop your air leaking OUT, while at the bottom of the trench you'd be engineering to stop the water getting IN. Which reminds me of this excellent Futurama joke...

Fry: How many atmospheres of pressure can the ship take?

Professor: Well it's a spaceship, so anywhere between 0 and 1.

This is often used as an argument against space settlement. How can they build a settlement on Mars if they can't even build a settlement in Antarctica.

But doing anything like resource extraction or permanent settlement is simply not allowed by the antarctic treaty system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System, and would be heavily fought by all the signatories of that system.

It does seem like it would be much less costly, as measured in hundreds of millions of US dollars, to build a fleet of something equivalent to Russian's heavy nuclear powered icebreaker fleet, than to colonize mars. Just as one essential link in the supply chain and infrastructure if you wanted to sustain a newly founded coastal city somewhere in Antarctica.

One doesn't get a resupply fleet on Mars.

Sure you do, the only feasible way to make a mars colony work is one-way trips of people / supplies once every nine months, when the earth/mars orbits align best for interplanetary travel.

>they should build a city in Antarctica.

Not a single billionaire alive today can be trusted to safeguard the delicate ecosystem there.

You’re telling me Larry Ellison is a threat to slow-moving glaciers?

But we…very much don’t want to melt the ice down there.

Completely independently of a mars colony, this would be an interesting experiment.

You might want to start with just building a very large east/west solar installation to create a large shaded area, then some water extraction systems and high intensity greenhouses. And obviously give the whole place very good internet connection.

It would not have to be fully closed, like biosphere 2. Many things you don't have to worry about, like CO2 from concrete accumulating. You can even have a bit of water loss.

But the problem is this: if you are successful and create some thriving city there, one of the neighbouring countries will suddenly discover some long lost claim to the land and annex it.

A better idea might be to take a place that is very inhospitable but already has a sizeable human presence, like the site of the EELT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extremely_Large_Telescope . This region is politically stable. It has to be for the extremely large investment of the EELT.

Then take a few square kilometers of desert in the vicinity and try to build a self sustaining city there for the EELT employees. Maybe it can grow into a tourist attraction. You would have to be extremely careful not to create light pollution though.

I disagree. Antartica is best suited to simulate the climate, hostile environment and logistical challenges. Especially the unexplored parts.

Antarctica is a great idea as well. I am not sure what the political challenges would be if somebody with a sufficiently absurd amount of money to throw at the project actually attempted it. The antarctic treaty is supposed to prohibit nation states from claiming pieces of it as sovereign territory, but those negotiations from the 1950s/1960s didn't really envision modern billionaires doing such things independently.

Whether somebody would have the early stages of their construction project shut down by a flown-in team of military forces from some major nation states (US, Russia, UK) is another question. Or simply blockaded and shut down at places like the ports in Chile, Argentina, Tasmania, mainland Austrlia, New Zealand, South Africa.

> The antarctic treaty is supposed to prohibit nation states from claiming pieces of it as sovereign territory, but those negotiations from the 1950s/1960s didn't really envision modern billionaires doing such things independently.

You've actually got the same exact problem with the Outer Space Treaty. It only prohibits countries from claiming sovereignty over outer space or any celestial body.

Claiming soveregnity automatically makes you a country, no?

I think it would be more accurate to say "having your sovereignty recognised by other countries automatically makes you a country", but obviously there are bootstrapping problems with that definition.

Sure, but you'd be recognising yourself as a country at least to have sovereignty.

If you form a new country that country isn't a part of existing treaties.

Sure, but unless you sign those treaties no one will recognize you and then it's fair game to take all of your assets.

Not really. There’s actually not a single thing that every country in the world agrees on.

There are 2 non-signatories of the Vienna Convention in Diplomatic Relations.

While that is true in theory, it's not true in practice. The 2 non-signatories are irrelevant countries.

I dunno, 12 million people live in South Sudan, and irrespective of that, there is not a single thing that every country agrees on. Even the definition of what a country is.

How would you define a country?

There’s also plenty of “global” treaties that United States is not a party of. Does this make the US a “irrelevant country”?

South Sudan is barely a state, as we both know, and is still fairly recent. Give them a few years.

The US doesn't accede to these treaties because it has a huge economy and military.

I mean, if the ISS can happen I am sure it can be worked out.

I suppose that one could consider a place like McMurdo as a proof of concept of such already, since its necessary annual inputs of cargo and life-support supplies (food, etc) are extremely well documented at a granular level in terms of the purchasing and procurement process and cargo manifests.

the ISS is not self sustaining and you can resupply quickly. For Mars you need to be able to survive for years before some kind of rescue is possible.

I'm not sure why it needs to be done by billionaires independent of nation states, the trip to mars sure won't be.

Indeed! Although I'd frame Bir Tawil as a good steppingstone. Anyone interested in Mars colonization should first also setup a prototype Mars base in the interior of Antarctica.

It has the same advantages as Bir Tawil, and it's still much warmer than Mars. If you can't succeed at Bir Tawil, you can't expect to succeed at Antarctica, and if you can't succeed in Antarctica, you can't expect to last on Mars.

Why not just do it in the Nevada desert? You can set any restrictions you want on how many resources you can bring or how you can transport them.

that as well, though some of the most bleak and desolate places like dry lakebeds are already occupied by things like area 51/groom lake.

You underestimate how vast the Nevada outback is, and how desolate it is.

The only thing this would demonstrate is that the nicest place to live on Mars is a hundred times shittier than the worst place on Earth.

Before Mars is a viable colonization destination, we need to build a good size habitat that's fully or almost fully self-dependent in one of our many oceans that make up most of this planet. If the purpose really is to attempt to escape extinction events I'd rather live down where food and water are plentiful and within arms reach than any celestial object. Additionally, international waters are by definition not owned or controlled by any government and are accessible by anyone with a boat.

Technically, this is more than possible with current tech at less cost than sending a rover to Mars (probably), but no one wants to do it because it's not land you can plant a flag into and "claim" as yours.

Building under the sea at any kind of scale falls down quickly as soon as you compare it to say building it on land.

In other words, from cost, to sustainability, to environment, to trade, to defence, to literally whatever criterion you want, living on land is better than living under the sea.

And alas it would not really increase survivability of ELEs. (inside mountains is likely better for that.)

The only reason to colonise Mars is to mitigate an ELE, and its a pretty poor mitigation at that - Mars is more likely to experience an ELE than we are, all it takes is a bit of machinery to fail.

Which begs the question of course, why do we care? If an ELE happens, then it happens. Bummer.

> cooperation from the adjacent governments

This is fairly impossible with two nations currently in a border dispute. Antarctica is a better place for that because there are no nations at war, no bandits, no geostationary satellites. It's quite a bit like Mars only with more water and an atmosphere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com