Sure. As long as people can be made of metal and glass and can run on rechargeable lithium ion batteries!
People have lived in the International Space Station for years without ill effects. It will be much easier to build a shielded, protected environment on Mars than in a thin, small, low orbit vehicle such as the Space Station.
What would be the purpose of colonizing Mars apart from having an (unnecessary) backup for humankind?
The purpose would be exactly the same as it was when ancient people left warm, comfortable Africa and Southern Europe and migrated to the north, where they had to wear heavy clothing and learn to survive in ways that no primate could without tools, furs and hunting animals that no primate could possible kill without complicated weapons, coordination and knowlege. If you don't think it was complicated, you don't know much about ancient hunters. It was the same as when ancient people crossed over to North American, built boats and went to Japan, and then fanned out over the Pacific to the islands and Australia. It was what drove my ancestors from comfortable, wealthy England to the middle of nowhere in Canada. People have a deep urge to explore and to go where there is nothing, and where life is challenging, and where they have to start over with nothing.
When you go to inhospitable places that happen to have far more wealth and potential than the old country you come from, a few generations later your descendants are wealthy, educated and skilled in ways they never would have been if you had stayed home.
Mars and the asteroids are empty worlds that have millions of times more material wealth than earth. I mean that literally. Millions of times more iron, gold, silicon, energy and everything else. There for the taking. No one owns it. No one can stop you from mining it, and there are no energy limits or worries about pollution. With self-replicating robots the cost of taking it will be zero dollars. You need only a few things to master these new worlds: intelligence and hard work. You do not need to seize the land from Native Americans the way my ancestors did, or destroy the ecosystem, or suffer from starvation or disease. You can live comfortably, although it will be crowded, Spartan, and dangerous for a few generations, and you and your descendants may never be able to go outside without protective clothing.
The idea to try to bring a part of the web of life to a dead, inhospitable (to say the very least) heavenly body is totally pointless, not to say bizarre. Living there will be a lifelong depression where the final decomposition . . .
That's ridiculous. Do you think people who live in the arctic suffer from lifelong depression? Or people who live in the town of Whittier, Alaska, where everyone lives in one large building and they cannot go out 6 month of the year? See:
https://www.npr.org/2015/01/18…-community-under-one-roof
Many people who live in noisy, crowded, unnatural cities and who never encounter nature are fine with that. My late aunt preferred that. If someone growing up on Mars craves wide open spaces, camping, and living close to nature, that person will emigrate to Earth. Other people on Earth who crave adventure, technology, and close-knit "corridor culture" dependence on others will go to Mars. It will be like living on a gigantic oil drilling platform, which some people enjoy.
I have lived in places that many modern Americans would consider boring, or even hellish. Such as the middle of rural nowhere in Japan, long before the Internet was invented, where there was no air conditioning, no place to go, and nothing to do at night. It was very humid and hot by 10 am. So hot that you have to take a siesta and not try to work around 2:00 in the afternoon. You may die of a heat stroke otherwise. The work is hot, tedious and dangerous. There is no flush toilet and the cesspool stinks when it gets hot. There are thousands of acres of beautiful unused forest and inaccessible hills, but you better not go wandering in them because you may be eaten by a 300 lb wild boar, or a bear. Mars is not the only place with dangerous wilderness. (People have guns to shoot larger wildlife; the Japanese government wants more people to own guns.)
In other words, it is like being a migrant laborer in the U.S. It sure isn't for everyone! But I like it. The people who have lived that way all their lives do not suffer from lifetime depression. Believe it or not, many of them have read more books than you. Some of them know much more about Jane Austen than you do, or about various subjects you have never heard of. They are much better at operating and repairing machinery than you are. Little old ladies operate heavy machinery that will cut off your arm if you make a mistake. They can build houses and barns better than you can. They are self-sufficient. They grow all their own food. If you sent them to Mars they could probably grow all their own food there, too.
If you have not lived this way, you cannot judge it. People living in caves and corridors on Mars would be self-sufficient, resourceful, and more like those people than like urban Americans.
Extracting various elements on Mars, regardless of the energy cost, is not a simple problem. On Earth, in order to have an effective mine, one mineral phase needs to be found that is amenable to extraction, concentration, and purification. If other mineral phases can be found that do not interfere with the processing of the primary phase, then these too might be mined as a byproduct line. The vast majority of raw material mined is waste: only a tiny amount is the target element(s). The waste needs to be dealt with. The typical free energy fantasy is that raw rock or ocean water can have all its elements selectively captured and concentrated, somehow making stockpiles of almost the entire periodic table readily available at no cost. That requires more than two new technologies. It is hundreds of new technologies, and a entirely new type of economy as well.
Mining asteroids is a hugely uneconomic venture, unless those elements extracted are needed in the immediate vicinity, or maybe downgravity. At some point the cost in energy is so high to find extraterrestrial mineral stockpiles it would be better to make the elements from scratch. And who cares about a boulder of platinum the size of an apartment building when the fact of of its existence and accessibility devalues the price of platinum? Better to carve a space station out of it then send it to Earth. In the early days of immediate pre-colonization, perhaps dropping a few asteroids of rich in various metal contents somewhere convenient on the surface might be a helpful plan. Might also inspire some nefarious plans...
Anyway, I've been to Mars. It was shit so I came home early.
Been there. Was great fun and action. I saved that planet.
As I totaly recall now 
Extracting various elements on Mars, regardless of the energy cost, is not a simple problem.
No one said it is simple. It is profitable. It is a good opportunity because it is not simple. If it were simple that would invite competition.
The vast majority of raw material mined is waste: only a tiny amount is the target element(s). The waste needs to be dealt with.
Why does it need to be dealt with? What harm could it cause? Perhaps on Mars pollution might become a problem, but waste material on an asteroid that has been orbiting the sun since the solar system began can be left to orbit. Or dropped into the sun. Thousands of asteroids fall into the sun every year.
If the mining is done by self-replicating robots using solar energy, the concentration of the ore would not matter. It would take more robots and more energy, but there would be unlimited quantities of both. Whether it takes 100 robots, 1,000, or 100 million robots would not make the slightest difference, and the cost would not be any higher. It would just take a little longer to fabricate the robots.
Perhaps you have to live in the countryside to get a feel for how this works. Take water, for example. In Atlanta, it is surprisingly expensive. If you accidentally leave the sprinkler running all day, your water bill will be noticeably higher. In contrast, I know of two old houses in the countryside (one in the U.S. and one in Japan) with unlimited supplies of water. Both are on hills, downhill from springs. The springs produce several gallons per minute, and have been producing for hundreds of years. I suppose people used to use buckets, which meant they had to do work to get water, but nowadays they have PVC pipes from the spring to the house. The pipes are pressurized because it is downhill. They do not even need an electric pump. The pipes only tap a small fraction of the water in the spring; the rest goes down the stream. You could open all the taps, fill the bath and the washing machine and water the lawn, and you would not even notice that the stream is a little lower. You could leave the sprinkler running for a week. There is no water bill. No one knows or cares how much water you use. "Conserving" water is meaningless in these circumstances. The fact that water costs money in the city is irrelevant.
Mining asteroids is a hugely uneconomic venture, unless those elements extracted are needed in the immediate vicinity, or maybe downgravity.
It would not be uneconomical if energy cost nothing. Solar energy costs nothing. Solar photon sails will cost little, and they can be gigantic. Cold fusion or helium-3 fusion would be virtually free.
To summarize, "the waste needs to be dealt with" is an earth-bound way of looking at things. Of course it has to be dealt with on earth! We can't leave mine tailings lying around. That is dangerous pollution. We are so used to the situation on earth that we forget how different it would be if the tailings were on the moon or on an asteroid. It would make no sense to "clean up" waste material on an asteroid that no one will ever see again. The material cannot possibly harm anyone.
Regarding self-replicating robots, suppose it takes 1 week for a robot to gather materials and fabricate another robot. Suppose you start with 1 robot, and you need 100 robots. That would take 7 weeks. Suppose you need 100 million robots. That would take 27 weeks. No one would care about the 20 extra weeks, or the extra metal and plastic needed to make the robots. When the project finished, you would abandon them along with the tailings. Or perhaps ship a few million to some other project, for a penny each.
With unlimited energy, it is more effective to assemble the elements from less useful elements than go great (solar system scale) distances to fetch them. The time required due to massive distances to go to, capture, and return an item from the asteroid belt to near the moon (for example) is extremely significant. Mars is about 3 light minutes away. Jupiter is about 30 light minutes away. (When these planets are close to Earth in their orbits). Many years will required to get something sent from the asteroid belt. It's not like you could order a load of metals and expect them to show up in a couple of weeks, unless you don't mind them arriving at nearly unstoppable velocities.
The Earth and Mars have a huge gravity well to overcome, so shipping stuff from one planet to the other is extremely costly. It becomes not the material shipped, but the shipping cost that will determine the price. The energy spent is better spent at home (Whether on Earth, the moon, or Mars, etc.) than moving things about up and down planetary scale gravity wells, if possible. Best to get it right where you are than using interplanetary shipping.
It is not the making of waste that is the potential problem, it is the scale of material moved in general, most of which ends up as waste. A typical mine now can process 5000 to 20000 tonnes per day. (It will be lighter on Mars). This is equipment and personnel intensive. For the recovery of just one or two elements. The example of robots doing it all at some point is possible. I don't see why colonizing Mars and other planets and moons is impossible, but we are creating a rather large wish list if we think that the unlimited supply of raw materials will easily yield to our demands.
Jed,
My home country Sweden from which I have not yet found any good reason to emigrate, has also experienced emigration waves, notably to North America.
You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…tion_to_the_United_States
Several reasons for emigration of 1.3 millions of Swedes are given, none of them lust for adventure. The emigrants were in desperate need for living space in form of arable land with forests and animal life, employment opportunities or religious freedom. Had North America been a desert they would have preferred to die at home instead of emigrating.
"Mars and the asteroids are empty worlds that have millions of times more material wealth than earth."
You are using the expression "material wealth" in an erroneous way, it means stuff that is more or less ready for use. It is a very long way to make a bolt out of iron mined from an asteroid. And please don't bring up those self replicating robots again. Though it is interesting to read about them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_machine)
I think that a truly self-replicating machine would have to be an entirely new "living" species. Moreover, it will need to have an intelligence equal to or surpassing our own, we have to design an ET. Moreover, ET must be able to survive where we cannot. It must withstand a large temperature interval, it must be impervious to dust and various kinds of radiation. It must also be able to import and store the energy necessary for its operation. Such a clever machine will be heavily dependent on sophisticated sensors and a very advanced data processor. This is not compatible with the harsh environment that it would be required to operate under. Our ET would only function in the cozy environment of a factory for copies of itself or similar accommodation. Then who is going to do the dirty work collecting raw materials and building new factories? The ET: s will have to build stupid remote controlled slave robots that are hardened against a hostile environment. I have nagging feeling that ET is beginning to look more and more like us ...
"Or people who live in the town of Whittier, Alaska, where everyone lives in one large building and they cannot go out 6 month of the year?"
Whittier seems to be a nice place in spite of some cold spells in the winter:
http://www.donanglephotography…tiful-place-day-46-aug-3/
But please tell me, where did they get all the materials for construction of boats, cars and buildings? Did they 3D-print everything from seaweed and gravel or did they import it from another planet?
It is interesting to take part of your experiences in rural Japan, thanks. But my opinion is that comparing your toil and trouble with those of a Mars settler running out of food, water, air, body temperature, life is like comparing a breeze to a hurricane. But I do admire the little old japanese ladies, I do.
But my main message in previous post was not that it would be impossible to colonize Mars. (Even though I still think that a permanent self-sustaining Mars colony is not going to happen because the accounting book will always show only red figures, and that is not sustainable.) My message was that there is no point in doing it. Do you want to be lonely? Be it on an inhabited island. Do you want to gasp for air? Climb a mountain. Do you want to work hard? Build a log cabin using axe and saw. Do you want to be cold? Take off you clothes and have a roll in the snow. For heightened experience some of these activities can be combined.
Want a faster-than-light trip to Mars: https://www.google.com/mars/?
No, the green is not grass and the blue is not water. sorry.
Listen to Alan, a few hours ago he was a candidate for a Mars trip. Using his LENR-powered space ship he has already checked Mars out. No sooner had he arrived than he got homesick missing his new lab.
With unlimited energy, it is more effective to assemble the elements from less useful elements than go great (solar system scale) distances to fetch them.
That kind of transmutation technology does not exist yet. Perhaps it is not even possible. I am limiting my discussion to technology that already exists. It may need improvement. For example, we know that people can live for years in space, in the International Space Station. We can think of ways to make it far cheaper and more practical, with things like a space elevator. The space elevator does not exist yet, but mono-filament material far stronger than steel or any other materials has been developed and it seems likely we will be able to make an elevator within 10 or 20 years. See the NASA docs I referenced above.
If you could assemble elements, it would be nifty to build a Dyson sphere, capture solar wind, transmute it, and use it to assemble entire planets. That's thinking big! That would be a handy material to make the sphere itself out of, since it happens to be headed out in all directions anyway. The mass of it is roughly 1 billion kilograms per second, so there is a lot to work with. If you could convert it into any element, that would be the cat's pajamas! As I said, we are not running out of raw materials anytime soon.
The time required due to massive distances to go to, capture, and return an item from the asteroid belt to near the moon (for example) is extremely significant.
Ed Storms and others at LANL developed space-based fission engines that could reach any planet in a few weeks. Uranium fission might be dangerous or expensive, but a similar engine could be made with cold fusion, helium-3 fusion or hot fusion. That would put the planets no farther away than Beijing to New York by container ship. The space ships would be fully robotic, so the cost would be lower than today's container ship. (Container ships will also soon have few or no human crew members.)
The size of a ship is constrained by the size of the dock facilities, and the depth of the channel. The maximum size of an airplane is constrained by the runway length and runway strength when an airplane lands on it. There are no such constraints for a zero-gravity spacecraft, so it might evolve into something ten times larger than today's container ship, or a thousand times larger.
I said that it will be possible to send goods to Mars cheaper than we send them to Beijing. I wasn't exaggerating.
The asteroid belt is between Mars and Jupiter. It may have as many as 1 trillion bodies. The Oort cloud, where we will find enough water to drown Mars, is considerably farther away.
I am confident that powerful, compact, continuous thrust space engines will be developed eventually. It might take hundreds of years but it can be done. The ultimate limits for human passengers on space vehicles would then be ~1 G acceleration. It would get uncomfortable above that. I suppose most freight might be sent at ~20 G. At 1 G, it would take 6 days to reach Jupiter or 18 days to reach the Oort cloud. That would be lot faster than today's Pacific route container ships. Freight would arrive from Mars or Jupiter on the same schedule as today's airfreight.
Prediction: The first financially successful asteroid mining company will be paid to not ship their rich finds to Earth. This model will attract many copy-cats, (although this will take decades), until the financial economy of Earth completely collapses and is totally re-organized. This re-organization will be precipitated by a renegade asteroid miner that breaks the blockade on delivery of precious and strategic metals by delivering an unusual and rare proto-planetary core into a near-Earth orbit.
You are using the expression "material wealth" in an erroneous way, it means stuff that is more or less ready for use.
No, it does not mean that. Many materials such as uranium fission reactor fuel require a great deal of processing and refinement, but they are still considered material wealth. The most valuable material on earth today is sand. Silicon, that is. It costs nothing as raw material but when it is refined, processed and converted into an Intel CPU, it costs more per gram than diamonds, gold or anything else.
In the 18th century, the most valuable material was iron. That is to say, blue steel processed in England and used to make mainsprings for chronometers. Only a few grams were needed, but they were worth more than their weight in gold. All because of the processing and the skill needed to produce it. Iron itself is cheap and abundant, like sand.
I think that a truly self-replicating machine would have to be an entirely new "living" species. Moreover, it will need to have an intelligence equal to or surpassing our own, we have to design an ET.
That is not a bit true. Robots are almost self-reproducing today. A robot or computer is mainly made by other robots today. People are not capable of doing it. Earthworms are self-reproducing but they are not at all intelligent.
Moreover, ET must be able to survive where we cannot. It must withstand a large temperature interval, it must be impervious to dust and various kinds of radiation.
They do that already. Space based telescopes last for decades. Robot explorers on Mars last for many years.
But my opinion is that comparing your toil and trouble with those of a Mars settler running out of food, water, air, body temperature, life is like comparing a breeze to a hurricane.
You are wrong. It has been shown that buildings and equipment on Mars would be easier to construct and maintain than those in Antarctica in winter. The environment is less dangerous; the weather is milder (the winds weaker). If we could reach Mars in a few hours by airplane, it would be cheaper to live there than at the South Pole. People already live in Antarctica. If they discover valuable minerals or oil there, thousands of people will live and work there, in conditions more onerous than on Mars.
People also live on large oil drilling platforms that are challenging and expensive to maintain, not unlike space stations. See the movie "Deepwater Horizon" to get a feel for this.
May 10 Falcon 9 • Bangabandhu 1
Launch window: 2012-2222 GMT (4:12-6:22 p.m. EDT)
Launch site: LC-39A, Kennedy Space Center, Florida
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will launch the Bangabandhu 1 communications satellite for the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission. The spacecraft will provide broadcasting and telecommunication services to rural areas and introduce direct-to-home television programming across Bangladesh and neighboring countries. The Bangabandhu 1 satellite was built by Thales Alenia Space. This will be the first launch of the upgraded Block 5 version of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Delayed from December, February, April 5, April 24, May 4 and May 7. [May 7]
Read this:
It is not the making of waste that is the potential problem, it is the scale of material moved in general, most of which ends up as waste. A typical mine now can process 5000 to 20000 tonnes per day. (It will be lighter on Mars). This is equipment and personnel intensive.
It is personnel intensive now, but in 20 years it will be done almost entirely by robots. By the time mining on Mars and asteroids begins, all mining on earth will be done by robots. So, the only issue is equipment.
As I said, robots already do most of the work to build robots. They are mostly self-reproducing, as first described by von Neumann. The raw materials used to make robots are mainly plastic, aluminum, iron and silicon for the CPU. These are available everywhere in the solar system in vast amounts, for practically no money. In other words, the raw materials are no more expensive than the carbon raw materials used by organic self-replicating robots (earthworms, trees, people, etc.)
I assume the raw materials would be available right there at the asteroid. The robots would then make and operate the mining equipment itself.
A robot cannot make another robot directly, in situ, the way people make babies. To make robots or mining equipment with today's technology, a few more steps are needed. The robots would first build some sort of factory structure, and machine tools, power supplies and so on. They would use that factory to make more robots, which would then make more factories. The principle is the same. Even if it takes months to make one factory, it is still exponential. You would soon have dozens and then hundreds of factories churning out more factories, and then factories churning out mining equipment.
The energy might come from the sun even it were far from earth, using mirrors. Or from fusion.
Of course, it may take decades or centuries before robots and mine equipment is made entirely on site with no outside materials and no human help. An intermediate version of this technique would probably be used. The robot CPU and control electronics might be made in a factory on Earth or Mars. It would be shipped as a kit to the asteroid, and then installed in a robot body that is fabricated on site from local materials. This is like building a railroad in California using high tech equipment shipped from the East Coast, plus things like wooden railroad ties cut locally. (This is how the Transcontinental railroad was built.)
The Earth and Mars have a huge gravity well to overcome, so shipping stuff from one planet to the other is extremely costly.
With a space elevator the cost is about a dollar per kilogram for electricity going up, and zero dollars going down. You just put on the brakes to slow the car. If you tap into the energy of the descending cars with something like a conventional electric railroad or maglev, you can use the electricity generated by the descending cars to drive the ascending cars up. The net cost is practically zero, assuming the mass of freight is the same in both directions. This is like using a counterweight on an elevator.
The cost of electricity would be far lower with cold fusion or with space-based solar, so I guess it would be more like ten cents a kilogram, and eventually much less.
If a space elevator is not possible, but earth to orbit spacecraft can be powered by cold fusion, the cost of sending goods into orbit will be zero. Except for the wear and tear on the spacecraft, which should be about the same as freight aircraft.
You are thinking of the problem from the point of view of today's technology. I suggest you consider instead what is possible with nascent technology that already exists, such as cold fusion and space elevators. You do not need to invoke things like antigravity machines, which have not been discovered and which may not be possible. Granted, antigravity would sure make access to space and space travel easy! We would not need a space elevator.
I am thinking about using today's technology, more or less, because that is essentially what will be used. Newer stuff will come, spurred on by the needs exposed by the failings of what is used beforehand, eventually. But people will go to the Moon, Mars and beyond, even with inferior or even inappropriate technology. The Earth is full of risk takers, and impossible challenges appeal to many. Some of the impossible challenges are surviving Out There, and some are making the technology to make thriving feasible Out There. But waiting for all the answers before beginning the expansion is extremely unlikely. There are far too many Firsts out there waiting to challenged and claimed by the intrepid and/or foolish.
I am thinking about using today's technology, more or less, because that is essentially what will be used.
I do not think so. The manned exploration of Mars will probably not even begin until decades from now. I doubt that mining of Mars or asteroids will happen any sooner than 50 years from now. Progress in robotics and AI are rapid these days, so by the time this happens, robots will be far more capable and cheaper than they are now. That is a safe prediction. So none of this will be done with today's technology. It will be done with robots and computers that are better than ours by roughly the margin that ours are better than computers and robots were in 1967.
A space elevator would be a tremendous improvement to every aspect of space exploration. It would change the capabilities and economics across the board. It could bring manned exploration and mining much sooner. Unfortunately, I do not expect people will build an elevator anytime soon, even though the materials might be available in 10 or 20 years. NASA has apparently dropped the project. I think the problem is the zeitgeist. People are opposed to new ideas. They don't want to try things, or take chances. Experts at NASA and elsewhere put years of effort into the elevator. They made important breakthroughs in mono-filament materials that might be terrifically useful -- and profitable -- even if we do not build an elevator. They conducted actual tests. They spec'ed out elevator designs in detail, and looked at a host of potential problems such as space junk whacking into the elevator. They described solutions to these problems. In short, they made great progress toward implementing it. And what was the response? People said it was insane. The newspapers ridiculed it. Funding was cut. When I brought it up here, someone boldly asserted:
OK, that's where I stop discussing this with you. That is a completely insane idea, at least for centuries to come if not permanently.
This person has dismissed decades of work by experts as a "completely insane" idea. Without knowing a damn thing about it! And that's here, in a technically oriented, open minded forum. You should see the response in the rest of the world.
That's how people respond to science and innovation these days. The only real progress we see is at places like Google, in a narrow range of immediate use engineering such as AI and self-driving cars. Nothing really far out or risky. Self-driving cars are thanks to DARPA in any case. That is why cold fusion was crushed in the cradle. As Schwinger said, this sort of thing will be the death of science.
Obviously technology will improve, and must improve or we would have colonized off world places more often already. However, once we start to pull new technologies out of a hat, then everything else becomes a fait accompli also, since we are inventing whatever needs inventing to allow the preconceived goal of Mars colonization.
People won't probably be beamed to Mars, etc, but maybe they will. (Star Trek used beaming people to places as a device to eliminate television air time potentially wasted in constantly boarding, driving, and disembarking from shuttles that might otherwise be necessary sometimes several times an episode.) Beaming only the desired parts of asteroids to a factory of one's choice, and then beaming the finished product to the customer would also be a great time saver.
