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Why not build the settlement in advance of the first landing? (piefed.social)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/mars@discuss.tchncs.de
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Sending people to Mars, keeping them alive there, and bringing them back (optional) is hard.

Sending robots to Mars is easier. It's been done in 1997 and artificial intelligence and robotics have made major strides since.

A semi-autonomous* settlement with life support should be built before we send people there. This will save a lot of time and make the mission far more likely to succeed than if we treat it like a camping trip and make astronauts set their own "tents" up.

* with high-level operations being managed remotely, but real-time operations requiring automation due to the unavoidably high ping between Earth and Mars

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[–] 4 points 2 months ago

I think (just my guess) that's probably the plan, have at minimum the infrastructure on site prior to human arrival

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    [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    is anyone planning to go there without doing that?

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 months ago

    I'm not sure, now that I think about it - at least not when it comes to actual space agencies. But when it comes to amateur proposals, I've seen a few posts in this community modelling Mars settlement after that of the Americas (which is completely wrong for several reasons, the most relevant to this post being that unlike with Mars today, colonizers had to actually send people to the Americas to build settlements there).

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    • [–] 0 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah but what about squatters?

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Can you clarify? I can only think of three kinds:

    1. people trying to hitch a ride on the unmanned launches to Mars - good luck lmao, they probably won't even make it past the launch alive
    2. another space agency taking advantage of the infrastructure without approval - could be an issue, but hardly an unsolvable one, with solutions ranging from sanctions to orbital and on-ground defenses
    3. somehow previously undiscovered Martian lifeforms, in which case we'd be too excited about life on Mars to be upset about infrastructure loss
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    • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (3 children)

    Despite the current hype about AI and robotics, we simply don't have the technology to do that.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    We don't have it yet? Or is there some fundamental law of physics preventing it?

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    • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    Mars is too small to build a colony there for anything other than to say we did it. Venus is a much easier option to eventually put humans on. Venus just really needs a few comets worth of ice, and some cyanobacteria. Might need some temporary shades as well to get the temperature down so the process can start.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 months ago

    Could be (best I can find is potential for cloud cities being potentially easier to do than Mars).

    However, this is a Mars-focused "subreddit" (subfeddit? sublemmy? subpiefed? "community" feels too generic) so I'm talking about Mars. The advice of the post probably applies to Venus as well, I guess?

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