> While the cost to colonize elsewhere is "mine the earth to a wasteland"
I'm not sure where this idea is coming from. I think the idea of most modern colonisation plans is to use materials at the location to build habitats etc, by 3d printing using martian soil or lunar regolith, not ship millions of tons of natural resources into space.
That's just magic woo though. You can't just "3D print" a clean room to build semiconductors or furnaces to smelt metal. Pretty much all heavy industry on Earth that makes all our high technology runs on petroleum products in some fashion. You can't just "3D print" lubrication and good luck building heavy industrial pieces without it.
While I would be actively surprised if the Moon, for example, had every element necessary for semiconductors, one of the things I absolutely do expect to be possible on its surface is 3D printing an extremely clean clean-room.
Furnaces? Well, I think it would take a polishing step after printing, but if you have aluminium you can do a rough parabola out of it and focus sunlight on a patch of regolith. Can you turn that molten alumina into aluminium and oxygen only by carbon rods and electricity? Or would electrolysis still work if you used a high-current election beam?
(I genuinely don't know, I didn't do material science).
Don't get me wrong, even if this is ultimately all fine without petrochemicals, I expect there is a lot of postgraduate research between now and any significant space manufacturing.
It doesn't matter if the moon has required elements to build semiconductors. Getting from sand to a solar panel or computer chip takes literal tons of infrastructure and precursor materials. Most of that infrastructure can't come from 3D printers. It's non-trivial to spin up a chemical factory on Earth with access to all of our infrastructure. Building one in space is orders of magnitude more difficult even if all of the technology required to do so already existed.
3D printers aren't Star Trek replicators. You can't take a manufacturing flowchart, add a "3D printer" node in the middle, and then consider your manufacturing problem solved. Even if you had a magic 3D printed that could print pipes and fasteners and ducting, it would still need to be assembled and the facility processed to get it clean enough to build semiconductors. Then you'd need smelters/factories processing raw materials to get the necessary feedstocks. Then you'd need reprocessing facilities that could recycle wastewater to be reused and catalyze waste chemicals to reuse.
While you're obviously correct to say you can't just pop them in at a random manufacturing node, "3D printers" are a category, not a specific tech.
Similarly, semiconductors don't only mean the really good ones we use now (though once you have the capacity to make an appropriate factory, obviously you should do that), there are also relatively easy but also mediocre options like copper oxide.
If it takes merely literal tons of pre-made equipment from Earth to bootstrap, that's easy. Musk's (for all I know paper napkin) stated intent of a million colonists is 50,000 to 100,000 tons just of human biomass.
Where are you going to get that, or any other raw material? Robot miners? We don't have those on Earth yet.
How do you purify it? All our chemical processes require huge quantities of free air, and of very cheap water, neither of which you have on Mars.
Where do you get the power for all of this? Solar panels don't behave well during sandstorms, the sun isn't very bright there, and how many solar panels can we really fly to Mars?
It's a pipe dream. We will destroy our ecosystem long before we manufacture even one thing on Mars.
> Where are you going to get that, or any other raw material?
Bootstrap with whatever the initial mission payload is. It's not like anyone is proposing magically teleporting there without stuff, IIRC even Musk's optimistic idea is still several no-humans flights for each passenger flight.
> Robot miners? We don't have those on Earth yet.
Sure we do. TBMs. Not all of which are manned. A few of the missions on Mars right now are taking rock samples with drills.
(Honestly, I'm mainly thinking of the moon, but Mars has moons too. No idea if any of Mars, Demios, or Phobos have significant easy access to aluminium oxides).
> Where do you get the power for all of this? Solar panels don't behave well during sandstorms, the sun isn't very bright there, and how many solar panels can we really fly to Mars?
Sure, PV. They do suffer as you say, but that's not a critical failure when bootstrapping a colony or whatever, especially when you're in the "robotic labor only" phase that (a) is a prerequisite and (b) Optimus Prime or whatever random pop culture reference Musk named that middling demo after. While I don't have any reason to actually trust Musk's "million people" number as anything more than a nice round number, at that kind of scale you necessarily have a lot of PV. Like, "tens of square km" is the minimum baseline. How much is made locally vs sent by Starship depends what can be made locally vs. what can't.
Plus, a Mars colony is one of the few situations where orbital solar via microwave isn't obviously worse than "a big wire to the other side of the planet".
As Starship has ~100T payload, and this PV is 120 W from 5.2g, given 50% reduction in sunlight relative to Earth, even if all the semiconductors have to be shipped from Earth, it's only a few flights out of what you need just to get the people, never mind the other bootstrap equipment you also want: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ultrathin-solar-cells-for-lightwei...
To ignore the massive difference in scope and scale between a space probe with a tiny rock drill and a tunnel boring machine, TBMs require literal tons of lubricants/coolant to operate. Even if you had a 100% electric TBM none of its parts are going to move without lubrication. Even "unmanned" TBMs aren't fully autonomous, they have a small army of squishy people in hard hats adjusting fasteners, checking feed lines, repairing damage, and generally maintaining the machine.
TBMs also going to be orders of magnitude more difficult to build for use on the Moon or Mars. They're incredibly dry environments, dryer than most places on the surface of the Earth. The dust is electrostatically charged and literally creeps along surfaces into seams and seals. The dust is also incredibly abrasive. Machinery does not like dust, machinery will hate Lunar and Martian dust.
In actual operation machinery does not look showroom pristine. It gets dirty and needs to be bathed in lubricants and coolants. Dust, dirt, and shavings get everywhere except in the cleanest of cleanroom environments and those take tons of effort to maintain.
Everything around you was manufactured with a very long tail of infrastructure. You can't just build a PV factory on Mars. You need to first build the infrastructure to build infrastructure before you can lay the first 3D printed brick for a factory. Even if you've got that infrastructure and factory you need a whole supply chain of refined materials to feed the factory to get solar panels.
It's not a handful of unmanned Starship missions, it's a hundred missions with no failures landing billions of dollars of basic infrastructure just to start building more infrastructure. The whole endeavor also needs to use technology like autonomous robotic mining rigs and autonomous mining rig support robots that don't even exist on Earth. I honestly don't understand trivializing the amount of infrastructure and complexity required to manufacturer things here on Earth let alone anywhere else in the solar system.
> You need to first build the infrastructure to build infrastructure before you can lay the first 3D printed brick for a factory
While I disagree with the specific claim here (bricks are easy mode, sand sintered with a fresnel lens brought from Earth), for the general point you're otherwise making:
Yes, and?
Depending on which bit you're pointing at, "a few" was just for the PV for everyone, or just per manned flight. For the "million colonists" (again, no idea if that's a well thought out number) that's thousands to tens of thousands of manned flights, and 3000 to 50000 unmanned flights each with about 100 tons of payload depending on which random early stage wild guess you use to calculate from.
5 million tons of stuff from Earth may or may not be enough to bootstrap, I wouldn't know. (Does anyone?)
But your specific criticisms… don't feel like they're aware of the scale Musk is aiming for.
On a separate point:
I have read of both liquid CO2 and graphite (which can obviously be made from that) being used as lubricants, but I'm emphatically not suggesting they're drop-in replacements. Obviously one would have to design mining equipment specially to use them, likewise for thermal issues.
Given who owns The Boring Company, this is probably already being researched.
> While I would be actively surprised if the Moon, for example, had every element necessary for semiconductors
As I understand it, the currently accepted theory about how the moon formed is the giant-impact hypothesis, which is that a very large object hit the proto-Earth and the moon is the material that was "splashed" off when this happened. As such it seems at least plausible that the moon would have a similar set of elements available for semiconductor production as Earth does.
We have been to the moon and collected samples. Regardless of the why, we know it has a similar composition to the Earth. At least at the surface; seismic data suggests, for instance, that its iron core is comparativly smaller than Earth's.
All of this is inputs that led to the impact model of moon formation.
> one of the things I absolutely do expect to be possible on its surface is 3D printing an extremely clean clean-room.
My understanding is that there is lots of very fine dust near the surface of the moon. It's continually being bombarded with micrometeorites that kick up the dust.
In addition to that, not 'well rounded' by erosion like sahara sand, instead still very sharp edged, abrasive. And electrostatically charged by being bombarded with particles over long times. Creeping into every seam and seal. Not good to breathe in at all.
There was a scene in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series) S02E01 where a solar storm surprised some astronauts on the surface, where they couldn't make it into shelter in time. One got toasted, another barely made it into a cave, and watched from there.
It looked like invisible drops of torrential rain, splashing down hard, and stirring the dust up, like in slow-motion capture of a drop of water, impacting, and stirring things up.
I don't know how realistic that is, but I liked it as a conceptual visualization, at least.
That's a process that involves drawing ions through solution towards a cathode and anode. A direct beam won't do.
A solar furnace would suffice for the first half of the smelting process if you have access to ore which is not pure alumina, as well as melting the cryolite flux. Actually separating out the aluminum from alumina requires PV panels, high temperature rods and some means of synthesizing the cryolite or similar solvent / flux.
> That's a process that involves drawing ions through solution towards a cathode and anode. A direct beam won't do.
OK, thanks for the info. Can you go into more depth about this specific part, or is this a thing where I need to do the whole degree to understand the answer?
> You can't just "3D print" a clean room to build semiconductors or furnaces to smelt metal.
The idea isn't that you'll <<just "3D print" a clean room to build semiconductors>>. But yes, the idea is to "3D print" furnaces to smelt metal (basic furnaces are prehistory-era tech) using heat provided from the solar, wind and/or nuclear power you arrived with. Then use that to mine more ore to smelt more metal to "3D print" more... and so on, and so on, adapting production processes to local environment piece by piece, until you eventually reach basic self-sustainability, and yes, eventually you may be able to build a clean room using entirely local resources and processes.
(Of course, there's the matter of whether people living on other planets will want to go for full self-sufficiency, and then if Earth even allows it. There's a potential for trade here, but the flip side of that is political power. E.g. as long as a Mars colony depends on Earth for complex organics or high-tech industry products, they're effectively under control / at the mercy of Earth.)
> Pretty much all heavy industry on Earth that makes all our high technology runs on petroleum products in some fashion.
It didn't until recently, though. I imagine that between those older techniques from early-to-mid XX century, and modern advances in organic chemistry, you'd be able to eliminate some of the hydrocarbons used and synthesize others, without a need to dig dead plants/dinosaurs out of the ground.
> You can't just "3D print" lubrication and good luck building heavy industrial pieces without it.
That's all part of the R&D work for off-world habitats and industrializing space.
One thing to remember is that our guessing how things would work out has always been laughable with [say] 5 insanely complex problems we didn't see coming for every 1 thing turning out much less complicated than anticipated.
How much of what we did just the last 100 years was accurately anticipated and how much of it is down right magical?
In hind sight, how complicated an idea was it really to heat water, get it to expand and do work? I think execution was hard but the idea was kinda obvious.
Most stuff we build is made of stone/rocks? It seems we can dig caves, just ship the front door an we can start our usual hoarding :)
> How much of what we did just the last 100 years was accurately anticipated and how much of it is down right magical?
How much more of what we did failed but nobody died (somebody died, but not always) because those failure happened in a hospitable environment for life?
We didn't just "magically" progress, we failed 99% of the times to evolve the process until it succeeded.
Now imagine launching 100 projects on Mars, most of which could lead to an explosion, and predict that 99 of them will fail (and probably explode)
Would you still believe "everything's gonna be fine"?
The Martian is just a good SCI-FI movie.
> In hind sight, how complicated an idea was it really to heat water, get it to expand and do work?
> Now imagine launching 100 projects on Mars, most of which could lead to an explosion, and predict that 99 of them will fail (and probably explode)
Well I'm just picking holes now, but in the Martian atmosphere is 95% CO2 - nothing will explode
> Would you still believe "everything's gonna be fine"?
Nobody said "everything's gonna be fine". The argument for sending people to Mars, at great peril, is that sitting _at home_ on Earth, and saying "everything's gonna be fine" is a bad idea.
It's going to be a tremendous struggle and we might not succeed. Mistakes will be made, people will die. We will have to push our abilities to the limit and beyond our known capabilities. We will learn new things (like working together) and every new answer will come with 20 new questions.
This is so much our thing (perhaps culturally) that we build our entire civilization to endlessly progress or implode.
I wouldn't mind living in a cave, scavenging and hunting for food but that is not what we are doing atm, I didn't choose this formula nor do I have to like it but if this is what we are doing lets do it.
Some of us questioning the sanity of the project is also important. We might chose to do something else one day. Until that day we might as well be good at what we do.
It's space. Orbit is in all likelihood cleaner than your average clean room. Planets/moons add dust and thin atmospheres as concerns, but that's quite obviously easier to mitigate than the "dust and much thicker atmosphere and microbes and moisture" that Earth-based clean rooms have to mitigate.
As for bootstrapping industry beyond Earth, the amount of Earthborne equipment and supplies to build a self-sustaining extraterrestrial supply chain is far below necessitating stripmining the Earth bare - obviously, since we were able to bootstrap terrestrial industry just fine without (yet) doing so.
> the amount of Earthborne equipment and supplies to build a self-sustaining extraterrestrial supply chain is far below necessitating stripmining the Earth bare - obviously, since we were able to bootstrap terrestrial industry just fine without (yet) doing so.
Considering how quickly industrialization has damaged Earth's ancient ecology I sincerely doubt industry could be sustainably stood up on a planet like Mars.
You may be underestimating how special Earth is as a home, and vastly overestimating how suitable Mars would be for carbon-based life.
> Considering how quickly industrialization has damaged Earth's ancient ecology I sincerely doubt industry could be sustainably stood up on a planet like Mars.
There is no ecology (at least to anyone's knowledge) on Mars to destroy in the first place, nor is there one in orbit or on the Moon or anywhere else other than Earth. "Sustainability" is therefore not a factor except in the sense of raw resources - and in the infinity of space that's a lot of raw resources at our disposal.
> You may be underestimating how special Earth is as a home, and vastly overestimating how suitable Mars would be for carbon-based life.
What makes you think I may be underestimating or overestimating (respectively) anything? Earth is special, which is precisely why we should be maximizing the preservation of the one thing that makes it special: its biosphere. That maximization entails moving everything that is even merely irrelevant (let alone actively harmful) to said biosphere off of Earth; anything less than literally all human industry (and all human population aside from non-industrialized peoples and maybe conservationists/biologists and their support staff) being moved to orbit and beyond represents a failure to achieve such maximization and puts that one special thing in jeopardy.
Luckily space is already clean, the trick will be converting current production processes to work in microgravity - process heat offtake without convection etc. LEO or higher orbit based manufacturing will probably occur before 2050, once that is solved then deploying infrastructure onto the Martian surface will become relatively trivial.
I'm not sure where this idea is coming from. I think the idea of most modern colonisation plans is to use materials at the location to build habitats etc, by 3d printing using martian soil or lunar regolith, not ship millions of tons of natural resources into space.