The European Space Agency just unveiled its plans to build a base onthe moon

In sci.physics Fred J. McCall wrote:
wrote:

In sci.physics Fred J. McCall wrote:
wrote:


I would say the odds of finding limestone deposits to make cement
highly unlikely. You do know limestone is organically created, don't
you?


You do know that we can make concrete and cement out of lunar rock,
don't you?

Sure, one can make concrete out of just about anything. It is making
the cement that is the problem, which requires limestone.


You need to research before you run your mouth. They actually tested
the suitability of lunar rocks for making construction materials and
they could do everything they needed to do. We use limestone as the
calcium source here on Earth because it's easily gotten, but a lack of
limestone really doesn't mean **** as long as you have rocks with
calcium in them.

Are there extensive calcium deposits on the Moon?

You may find bauxite or iron ore, but unless it is really close to
where you set up your colony, you would have no way to transport it.


This is presumably because the colony was planned by you and you
didn't allow any supplies but stone axes and bear skins.


That is both childish and stupid.


Oh, look whose talking, Mr "They all believe Star Trek science and
economics are real" who does nothing but wave hands and make strawman
arguments.

Like pointing out facts?

Care to detail how you would transport raw ore over just a hundred
miles on Mars and what would power that transport?


Truck. Hydrogen works. Yes, you have to plan on needing the truck.
You could crush and smelt to rough ingots (solar furnace works for
that) to lower the volume you need to drag to your factory.

Where do you get the hydrogen and what do you do with it then?

Yes, that's not how we do it here on Earth, but we're not talking
about here on Earth anymore.

Right, we are talking about a place with zero infrastructure, a thin
atmosphere that is 95% CO2, and easily obtainable source of either
oxygen or water.


If you setup your colony next to some ore deposit, you need a refinary
and power for it, which could only come from a fair sized reactor.


Certainly one way to do it (and probably easiest for the initial
colony), but long term production of power isn't that hard.


Really, where do you propose to get that power?


The same place all power comes from; the Sun. Crack water to get
hydrogen if you need a portable power source, take a bunch of small
reactors, RTGs, or whatever with you (along with a couple of big
reactors to get you started).

With a solar irradiance of less than 100 W/m^2 you are going to get
very little power from solar sources unless your array is measured
in kilometers.

There is no known readily available source of water to crack.

If you get the water somehow, you need to store both the hydrogen
and the oxygen.

Sure, all of this is theoretically posible.

The current cost to build a reactor on Earth is about $9 billion.

So what is the total cost to haul a reactor in pieces along with all
the needed to put it together on Mars?

What is the tranportation cost for the kilometers of solar panels?

What is the tranportation cost for the machinery to dig out the ice
we THINK is buried beneath the surface?

What is the tranportation cost for the machinery crack water?

The point is that all this crap is just too expensive for it to ever
happen.

Go read the Mars Reference Mission, Chimp.

Which is to establish a research station, not a colony.


Certainly not from solar power as the solar irradiance on the surface
of Mars is less than 100 W/m^2.


Check your math. Your number is wrong.

Not my math, The Univerity of Colorado's math.

That was an average number adjusting for the presence of haze in the
atmosphere.


Certainly not from wind power as the atmosphere is so thin there
is no energy to speak of in the wind, no matter what you saw in
"The Martian".


Wrong again. Once again, please educate yourself on the issues before
flapping your arms and squawking. Again, let me help.

http://www.marspapers.org/papers/MAR98058.pdf

It appears that this paper pretty much agrees with what I said.

You need a lot of raw material and the ability to process it into
something usefull to build the domed and pressurized buildings
required to survive and do anything.


You need to be able to dig a hole.


Dig it with what and then what do you do with it?


Dig it with tools (they're this marvelous thing we've invented since
you looked at colonization of anywhere) and then seal it up and live
in it.

How much to transport all those tools to Mars?

Where do you get stuff to seal it unless you send it from Earth and
what does that cost?


Line it and cover it with something shipped from Earth in pieces
at huge expense?


Or instead you can pull your head out of your ass and seal it with
locally produced plastics. What you suggest will probably be how a
base would do it initially, but again this is a problem people have
thought about. You need to study up.

Again, you would need massive infrastructure already in place to make
plastic on Mars.


You will be lacking just about all usefull chemicals as most of
them come from petroleum, so no plastics.


Jimp, you just make them a different way. Unlikely on the Moon, but
not difficult at all on Mars. Educate yourself. People have examined
all your 'impossible' problems and there are solutions to all of them.


No, not difficult at all on Mars for someone that isn't going to be
doing it or paying for it.


Chimp, better people than you have thought about all the problems you
raise as things that are 'impossible' and it turns out they're just
not that hard if you plan for them.

I never said anything about hard, I am talking about the cost.

Again, the cost for all this pie in the sky is so horrendous it will
never happen.


The issue is not whether or not it is theoretically possible to do
something on Mars, the issue is that doing anything on Mars, including
gettting there in the first place is horrendously expensive.


Initially getting to North America was "horrendously expensive", too.
Just look at what those expeditions cost and adjust them for
inflation.

And most of them were done at a profit from all the stuff the expeditions
returned.

There is nothing on Mars that is anywhere near the value of the transportation
costs.

You keep arguing how things "aren't possible". If you want to argue
that it's not worth the money, that's a different issue.

I have never said "aren't possible", that is the voices in your head.

What I have said over and over again is that the cost of a colony on
Mars is so horrendously expensive with zero economic return it will
never happen absent the invention of techology that reduces the costs
many orders of magnitude.



--
Jim Pennino

In sci.physics Fred J. McCall wrote:
wrote:

Have you ever responded with anything other than bile and name calling
to posts you don't agree with?


Yes, I have. For example, I've posted links to research and resources
that explode most of your claims. Do you ever read them? You only
get "bile and name calling" when you act like a lying dishonest dick.
Of course, you do that a lot, so that might be why you get slapped
around so often.

OK, so you mix your bile and name calling with off topic links about
research stations when the topic is colonies.


How about YOUR outline to colonize Mars, what it would cost, and how it
would be financed.


The world hardly needs my outline. Several different groups have put
together workable plans. See the Mars Reference Mission from NASA, or
Zubrin's "Mars Direct", or any of a number of others. Why don't you
go through those and explain why all the experts are wrong and you're
right?

None of the things you reference talk about a colony on Mars, they
talk about research stations.

A colony, other than a penal colony, has families raising kids.

The big driver on cost for most of them is launch costs and those are
dropping pretty damned quickly these days. Yes, a large, fully
independent colony on Mars will take a long time. But then, such
colonies have always taken a long time here on Earth, too.

Nope, most all successful colonies were survivable without outside resupply
in a time frame measured in months, i.e. how long it took to erect basic
shelter, find water, and get the crops planted.

The big driver on cost in getting to Mars is the cost per pound of getting
stuff off the Earth, to Mars, and landing it softly on Mars.

And to establish a colony, not just a research station, takes so many
pounds of stuff just to survive on Mars, it just isn't going to happen ever
without astounding new technology.


--
Jim Pennino

In article , says...

On 4/5/2016 6:14 PM, Fred J. McCall wrote:
wrote:

All historical colonizations have been to places with air, water, and
growing things where one could be dropped nude and survive. ....




Bull****. Lots of colonies in the New World succeeded only by the
skin of their teeth and lots of them failed and they all had the best
technology available at the time.



silly boy,

the moon and mar have NO AIR, NO WATER, NO FOOD, NOTHING but sand and
rocks, and high radiation.

Both the moon and Mars have water. Mars has a very thin atmosphere of
CO2. Other chemicals, such as oxygen on the moon, can be extracted from
the local "soil". No, there are no animals or plants to eat, but the
raw materials are definitely there to make them.

Jeff
--
All opinions posted by me on Usenet News are mine, and mine alone.
These posts do not reflect the opinions of my family, friends,
employer, or any organization that I am a member of.

In article ,
says...
Colonies with insufficient support from 'back home' tended to
disappear. You talk like all colonization attempts are easily
successful. There are enough failed colonies to prove that to be
bull****.

I never said anything like that.

However, support from 'back home' wasn't oxygen, food, water, and
repair parts for high tech equipment.

Water is available on both the moon and Mars at at least one of the
poles on each. Oxygen is also available on both the moon and Mars; it
just needs to be extracted. Food can therefore be grown.

Repair parts for high tech equipment is exactly the sort of thing that
Fred is talking about when he says "support". For early earth colonies,
things which are difficult to manufacture locally, like anything made of
metal, had to be shipped in, unless there was a readily available source
of metal at the colony and all of the tools to smelt and then process
and work with it.

For the most part it was luxury items such as good china before such
manufacturing could be established in the colonies.

In return the colonies, depending on where they were, sent back things
like spices, precious metals, furs, and timber.


Agreed that this pattern would often continue with even well established
colonies. The colony would mostly ship back raw materials, or goods
easily manufactured locally, and the "old world" would send the colony
finished "hard" goods.

There is nothing off the Earth so valuable it would be worth the
shipping cost in fuel to send it back to Earth.

Depends. If the fuel is largely made locally (on the moon or Mars), the
cost is local too. It may be more difficult to extract, but the supply
(the entire planet or moon) versus demand (a fledgling colony) would be
quite favorable.

No successful colony in history required anything beyond 10th Century
technology to survive.


Bull****. Lots of colonies in the New World succeeded only by the
skin of their teeth and lots of them failed and they all had the best
technology available at the time.

And that technology, except for a very few things like muskets, dates
back to at least the 10th Century.

Most certainly, but even that early tech (e.g. metal knives, axes, and
etc) would be quite difficult to manufacture at many early colonies
which may lack readily available raw materials (e.g. iron ore right on
the surface).

And, BTW, the indigious populations where most colonies where established
were surviving just fine on Stone Age technology long before the Europeans
appeared.

"Just fine" is a stretch, depending on the technological level of the
indigenous populations. (Primitive) technologies like farming and
domestication and selective breeding of animals *greatly* increased the
potential population density of even indigenous populations.

Jeff
--
All opinions posted by me on Usenet News are mine, and mine alone.
These posts do not reflect the opinions of my family, friends,
employer, or any organization that I am a member of.

Expense is a function of technical maturity and investment in supply chains.. Continuing investment in computers along a well-defined path of development transforms the role of computers in our society. Continuing investment in internal combustion engines and automobiles, transforms the role of automobiles in our society- turning them from play things for the rich, to a commodity transport that changes the nature of our cities. Similar investments in advanced technology, in combination with other technologies, will produce other transformative technologies. Air travel has been developing over a longer period than automobiles, but driverless cars and passengers carrying drones will make point to point travel on demand a reality.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/30197...000-feet..html

With power beaming, the 20 minute flight time of this craft can be extended..

http://www.popularmechanics.com/flig...ight-11091133/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mq7ieXNoyVw


Draw a 12 mile ring around the Chrysler building in New York City, and put four ABL type laser steering systems atop the building (which doubles as a defence of the city btw) that allows 32 ships to be powered of the type EHANG 184. At $300,000 per ship, 32 ships cost $10 million. The lasers are $10 million as well. A total of $20 million. 100 kW power each, a total of 3200 kW. At $0.181 per kWh that's $579.10 per hour. Divided by 32 ships that's $18.10 per hour per ship. 32 ships produce 320 trips per hour or 7,680 trips per day.

There are 20 million people in the service area. In 6 minutes you can go 6 miles, which is the average distance of a taxi ride that takes 40 minutes during rush hour - point to point anywhere in the city at 62 miles per hour by line of sight. Cost $120 per trip - typical of Manhattan taxi and limo service, but much much faster. So, each ship generates $1200 per hour times 32 that's $38,400 per hour. Less $579.10 that's $37,820.90 per hour. That's $331.53 million per year. A discount rate of 8.5% over 10 years is worth $2.22 billion the day it starts.

Today, with governments spending money to build rockets, and with governments classifying rocket technology as being too dangerous to be generally known, its not surprising that rockets are very expensive. But, it need not be that way! With appropriate investment by innovative corporations not beholden to government or constrained by legacy concerns of ancient weapons systems, radical transformations can take place, and are taking place.

A Falcon Heavy can put 53 metric tons into Low Earth Orbit. This is equivalent to 10 communications satellites. Advanced satellites that have open optical broadband between satellites to implement an optical back bone in the THz range, and an inflatable phased array uplink downlink that paints thousands of stationary Doppler corrected cells on the Earth's surface - to implement a global wireless hotspot - With 10 launches, and 100 satellites, a company with less than $2 billion could capture a good portion, if not the entirety of the world's $3 trillion telecom market. With this sort of income, a company could invest any amount needed to develop further innovations using off world assets and resources.

A Falcon Heavy can put up an inflatable concentrator that powers a solar pumped laser, that beams energy where its needed on the surface and anywhere in cislunar space. At 22 kW per kg specific power, a 53 ton satellite generates 1.16 billion watts of continuous power and makes it available anywhere on Earth in any amount. At $0.181 per kWh this system produces $211,046 per hour. Or $1.85 billion per year. Over 30 years at 8.5% discount this revenue stream is worth $19.88 billion the day it switches on. The capital cost of this system is likely less than $1 billion, including the ground stations.

This will allow a company to capture the $4 trillion per year energy marketplace.

The Falcon Heavy can put up a solar pumped laser that uses laser powered rockets to propel itself from LEO to GEO, or from LEO to any of the Lagrange Points, or from LEO to Mars, or the asteroids. Powerful lasers can also be used to propel ships using photonic thrust technology, to put objects launched by rockets onto the moon, or Mars or among the asteroids.

At 1 AU a 1.16 GW laser can process 384 tons per hour. At 1.57 AU (at Mars) 141 tons per hour. At Ceres (2.6 AU) this falls to 52 tons per hour. The material is broken down to the atomic level and reassembled in vacuo, to produce anything through additive manufacturing. The materials or objects can be dispatched without the use of propellant through photonic thrusters anywhere they're needed in the solar system. In this way capturing the $9 trillion per year in manufactured goods for humanity. All without labour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZX-iJLHZt8M

With 10 launches we capture all the world's telecom market and earn $3 trillion per year,
With 16,000 launches, we capture all the world's energy market, and earn $4 trillion per year,
With 1,000 launches, we capture all the world's manufacturing and mining markets, and earn $9 trillion per year

This leads to massive unemployment.

With automated systems operational off world, it makes sense to move unemployed people off world as well to reduce costs of supporting them.

Alright, so how long could this take? Well the first 10 are from plain vanilla Falcon Heavy rockets. However, the revenue allows development of advanced Falcon Heavies, one that can be recovered and reused in four hours, and be flown 150 times. Thus, 16 launches per day, times 1000 days, less than 3 years, requires only 3 launchers of this capacity!

Now, a Dragon capsule masses 8,000 kg and carries 7 astronauts for up to two weeks. 53 tons could carry 100 passengers for up to one week, and by combining photonic thruster technology with suspended animation technology

https://labs.fhcrc.org/roth/

So, carrying 100 people to Mars and landing them there - would cost how much? Well, the infrastructure would already be there in the form of automated solar powered systems that could build anything. The same systems that recycle all wastes.

Now, $61 million cost per launch divided by 100 people is $610,000 per person. However, this is the construction cost of the rockets. With 150 flights per launcher, the price will drop to $610,000 per launch, and cost per passenger costs $6,100 - the price of a business class ticket from the US to Europe.

So, with recovery of the boosters at the launch center, within 2 hours of launch, and another 2 hours to refurbish and refuel the vehicle, a single vehicle can put up 600 people per day. Three vehicles put up 1,800 people per day. 1,000 vehicles split in groups of 50 operating from 20 launch centers put up 600,000 people per day, with one launch occuring 1.2 minutes. 219 million per year. This is far smaller than the 3.6 billion airline passengers per year carried aboard 19,340 large airliners each year.

Aircraft Number
A300: 376
A310: 200
A318: 35
A319: 915
A320: 1589
A321: 366
A330: 440
A340: 329
A380: 5
ARJ: 117
ATP: 31
ATR42: 318
ATR72: 307
B.142: 142
B717: 149
B727: 491
B737: 4416
B747: 936
B757: 1009
B767: 852
B777: 596
CRJ: 1284
DC-9: 292
DC-10: 198
DHC-8: 689
Do328: 150
ERJ: 964
E170: 153
E190: 60
F28: 67
F50: 188
F60: 4
F70: 46
F100: 221
J-41: 53
L1011: 33
MD-11: 174
MD-80: 954
MD-90: 106
S2000: 57
Tu204: 28

Total: 19'340

Expanding the 22 rocket launch sites operating today to handle the same number of flights per hour as O'Hare international airport,

http://www.spacetoday.org/Rockets/Sp...unchSites.html

There would be 44 flights every minute carrying 6.43 million people per day off world aboard 10,560 ships with 480 ships at each rocket base, each carrying 100 passengers per launch.

At this rate it takes less than 4 years to depopulate Earth:

Year Earth Off-World

2020AD 7,280.0 2,314.0
2021 AD 5,063.0 4,704.8
2022 AD 2,816.4 7,175.0
2023 AD 539.9 9,727.2

Reducing the world's population to 540 million by 2023 AD!

People would go to Bishop Rings built in the asteroid belt from the major asteroids and be served by self replicating utility fog.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZn5...&nohtml5=False
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXpk...&nohtml5=False

http://www.iase.cc/openair.htm
http://www.kurzweilai.net/utility-fo...ms-are-made-of

10,000 rings that are each 2,000 km in diameter and 600 km wide. This is a region 3.77 million sq km. A little bit larger than India, but sporting a population of less than 1 million!

On Thursday, April 7, 2016 at 10:24:35 PM UTC+12, Jeff Findley wrote:
In article ,
says...
Colonies with insufficient support from 'back home' tended to
disappear. You talk like all colonization attempts are easily
successful. There are enough failed colonies to prove that to be
bull****.

I never said anything like that.

However, support from 'back home' wasn't oxygen, food, water, and
repair parts for high tech equipment.

Water is available on both the moon and Mars at at least one of the
poles on each. Oxygen is also available on both the moon and Mars; it
just needs to be extracted. Food can therefore be grown.

Repair parts for high tech equipment is exactly the sort of thing that
Fred is talking about when he says "support". For early earth colonies,
things which are difficult to manufacture locally, like anything made of
metal, had to be shipped in, unless there was a readily available source
of metal at the colony and all of the tools to smelt and then process
and work with it.

For the most part it was luxury items such as good china before such
manufacturing could be established in the colonies.

In return the colonies, depending on where they were, sent back things
like spices, precious metals, furs, and timber.


Agreed that this pattern would often continue with even well established
colonies. The colony would mostly ship back raw materials, or goods
easily manufactured locally, and the "old world" would send the colony
finished "hard" goods.

There is nothing off the Earth so valuable it would be worth the
shipping cost in fuel to send it back to Earth.

Depends. If the fuel is largely made locally (on the moon or Mars), the
cost is local too. It may be more difficult to extract, but the supply
(the entire planet or moon) versus demand (a fledgling colony) would be
quite favorable.

No successful colony in history required anything beyond 10th Century
technology to survive.


Bull****. Lots of colonies in the New World succeeded only by the
skin of their teeth and lots of them failed and they all had the best
technology available at the time.

And that technology, except for a very few things like muskets, dates
back to at least the 10th Century.

Most certainly, but even that early tech (e.g. metal knives, axes, and
etc) would be quite difficult to manufacture at many early colonies
which may lack readily available raw materials (e.g. iron ore right on
the surface).

And, BTW, the indigious populations where most colonies where established
were surviving just fine on Stone Age technology long before the Europeans
appeared.

"Just fine" is a stretch, depending on the technological level of the
indigenous populations. (Primitive) technologies like farming and
domestication and selective breeding of animals *greatly* increased the
potential population density of even indigenous populations.

Jeff
--
All opinions posted by me on Usenet News are mine, and mine alone.
These posts do not reflect the opinions of my family, friends,
employer, or any organization that I am a member of.

With the discovery of ice caps on Mercury, the feeling among many planetary scientists is that water is common in the solar system, and in fact common in all star systems. Many now feel that the hydrogen coming out of the sun finds its way to the planets and other objects that orbit the sun, and interact with silicates and other oxides, to form water.

http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/...st825/ch11.pdf

20.3x10^-15 litres/sec/m2. This 640 cc per year per square kilometer.

Taking an asteroid and moving it to Earth Mars Lagrange Point One, and making a faceted mirror that focuses light to equal that of Earth, requires a mirror 6,612 miles across. Putting a solar powered magnetic ring of that size at that point, focuses protons onto the Martian surface, producing 592 million litres of water on the martian surface each (Earth) year. Of course, colliding with Martian CO2 produces water as well as oil and carbon deposits.

This all with fairly near term technology.

Times like these Pat Flannery on sci.space.history is missed even more.

Bob Clark



----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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21st-century technology, from the space elevator, to private, orbital
launchers, to 'flying cars'.
This crowdfunding campaign is to prove it:

Nanotech: from air to space.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/n...ce/x/13319568/
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Sergio" wrote in message ...

On 4/5/2016 2:09 PM, benj wrote:
On 04/05/2016 02:32 PM, wrote:
In sci.physics Doc O'Leary wrote:
For your reference, records indicate that
wrote:

Or in other words, it won't happen until we have Star Trek level
technology.
we are there, your salt shaker is a stun gun, just pretend it.

Hey a moon colony is no problem. The settlers can always sustain their
settlement by trading beads with the alien basses there. It's a PLAN
that worked the last time! HVAC will explain the details of the plan.


good idea, give them alien suckers some beads for Manhatten on the moon.
(I think instead of hands they have suckers).
I think the aliens on the moon are giant Moon Mice because of the cheese.
OR Amazon Women on the moon, or Catwomen of the Moon, Woman in the moon,
or teenage Moon Zombies, there is a movie already out on what happened.
---

On Thursday, April 7, 2016 at 10:24:35 PM UTC+12, Jeff Findley wrote:
In article ,
says...
Colonies with insufficient support from 'back home' tended to
disappear. You talk like all colonization attempts are easily
successful. There are enough failed colonies to prove that to be
bull****.

I never said anything like that.

However, support from 'back home' wasn't oxygen, food, water, and
repair parts for high tech equipment.

Water is available on both the moon and Mars at at least one of the
poles on each. Oxygen is also available on both the moon and Mars; it
just needs to be extracted. Food can therefore be grown.

Repair parts for high tech equipment is exactly the sort of thing that
Fred is talking about when he says "support". For early earth colonies,
things which are difficult to manufacture locally, like anything made of
metal, had to be shipped in, unless there was a readily available source
of metal at the colony and all of the tools to smelt and then process
and work with it.

For the most part it was luxury items such as good china before such
manufacturing could be established in the colonies.

In return the colonies, depending on where they were, sent back things
like spices, precious metals, furs, and timber.


Agreed that this pattern would often continue with even well established
colonies. The colony would mostly ship back raw materials, or goods
easily manufactured locally, and the "old world" would send the colony
finished "hard" goods.

There is nothing off the Earth so valuable it would be worth the
shipping cost in fuel to send it back to Earth.

Depends. If the fuel is largely made locally (on the moon or Mars), the
cost is local too. It may be more difficult to extract, but the supply
(the entire planet or moon) versus demand (a fledgling colony) would be
quite favorable.

No successful colony in history required anything beyond 10th Century
technology to survive.


Bull****. Lots of colonies in the New World succeeded only by the
skin of their teeth and lots of them failed and they all had the best
technology available at the time.

And that technology, except for a very few things like muskets, dates
back to at least the 10th Century.

Most certainly, but even that early tech (e.g. metal knives, axes, and
etc) would be quite difficult to manufacture at many early colonies
which may lack readily available raw materials (e.g. iron ore right on
the surface).

And, BTW, the indigious populations where most colonies where established
were surviving just fine on Stone Age technology long before the Europeans
appeared.

"Just fine" is a stretch, depending on the technological level of the
indigenous populations. (Primitive) technologies like farming and
domestication and selective breeding of animals *greatly* increased the
potential population density of even indigenous populations.

Jeff
--
All opinions posted by me on Usenet News are mine, and mine alone.
These posts do not reflect the opinions of my family, friends,
employer, or any organization that I am a member of.

http://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=19780044024
http://www.johnslewis.com/2011/01/de...-in-space.html

Modern methods of production will make use of demandite to make anything desired. This has long been known.

https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=...d ite&f=false

The issue is the biosphere. The biosphere cannot support - according to conventional wisdom - a large number of people living at a high standard. Self replicating machines transforming the Earth into a factory for billions of high tech consumers cannot be sustained. Self replicating machinery operating automatically throughout the asteroid belt and inner solar system, can transform worlds and make large volumes of high quality products available on Earth.

Here is what we consume in the advanced industrial world;

Fuel......... 0.42 3242.82
Building.... 0.40 3088.40
Agriculture 0.10 772.10
Metals...... 0.06 463.26
Others...... 0.02 154.42

Total......... 1.00 7721.00

So, the average industrial consumer uses 7.72 metric tons of stuff each year. 3.24 tons of that is fuel in the form of oil, natural gas and coal. 3.09 tons of stuff is in the form of building materials. Glass, stone, gravel, concrete, and so forth. We don't need the first with beamed energy from space. We don't need to bring stones and sand to Earth. We can use materials here without too much trouble. We can even reycle the materials we want to clean up.

So, the balance of imports, is metals and agriculture products, including clothing and medicines, construction timber, paper, as well as plastics and electronics.

This adds up to no more than 1.4 metric tons moved from the asteroids to Earth, prior to doing the long term solution of moving people from the Earth to the asteroids. Importing goods requires that we slow products down by a small amount, so they fall to Earth, to be captured at Earth and distributed and consumed.

So, during the shipping season from Ceres say;

Ceres: 2.7675 AU - semimajor axis
17.905 km/sec - average orbital speed
0.510 km/sec - escape velocity

Earth: 1.0000 AU - semimajor axis
29.782 km/sec - average orbital velocity
11.186 km/sec - escape velocity

So, the Vis-Viva equation gives you the velocity at each point in an orbit. So a Hohmann transfer orbit that connects Earth with Ceres is

( 2.7675 + 1.0000 ) / 2 = 1.88375

V = sqrt( 2/r - 1/a )

So, at r=2.7675 and a= 1.88375 we have

V = sqrt( 2/2.7675 - 1/1.88375) = 0.43797 times earth's orbital velocity

0.43797 * 29.782 = 13.044 km/sec at Ceres. So,

17.905 - 13.044 = 4.861 km/sec delta vee to fall from Ceres orbit to Earth orbit around the Sun.

Now the escape velocity of Ceres is 0.510 km/sec. So, the speed at which an object must be projected from Ceres to Earth is;

sqrt( 0.510^2 + 4.861^2) = 4.888 km/sec.

Now, to project 1.4 metric tons from Ceres to Earth requires that it be accelerated to this speed. If done with a solar powered photonic thruster, this will use;

1/2 * 1400 kg * 4.888^2 = 16.722 GJ per year.

This is 529.9 Watts continuous per person at Ceres, with 80% overall efficiency, this requires 3.71 sq meters of solar collector at Ceres per person!

Adding up across all asteroids for 7.28 billion person this is a total of 3..86 trillion watts! It takes 15.5 months to get to Earth.

To break down 1,400 kg into plasma and reassemble it at the atomic level, concentrating the needed atoms, requires 19.6 GJ per year. This is a little more energy requiring a little larger collector.

On average, 1.16 billion tons enter Earth's atmosphere every hour in billions of payloads and contain products that fly directly to the person's needing the material. The 15.5 month supply chain can be considered a warehouse, and the last three days orders are placed and final course corrections are made to bring the product to the person. Utility fog on Earth recycles the wastes including the packaging.

So, we won't be going to Mars living under a dome and growing minks to export fur back to Earth. We will send first;

(1) a network of automatic communications satellites to capture the telecom market,
(2) a network of automatic power satellites to capture the energy market,
(3) a network of self replicating automatic manufacturing satellites to capture the manufacturing market,

and finally,

(4) manufacture residential colonies in the asteroid belt and send people to these colonies reducing human numbers to 500 million in five years.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZNzz4SaTYk

For your reference, records indicate that
wrote:

And if Star Trek technology did exist, people wouldn't bother attempting
to colonize airless, barren rocks.

Stupid people will always try to inhabit stupid places for stupid reasons.
Access to technology that makes it easier to do so only makes the problem
*worse*.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Everest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl

--
"Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
River Tam, Trash, Firefly

For your reference, records indicate that
wrote:

As Antarctica has never had any colonies, Antarctica is irrelevant to
a discussion of colonies.

And yet *you* were the one who brought it up. It’s always fun to see
people attacking their own straw man arguments! :-)

So just what are the natural resources available on Mars?

All the ones we know about, and all the ones we *don’t yet* know about.
The main problem with your thinking is that you seem to use Earth-
centric thinking when evaluating the resources that are available.

There are no forests, no lakes, no rivers, no life and no air.

You seem to have more knowledge than NASA on those things. How is that?

I would say the odds of finding limestone deposits to make cement
highly unlikely. You do know limestone is organically created, don't
you?

You do know that civilizations have been built without relying on
limestone, don’t you?

[blathering about industrial mining snipped]

something usefull to build the domed and pressurized buildings
required to survive and do anything.

If that’s how you think about what is *required* to survive, you clearly
haven’t thought much about the problem. These are *your* straw men.

You will be lacking just about all usefull chemicals as most of
them come from petroleum, so no plastics.

You do know that civilizations have been built without relying on
plastics, don’t you?

You miss the point, it would take Star Trek technology to make it affordable.

I don’t miss that point at all. I *made* that point when I questioned
the proposed budget. But I am also making the point that it does *not*
require magical technology if you don’t make the assumption that you’re
going to live an Earth-styled life on such an inhospitable landscape.

--
"Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
River Tam, Trash, Firefly