The Caves of Mars (2019)
usgs.gov
usgs.gov
Has anyone thought about constructing self healing domes like all those scifi movies and games imply?
(As for air - we just need enough barsooms of oxygen !)
Like if space travel was an electric car and you were an ICE car kind of guy, what would space travel have to be like for you to be like "Okay, that's pretty cool."
Mediterranean climate would be great, but that's negotiable.
I like your analogy with ice cars and electric cars. It perfectly captures the value system that drives space colonizatuon. It's the fetishization of technology. Because it requires advanced technology, therefore, in and of itself, space travel is the right thing to pursue. It's a modernist mindset.
Going to Mars will eventually end up the same fate as going to the Moon. It's a branding effort, the most expensive carnival ride. We'll do it a few times, some young people with a sense of adventure, middle-aged people bored with their families, old people looking for a last hurrah. And once there, only to live in the most bureaucratic, degraded, dependent way possible. In a true anti-state of freedom.
It's constructive to think about this in contrast to the explorers of the 15th and 16th century. They discovered paradise. Mountains of gold and silver, perfect weather if you were lucky, freedom (frighteningly raw freedom) from their lords in the old country, grass plains carpeted with red meat, streams overflowing with fish, ... Technology was not a value in and of itself in any of these endeavors. Current discourse around going to Mars, technology _is_ the value.
Not psychologically, it's not. You might say the same about much of the inside volume of a cathedral; useless space! And yet, we make sure they all have it, because we value it.
> because the pressure difference between inside and outside will explode your habitat before any self-healing mechanism kicks
No, it won't. It's (at most) one atmosphere worth of pressure. ~14 psi. A small hole in a tire doesn't immediately burst it, and it's under significantly more pressure.
The problem is that the first force scales with the surface area enclosed (or even volume - I'm not sure as I can't find the reference at the moment), while the second one scales with the circumference. So r^2 versus r. This gives a fundamental limit on how big hemispherical habitats can be.
The tensile strength of the membrane will also be interesting for larger habitats.
This, a disproportionate amount of human history has only been preserved in caves.
The lack of radiation shielding is a problem.
The cave candidates that they displayed in the image were all in the Tharsis Montes surrounding the major martian volcanos in the most volcanic region of Mars, so I suspect that those ones are largely lava tubes.
Harder to fly in, though.