Build a lab. Run it with things that we hope are good enough, but don't value enough to get home (back to earth) safely.
If we're really smart we can even use the whole thing to bootstrap a useful environment to get to and a far easier environment to get back from.
I mean very different robots from the rovers we've sent to date. Maybe not even more complex robots but definitely bigger (and smaller too) robots.
Their task not to survey with minimal disruption, but to actively disrupt. To build, to transform materials (lab), to create the base buildings and infrastructure of civilization. So there's somewhere with resources to better support humans.
Also, you need a vison to advance things. Millions of electric cars ? 10 years ago it would have been a joke
Viable electric cars were a thing even way back in the late 19th century [1]. The problem was that burning oil was cheaper (as the users had to pay none of the externalities for decades), and so it lost out for a good while despite being more efficient (i.e. energy contained in the fuel vs distance driven) on paper.
On top of that came the massive, decades-long lobbying efforts of the fossil fuel industry to get rid of public transit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl...
Agreed on the speed, but 100 miles range on a single charge? That's more than enough to account for the needs of the vast majority of commuters.
> until Lithium-ion batteries because cheap and commonplace, which was only in the last 20 years.
I wonder how that one would have played out if we didn't have oil. The abundance of cheap fossil fuels didn't make it exactly worthwhile to invest in battery R&D.
1. If that were true, EVs would have been much more successful in America. They haven't been. The Nissan Leaf was around long before Tesla and it never went far, because the range sucks.
2. Back in 1900, 100 miles would have been great. In 2000, it's not sufficient at all for most car-owning Americans.
3. You can't have the same range at higher speeds: energy usage goes up dramatically with speed. So you need much more energy storage, and the battery tech of the time just wasn't sufficient.
>I wonder how that one would have played out if we didn't have oil. The abundance of cheap fossil fuels didn't make it exactly worthwhile to invest in battery R&D.
That's a very good point. It would be interesting to see an alternate universe where this was the case.
The problem is that, because of cars, they built everything farther apart, and people willingly chose places to live farther away from work. Just look at a map of the city of Phoenix AZ for instance: 100 miles' range won't cover a trip from one side of the city to the other side and back.
However, for vacations, a rental car is absolutely the right idea. That's what people here in Tokyo do: there's lots of convenient places to rent a car for shopping trips to Costco, or a trip to the mountains, etc., because so many people don't own cars.
Electric cars are nice and all but if you want to credit Elon Musk with contributing to the switch from gas to EV, you also have to credit him with killing high-speed rail with spitballing about the vaporware that is building underground vacuum tunnels to shuttle cars around, aka the Hyperloop (before it became a closed-loop underground taxi service with no regard for fire safety).
Fundamentally the issue with long term Mars habitation is that any technology that allows us to live on Mars full time without support from Earth would make even the wildest 'destroyed' Earths livable. The only thing Mars gives you is there's not going to be people beating on the outside of your trillion dollar dome trying to get in.
The real danger is that life forms hitchhiking the first humans can totally overwhelm any existing life and completely condemn it.
IIRC you need 6 tonnes of food and oxygen just to keep them alive for the transit.
Has that ever been done for human consumption before? Relying on a novel technology in a setup where, if it breaks, everyone on board dies, seems rather dubious.
There were also experiments with "undifferentiated lettuce tissue", using C13-labeled acetate to investigate whether crop plants are able to properly feed off of acetate as their main food source, instead of photosynthesis-based small molecules.
What I'm suggesting is, roughly, to replace the base starch and maybe (some amount of) base fat in a diet (think a typical Asian diet's rice, or wheat in (historic) European bread+beer[0] diets), so that the overwhelming amount of calories won't need to be supplied in advance. Yeah, that'd likely involve feeding some algae or so with the e.g. synthesized acetate, due to yielding nicer nutrition molecules than e.g. simple glucose, which would be comparatively feasible to synthesize without having to use a bio reactor.
Worst case you'd have more sleep in place of productive work for energy conservation reasons, if you need to partially fall back on shipped food due to the food synthesis machines breaking. Recent space fairing history has shown that we can make machines very reliable, especially if they're pretty self-contained, not exposed to/operated in vacuum, and straight-forward to test on earth and in low earth orbit. The ISS crew is just too small to warrant as much of a kitchen facility as needed for incorporating something like "algae-based rice-substitute" or "mushrooms" into their meals, but if Starship works well enough to deploy an unmanned algae production machine for a few months (with solar panels and thermal radiators), before transferring the produce to the ISS to test zero-G food preparation...
[0]: that beer was really low %ABV, and more comparable to eating bread with 1:1 watered-down beer to wash it down.