It can’t be self-sustain without manufacturing, say, electronics, which requires here on Earth thousands of factories, producing copper, plastic, chips etc—and employ millions of people. Basically, the whole Earth economy should be copied on Mars + a new part of economy which will allow survival in harsh environments. Thus Martian economy needs to be bigger than Earth one for sustainability. This requires delivery of billions of people and tens of billions tons of goods.
Huh. An interesting thing this points to is that when/if eventually there are self sustaining colonies on Mars, there’s a chance the supply chains will be much more legible (because they’ll have been built from scratch, without having to have been built on top of tons of spaghetti towers)
Actually, this seems even more likely when you factor in that Elon’s whole deal seems to be looking at an industry, getting fed up with it and rolling his own version of it so that he can fully control everything. Seems likely this’d continue on Mars.
Reduced gravity is deleterious to people’s health when you want the people to afterwards survive in higher gravity.
If it’s hard for fetus to develop on Mars during pregnancy, there’s genetic engineering to solve the problem. If all humans on Mars are genetically engineered that in turn adds additional dynamics.
If you would told the people who started the human genome project 30 years ago that we have complete* genome sequencing today for a few hundred dollar it’s likely that they would have told you that you underestimate the difficulty in sequencing.
Three additional decades of AI development and automatizing lab workflows will make genetics a lot easier then it’s now. I think a lot will be possible in the later part of this century and even Elon doesn’t believe that a Mars colony will be self-sustainable in the next three decades.
It can’t be self-sustain without manufacturing, say, electronics, which requires here on Earth thousands of factories, producing copper, plastic, chips etc—and employ millions of people. Basically, the whole Earth economy should be copied on Mars + a new part of economy which will allow survival in harsh environments. Thus Martian economy needs to be bigger than Earth one for sustainability. This requires delivery of billions of people and tens of billions tons of goods.
Huh. An interesting thing this points to is that when/if eventually there are self sustaining colonies on Mars, there’s a chance the supply chains will be much more legible (because they’ll have been built from scratch, without having to have been built on top of tons of spaghetti towers)
Actually, this seems even more likely when you factor in that Elon’s whole deal seems to be looking at an industry, getting fed up with it and rolling his own version of it so that he can fully control everything. Seems likely this’d continue on Mars.
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Reduced gravity is deleterious to people’s health when you want the people to afterwards survive in higher gravity.
If it’s hard for fetus to develop on Mars during pregnancy, there’s genetic engineering to solve the problem. If all humans on Mars are genetically engineered that in turn adds additional dynamics.
You drastically underestimate the difficulty of genetics.
If you would told the people who started the human genome project 30 years ago that we have complete* genome sequencing today for a few hundred dollar it’s likely that they would have told you that you underestimate the difficulty in sequencing.
Three additional decades of AI development and automatizing lab workflows will make genetics a lot easier then it’s now. I think a lot will be possible in the later part of this century and even Elon doesn’t believe that a Mars colony will be self-sustainable in the next three decades.
:*: Well, 92% but all the protein coding stuff