Trash is Only One Problem Facing Martian Colonists #science and #scifibooks
NASA has a project manager for trash – of course it does.
There’s a lot of problems with space [trash] because we’ve got limited power, volume, and mass. You also want to be able to take the liquids out and process those or reuse it.” One project NASA is working on right now is a compaction system that could turn astronaut garbage into tiles that can be used for practical applications like radiation shielding. Steve Sepka talking to The Daily Beast
Right now, today, we drop debris without much worry, aside from trying to avoid contamination with earthly lifeforms.
In fact, we’ve dumped an estimated 15,694 pounds of trash on Mars from the past 50 years of exploration alone. And even that’s tiny in comparison to the whopping 400,000 pounds of garbage including materials, rovers, rocket boosters, and assorted national flags we’ve left behind on the moon. The Daily Beast
Reuse and recycle becomes a key factor in human missions to Mars because it’s so costly to send materials to the planet, and that’s not all. More exciting problems face a real-life Mars colony.
How many tools and resources could colonists afford to take with them? How long will those last and how will they be replaced? What resources can settlers extract from the planet, and how will they produce the necessities of life on a deadly world? How many hours a day would you work if your life depended on it? An article in Nature tackles the problems:
From a practical point of view, it is not clear how many years it would take to achieve a reasonable level of self-sufficiency, how many rockets would be required to send resources and goods and what would be the way of life and the organization of society… If a slow settlement process is already a great challenge, what if time and payloads were constrained and the objective was the long term survival of the group without help from Earthlings?
Logically speaking, from an engineering standpoint, survival can be simply expressed as follows: $$working\,time\,requirements < working\,time\,capacity$$ Nature
You don’t need to do the math. A scientist figured it out for you – the minimum number of individuals needed in a colony for survival on Mars is 110. Read the article to see how that’s calculated and lots more details. Or, join my science fiction colony. (Better yet, do both.)
Take a marvelously detailed journey into the near-future. Colonists cling to humanity’s first fragile foothold on the Red Planet and struggle on through generations, battling the deadly planet and each other. Because no matter how noble the aspirations, how alluring the technologies, survival requires individual intelligence, ingenuity, and courage.
In these five full-length novels exploring a colony on Mars, join a different settler in each book in a creative mix of science and storytelling that nails it for realism. Someday, real settlers will tell tales like these.
