A book review on the latest Weinersmith creation. It’s true, there is so much we don’t know.
Just throwing this out there on this forum because missing technology is the problem that kills the dream of Mars, according to the authors.
A book review on the latest Weinersmith creation. It’s true, there is so much we don’t know.
Just throwing this out there on this forum because missing technology is the problem that kills the dream of Mars, according to the authors.
Scientists catalog what we know and don’t know and try to chip away at the list of things we don’t know. The whole point of the book and this article is that there is way more stuff we don’t know than we realize and most discussion of space colonization tends to forget the parts we don’t know.
The article even pointed out some very showstopping issues:
Space colonization may happen, but it’s incredibly doubtful that it’ll happen in our lifetimes.
Mars is actually full of oxygen. The surface is covered in oxidized iron, and trillions of tons of carbon dioxide makes up its atmosphere. Plus all the ice.
We can’t breathe oxidized iron or carbon dioxide. We’d need to convert it into breathable oxygen and the mechanism would have to be foolproof and have redundancies. And that still leaves plenty of other problems.
But my main point was to everyone in this thread criticizing the authors for being pessimists. This isn’t just naysaying or complaining. The authors are pointing out all of the necessary research we still have to do before a space colony can be feasible.
NASAs rover has already successfully tested a carbon dioxide to oxygen conversion system, MOXIE.
https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacecraft/instruments/moxie/
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-perseverance-mars-rover-extracts-first-oxygen-from-red-planet/
If they can do it on a rover, it’s pretty trivial to scale that up to an industrial scale.
In the first link you provided, NASA themselves say we’d need a 25,000 watt power plant to scale that up. That’s not trivial.
Again, what the authors are pointing out is that space colonization is probably scientifically possible, but will take a lot of research and then investment. MOXIE is a great tech demo, but its not a solution by itself.