Dome, sweet dome: UAE mulls Martian city here on Earth ahead of Red Planet colonization Three years ago the United Arab Emirates announced plans to stage a manned mission to Mars. Now the kingdom plans to build a massive Mars colony in the desert to test out the technologies they will use to live there. The Mars Science City will be a series of domes with 1.9 million square feet of living space encompassing …
How cold is it again, and how much solar power availability in the UAE versus on Mars?
I'm all for good science and exploration, but is the UAE the most realistic location for a Mars habitat demonstrator?
Presumably they are going to tint the domes to the restrict the available incident light to Mars equivalent wavelengths and energy? Still not sure about the thermal environment though...
@Rich 11
Nice one :)
I was actually thinking of this bit though:
A team will also test how to grow food under Martian conditions
which is bollocks unless you simulate the lesser gravity - plants will surely grow in a completely different manner in low gravity conditions.
"The facility will cost $136m to construct."
That seems exceedingly cheap, certainly less than I expected. Peanuts really for UAE.
Great if they can really build it mostly out of materials already avaiable on Mars. Minimise weight, and then send a few robots to Mars to build the domes and have them ready before the colonists arrive
That seems exceedingly cheap
Its amazing what you can do when you put your mind to it. Of course this sort of stuff helps keep the cost down.
Great if they can really build it mostly out of materials already avaiable on Mars. Minimise weight, and then send a few robots to Mars to build the domes and have them ready before the colonists arrive"
Also a handy demonstrator of the technology required to build a new air-conditioned, oasis-like community for the local ruling elite when the oil runs out and temperatures rise. </tinfoil hat mode>
Some discussion of the numbers would help the article. Like, it's bigger than Biosphere 2, which struggled to sustain eight people for two years, and both sites are pretty massive, far far larger than anything Mars colonists could expect to have, so the experiment doesn't really scale for the surface of another planet.
Then launching 600,000 people to inhabit Mars in 100 years. Really? In the entire history of space flight, some 56 years, ~550 humans have gone into space, so about ten per year on average. How are we going to scale that number up to this proposed 600,000? It's a nonsense number plucked out of thin air with no basis or support.
Well companies like SpaceX with their re-usable capsule and boosters will drive the cost down.
With more demand, companies like Reaction Engines might get enough funding to build their SSTO's
So its not impossible, but the UAE isn't a shining example of humanity, so I would hope they progress a bit before they succeed.
Yes, 600,000 in 100 years is impossible. While there will be cost savings due to re-usable rockets and market forces, they will not make Mars a consumer destination. It's still going to be excruciatingly expensive, and I doubt there are 600,000 people on the planet that could afford it, and want to go live in a sealed dome, instead of lording it about on their yacht.
Ignoring moral issues and tech hurdles for radiation, shelter building etc;
If you sent 200 women (plus maybe 20 men / lots of varied sperm for genetic diversity), with each of them having 4 children, and each subsequent generation having 4 children (per person, so possibly 8 per woman at 50/50 female/male birth rate - or selective breeding for majority female offspring) you would need 4 generations of offspring to get to a population around 600,000.
Your first generation could begin to be born almost as soon as you arrive, and then average 25 years old per generation, you would be at 600,000 around 75 years in. Obviously it's a captive breeding programme and you're expecting people whose grandparents haven't even been conceived yet to follow your demands for procreation in a confined environment, but it *could* be done mathematically, if not ethically.
First off, I'd suggest that any such enthusiastic male volunteers first watch
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072730/
Also a "fan out" of 10 may be both impractical and illegal (depending on jurisdiction)
http://loweringthebar.net/2008/09/man-with-86-wiv.html
But above all, human nature and emotions are unlikely to continue this for long, and while the sponsors might be paying your way outbound, the return ticket is your problem.
If you sent 200 women (plus maybe 20 men...Me! Me! Over here! Yes, yes, I'll sign anything you want. Shouldn't we start practising this bit on earth too?
And another thing, you do KNOW that the ideal mix for captive breeding is intelligent, scrawny, older men with a pot belly paired with athletic young women with a taste for mild femdom BDSM?
I did consider on planet reproduction contributing to the total, but didn't understand any need need to deliberately create a significant number of new humans, as that hardly alleviates demands for resources on Earth. Although if we don't keep it in our pants, that number may not be so significant, and get lost in the noise while the population of Earth continues to explode I guess.
Either way I don't see the point of the number, we could freeze sperm and eggs to future proof the diversity of the human race, they don't need to develop into mouths to feed.
Musk thinks he can get the price under $500k a head, with fleets of reusable rockets, each rocket sending 100 people at a time, and then returning to go again two years later. He's quite serious. He's announcing an update to his plan tomorrow morning. 100 years is a long time; a lot can be achieved in that time if you try.
"You aren't going to get into orbit for $500k, let alone a 9 month trip to Mars"
Most of the difficulty of going to Mars is getting to orbit and landing. The trip itself is "point and shoot" so time constraints aside it isn't that much more difficult to go to Mars than to the moon. The difference is mostly related to Mars gravity.
So if you could get in space for $250k per person, then scaling up a bit, it's not that unfeasible to go to Mars for $500k per person.
Except you aren't going to get into orbit for $250k, when that's the proposed cost of a sub orbital Virgin Galactic fight. Hell, it's €17,500 for a 'Edge of Space' fight in a MiG-29. The cost of getting to the ISS and staying for a while was upwards of $20M. If Musk et al get that down to a couple of million (just to orbit) I'll be amazed. That's before 9 months of meals, and a home waiting for you at the other end. That part, the construction of the habitat on Mars, is going to be really expensive too.
The other thing you overlook is the transit time to Mars. Check out the Top ten longest space flights. See the 10th place? That's about the the same as Mars transit. Not everyone has the mental fortitude to live sealed in a small space for such a long time, especially when you add in additional communication lag, and a total lack of an escape plan.
" It's still going to be excruciatingly expensive, and I doubt there are 600,000 people on the planet that could afford it"
When you're talking about that amount of people, the bulk of them will be there as unskilled / semi-skilled workers (mostly space farmers) with a small elite directing them. I suspect that most likely the workers will be made up of a bunch of undesirables* and/or expendables** with nothing to lose to be forcefully relocated or *ahem* 'convinced' to take up the role of Mars proles with a few military types to keep them in line.
*As in past Chinese/Russian 'labour camps'
** As in current Indian workers in UAE / Qatar etc
"I suspect that most likely the workers will be made up of a bunch of undesirables* and/or expendables** with nothing to lose to be forcefully relocated or *ahem* 'convinced' to take up the role of Mars proles with a few military types to keep them in line."
Worked pretty well for Australia...
"Then launching 600,000 people to inhabit Mars in 100 years. Really?"
I do know a little about the UAE, and they are great kite fliers. Don't get me wrong, they have, in their own way, achieved a heck of a lot, the entire country is unrecognizable from just the few years ago when they discovered oil. But, even relatively down to earth projects like new shopping malls, or the islands that they like to make out of sand, are nearly always late, or dont appear at all. I get the feeling that people tell Sheikh Mo exactly what they think he'd like to hear, without thinking too much about actual delivery.
"Then launching 600,000 people to inhabit Mars in 100 years. Really? In the entire history of space flight, some 56 years, ~550 humans have gone into space, so about ten per year on average."
If you take the first 56 years of powered flight and average out the number of people who have flown per year, how realistic would the yearly average be compared to the number of people flying in 1966? Any number of new developments could happen over such a time period.
To throw some currently ridiculous suggestions into the mix, cheaply produced strong aerogels weighing next to nothing suitable for structural jobs, single stage to orbit "space planes" a la Reaction Engines plans, maybe something clever with high temperature superconductors.
Even rocket nozzles might be improved for all I know though we think we are pretty much at the pinnacle of nozzle design. That exhaust is coming out in a pretty chaotic fashion like water out of a hose. Maybe some bright spark will come up with materials and a design to improve the lamina flow like modern "dancing fountains" nozzles. Dunno, I'm not a physicist or materials scientist.
The analogy to powered flight is quite accurate I think, but not for the reasons many think. We reached peak space when we briefly had the capability to reach the Moon. We reached peak flight when we had the capability to fly supersonically. Market forces settled both down, and it ended up wider, and cheaper, with only governments pushing the limits of what can be done. I don't see Mars trips being something Mr Average is going to afford, and rich people don't need to go. Rich people got rich enough exploiting resources on Earth, and they'll only get richer as resources get more scarce. I can't see a corporation dropping any significant cash to send a person to Mars to mine, or farm either. They'll send a robot if there's financial gain to be had. Fast forward 100 years, we'll have AI and robots, why are we sending flesh?
"Even traveling from sea level to 1km is a pretty big variance when it comes to nozzle design."
Thanks, I didn't realise that an atmospheric optimised nozzle might be different to a vacuum optimised nozzle. So this means any chance of an efficient Single Stage To Orbit is probably going to need some clever variable geometry nozzle which as yet we are not able to create.
Already been sorted. See 'plug nozzle' design. It's lke an inside-out bell nozzle; the plug in the middle acts as one side of the nozzle, and the surrounding atmosphere the other side. To keep the plug to a reasonable length, an aerospike nozzle can be used. This uses gas vented through a stubby plug - typically exhaust from the turbopumps that drive fuel into the reactio chamber - to from the pointy bit of the plug. Such nozzles automatically compensate for altitude from sea level all the way up to vaccuum.
We've known how to do this for decades. Since the 1970's at least.
Yes. This figure in the order of 1,000 is a lot more realistic. It would probably be sensible to have around 3 semi-autonomous communities of this size in case of some form of infection / natural disaster / depressurisation / fire wiping out a community altogether.
And to be practical, rather than fashionable, we should, of course, start on the moon for fairly obvious reasons.
Which direction do you pray to Mecca, when you're on another planet?
More seriously, I wonder how they are actually going to build the Habitats because thats actually one of the main stumbling blocks of a colony. If you need low cost workers to put it up in the UAE, thats not really replicatable on Mars - but considering the UAE laws on Migrant workers and the Kafala System, I wouldnt put it past them to try...
When I got my first proper job, one of my tasks involved spending some time on a fishing trawler - so I got put on a training vessel for a week.
The skipper told me that he often got groups of Muslim students on his boat, and that at prayer time he'd wait for them all to start their prayers and steer the boat in a circle, while the students shuffled around on their knees trying to keep facing towards Mecca.
> Which direction do you pray to Mecca, when you're on another planet?
You'll be unsurprised to hear that there's guidelines on this (though, I guess, how relevant these guidelines are always depends on how you feel about the group that issued them): https://www.wired.com/2007/09/mecca-in-orbit/ quotes a report approved by Malaysia's National Fatwa Council in 2006 that seems to boil down to, in order of preference, "1) the Ka'aba, 2) the projection of Ka'aba, 3) the Earth, 4) wherever".
Which direction do you pray to Mecca, when you're on another planet?
Just face the sun. From Mars you won't be more than 33 degrees out if you follow that rule, while from Jupiter (and let's assume a moon's surface rather than the planet's surface) the margin of error will be about 11 degrees. Surely that has to be accurate enough for god's magic to work.
Presumably laser sintering of sand into something resembling glass is possible - rather depends on having the right type of sand though, I guess.
Maybe you could make lightly sintered light weight porus bulding blocks or fully fused airtight sheets by controlling the laser power.
Maybe UAE is sick of getting sand in their sandwiches and want to ship all the sand to Mars.
Just so you know, doing any sort of laser sintering requires an extremely fine and accurate powder to get anything with structural strength that you can rely on.
This is always the Problem when I hear People talk about just 3D printing everything on Mars from the local sand. Sure it's potentially feasible. the building blocks are there, but only after you've filtered it, seperated the soil into it's consitutent parts, reduced it to a very fine powder, and then, maybe, you can start sintering. So you already need some very good, powerful and expensive production facilities to get the raw materials to build the rest of your base. If you dont do that, your sintered blocks will end up with mass impurities which mean the strength will be shite and they'll suffer from cracking under even low loads.
As always, the devil is in the Detail...
The problem inherent in any state, religion, or corporate sponsored colonisation of Mars will be that unless we are very lucky the social pressures and prejudices of each sponsor will be reflected in the way the Colony behaves.
If the technology succeeds, we would end up with many domes on Mars
- several Islamic based societies (Shia, Sunni, Sufi, etc) The domes will hopefully not be built too close together otherwise hostilities brought from Earth will start even before the paint is dry.
- Balkan Domes. Three at least based on Catholic, Orthodox, and Islamic social structures. It is probable that at least one of these will decide that they should occupy more than one dome.
- Westboro Baptist Dome. They are just going to hate everyone else.
- EU Domes. 27 or 28 domes all designed with different social priorities and linked by tunnels that allow free access amongst dome dwellers. This is of course the perfect design.
- The USA Dome. Mexico is going to pay for this one. It will still trust in God but there will be no agreement on which God. Gun ownership will be a problem and patches for bullet holes will be best sellers.
There will be no UK dome. We are staying where we are. We will of course want to run the banking of the Domes and will set up special off-planet money handling facilities on the Moon to do so.
What could possibly go wrong?
Mars will need an extra dome as a place to send the worst of its criminals (e.g. people who steal a loaf of bread, a very serious crime in any developing society). This dome will be located in the part of Mars which has the most deadly conditions, and is not claimed by any other nations (except the local Martians who have lived there since forever but they don't count). This dome won't legalise same-sex marriage until long after every other dome has done so. It will also have the best stretches of sand on the planet, so we can forgive everything else. It will be called Marstralia.
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