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Comment by lupusreal | Hacker News Reader

It's not an intractable problem, just send a robot bulldozer and excavator a few years beforehand. The real problem with a Mars colony is the economics for making it anything more than a small scientific outpost / political stunt. Forget the upfront cost of the habitat/etc, how do you actually create a self sustaining Martian economy? I've never heard a realistic answer for this.

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It is an interesting problem of energy. How would a robot bulldozer or excavator be powered? They require more power than a rower.

They don't require more than a rover if you accept them doing their work far slower than their normal earth equivalents. Hence sending them years in advance to dig out a some holes that would only take a few days for excavators on Earth.

While speed is a factor as well, you still need a lot more energy consumption to move a mass of rock&dust some distance away than to move a small rover. This immediately follows from the formula for work and the gravitational force.

Given enough time, you can dig out a house foundation with a spoon, power is not an issue here. The less power you have available the slower you work. If your robots wear out, you send more.

The real problem is finding enough time and money to waste on such a fruitless endeavor. If that can't be managed it nullifies the entire problem of digging a hole on Mars since a Mars base is nothing but a waste of time and money. Wasting time and money is table stakes.

If we can spend $100 billion on blowing people up, we can certainly afford a Mars colony.

That's easy to claim, but it's not so easy to actually convince a government of this.

Before you get angry with me: I'm not saying this is the way it ought to be, but it's the way it is.

As terrible as it is, blowing people up at least serves a purpose (an evil, mean-spirited, ego-driven purpose). A colony on Mars is entirely pointless. It would be like spending $100 billion on a performance art project.

Solar still works on Mars as does fission. Plenty of stuff about this online if you look.

Sure, but solar is not great for digging underground. So now you need a solar station and wires connected to it, and that already complicates things significantly and massively increases the chance of failure.

small nuclear power plant would be the first thing sent to mars, or many arrays of solar cells. then pods of batteries, then construction materials, then equipment, then humans.

realistically, the assembly could be done remotely, and you would want at least two habitable shielded pods with a very large excess of food/oxygen/supplies stored by the time humans arrived.

This might seem impossible, but i don't think it's particularly difficult, the only major hurdle would be the budget. The rocket vessel will make a good living pod, the small nuclear reactor was studied by the US Gov in the 50s, so that shouldn't be a problem, except maybe cooling, but again that should be a solvable problem.

> how do you actually create a self sustaining Martian economy? I've never heard a realistic answer for this.

What would a realistic answer even look like? I imagine that since nothing like jump-starting an economy ex nihilo on a cold, desert planet has been done before, any proposal at all would sound wildly unrealistic.

Tourism? That's the only thing that even approaches realistic that I can think of.

The problem with the Martian tourism is the huge amount of time it takes - around 3 year round trip with current conventional rockets; this proposed nuclear rocket would cut travel time to 2 months one way, but you are still looking at a 4 month minimum just in travel time. A billionaire who could afford a Martian vacation would likely struggle to take the time out of their schedule for one. This is why I think lunar tourism is much more viable: a vacation on the Moon need only take 2 weeks (a week of travel time and a week there; and nuclear propulsion could cut the travel time substantially)

It takes 2 months in near-ideal winds to cross the Atlantic by (non-modern ultralight) sail, yet that sort of travel was done pretty regularly for business.

When steam engines decreased that time to 16 days, 200-passenger ships crossing Atlantic purely for tourism were very popular.

It once was a tradition for the English upper classes to send their young sons on a "grand tour" of the Continent, which would last for many months, sometimes even a year or two.

So, yes, some billionaire paying for their kid to spend 12-18 months on a Mars trip is a possibility. Or maybe even for themselves if they retire, or as a sabbatical.

However, I think the much greater time and expense is going to make Martian tourism a much smaller market than lunar tourism.

I think in the medium term, the Moon is a much more feasible destination for humans than Mars is. It is much easier for an ultra-wealthy person to take a few weeks out of their schedule for a trip to the Moon, than months or years for a trip to Mars. Since it is only a bit over a light-second away, they could even quite feasibly work remotely from there – the delay is small enough that real-time audio and video calls are possible. Mars is 3–22 light minutes, which forces all communication to be asynchronous.

I guess my question wasn't so much "What is a realistic solution?" but more "Would we even recognize a realistic solution if it were presented to us?"

The enterprise of starting a colony on Mars is so unprecedented that any economic solution sounds nuts.

I think the only realistic answer at this point is "We need more information".

"The Mars colony would produce [service/good] to generate income sufficient to pay for the colony's upkeep / expansion."

Let's assume the colony itself is built by some idealist willing a trillion dollars to the project or something. Now that you have a base on Mars, how do the inhabitants pay to keep it going? Self sufficiency is too far fetched at this stage so they need regular supply shipments from Earth, so they need income of Earth currency.

> Now that you have a base on Mars, how do the inhabitants pay to keep it going? Self sufficiency is too far fetched at this stage so they need regular supply shipments from Earth, so they need income of Earth currency.

Emotional blackmail: “If Congress doesn’t pass the Martian colony funding bill, Americans on Mars will die”

National competition: “China’s Mars colony is bigger than ours”

Religion: “God wants us to send money to Mars” (that may sound bizarre, but religion motivates humans to spend fortunes on all sorts of strange things, maybe at some point one or more religions will latch on to Mars)

Ok, you've described the problem again, but I'm trying to understand what a realistic answer would look like.

Let's say for instance that some answer were "handicrafts built from local, Martian materials" along with "YouTube channel revenue". Sounds unrealistic to me, but maybe people would be willing to pay $1M for a little puppet made on Mars, and they could ship them out by the ton. The economics on this are unusual.

I don't know. I honestly think Martian colonization just will not happen until we have a global, peaceful, prosperous civilization. Then it would just be funded by the global government in a similar way and for similar reasons as the antarctic stations.

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