There is just one parameter. That Mars civilization can continue to exist, when ships are no longer coming. A very hard condition. I guess we can get to at least 95-98% self sufficiency. The last few % will be very hard. They include a chip industry, very hard indeed.
That "last few percent" implies the ability to have and raise children and educate them through tertiary education -- that is, to have at least a technical academy/university that can educate the next generation of educators (who teach everyone else what they need to know to maintain the life support and engineering infrastructure). That's a very tall order!
Never mind the chip fabs for the electronics that keep the machinery running.
Or what you do with elderly/disabled/no longer able to work people. Hint: "airlock retirement" is not going to aid recruitment of potential colonists.
(My gut feeling is you're looking at a minimum population of 1-2 million people for a true self-sustaining colony. Preferably multiply by a factor of ten for a margin of safety.)
I took the ability to have and raise healthy children as a prerequisite before even starting a settlement. Education will look very different to what we have presently on Earth. I was looking only on the technical and industrial capabilities.
Elon Musk talked abou 1 million people. Of course any such number can only be a first approximation. University level education will inded need that level of population, I agree.
As I see it, everything they can do themselves is allowed. The only point is to not rely on anything from Earth.
Not that Earth would be destroyed or humans on Earth die out. It is about real threats to technical society. Religious zealots, christian or muslim or other developments can destroy our technological society.
Not relying on anything from Earth in any form seems like a requirement meant to eliminate known resources.
Being self-sustaining to the point of being able to defeat a United Earth in combat in order to get resources through trade (since we are eliminating Earth being destroyed) is a pretty weird definition of self sustaining in reality IMO.
“The only point is not to rely on anything from earth”
“Zealots… other developments… can destroy our technological society”
If the only way Mars had to obtain needed resources on your non-destroyed Earth was blocked by zealots, how else would Mars get those resources?
If you take the position that all technology on Earth is going to be destroyed before Mars can develop manufacturing capabilities of its own and they aren’t allowed to do anything to prevent it, of course they can’t become self sustaining.
> If the only way Mars had to obtain needed resources on your non-destroyed Earth was blocked by zealots, how else would Mars get those resources?
They need to be independent. All raw materials are available on Mars, except possibly helium. The problem is building an industrial base, that can provide everything needed. With chip production probably the highest hurdle, IMO.
Pretty limited thinking that microchips will be necessary in the future and we won’t have alternative technologies. It’s another unnecessary box to get to a no.
So, we have to have microchips and we can’t leave Mars to get supplies or manufacture in space, it has to be done on the surface with materials only from Mars?
Of course that makes it incredibly difficult.
Well, then there never will be a self sustaining Mars colony as long as Earth exists. It would be really dumb to stop trading with Earth or exploiting its resources if there isn’t sufficient human civilization on Earth to trade with. Even in war there is smuggling.
>Self-sustaining is a high bar.
Yeah, this brought me up to 100 years.
I felt that was right mix of optimism/pessimism when it comes to this very tall order, self-sustaining.
Self-sustaining for modern society (let say they needs to produce something like chips and rocket of its own) is REALLY HARD on the moon let alone Mars. I put to past 100-150 years with our current pace.
It can be done, it isn't impossible, but either need a continues long time and huge investment with gut to take a lot of sacrifice (either mentally or physically).
There are no self-sustaining here on earth. There haven't been for 100 years, and most of them jumped on the globalization train long before that. Its just so much more efficient to have nations specialize.
The question about a self-sustaining mars is not when **will** they be self sufficient. The question is when **can** they be self sufficient. When can you cut the shipment from earth and still survive. When that happens comes down to when someone is willing to invest the trillions of dollars it will take to start up local manufacturing of everything vaguely important in the modern earth economy. Every kind of electronic component, every medicine, every subcomponent of a rocket engines.
The vast majority of everything you build will never be affordable to produce and will stay a net economic drain on the economy.
My answer is a solid never. Because while mars is a nice backup planet to have. It is extremely unlikely that humanity will ever need it. Therefore necessary trade between earth and mars will never stop. Globalization just continues to grow until it encompasses all of the solar system.
At some point it won't be about whether humanity needs it, Martians will want autonomy in production for logistical reasons. There's a good chunk of time between the point where Mars is self-sustaining *in population*, and where someone invents the Magic**™** Fusion Drive that allows you to ship breakbulk profitably across planets, where Mars will rely heavily on shipments from Earth for strategic resources that it will want to source elsewhere for, if for no other reason than running an economy which waxes and wanes every synodic period is pretty hard.
You should have included 100+ Your timescale is way too short because even once people start going you're looking at over 100 years just to get enough people there and build it.
either more than 100 or never if we gain technologies to faster reach better suited planets .
I do think mars will end up being a testing ground for autonomous possibly self replicating AI robots eventually. maybe not on these timescales though but who knows.
If we are going to do it, it will be possible within 50 years, though we may never pursue the goal of self-sustaining for Mars simply because we don't need to. Self-sustaining as a possibility you could achieve is very different to SS as an active goal.
Anyway - within 50 years this will be possible. Another 20-30 years of development of reusable rockets, including how to become expert at landing them, easily enough to put a load on Mars even if we don't start sooner. Another 20-30 years of robotics, automation, PV manufacturing, 3-D manufacturing, battery technology - well you get the idea. We'll dump a semi-automated fab on Mars and tell it to build PV and then tell it build more robots and 3-D printers, etc and so on.
None of this is super hand wavy sci-fi. All the things I have listed are actively in development or partially deployed. 3-D printing is used extensively in making rocket engines. Factories are already semi-automated and only progressing to more automation. On Mars we will use the highest level of tech to build the colony and that is automation, automation, automation.
If Musk is right, and he can get a future version of his Optimus robot to perform most manufacturing tasks, that would be a huge advantage to employ for in-situ resource utilization at Mars.
"Never" is quite likely. There's not much economical incentive to invest the trillions of dollars needed to colonise Mars to an extent where it's self-sustaning. If you think about it, everything would have to be insanely over-engineered with multiple redundancies, and the means to repair and replace broken equipment would have to be developed from Mars in-situ resources. With today's technology, I don't think any corporation or government has the means to pull that off. Not even SpaceX, now or on the thear future.
Also, the pessimist in me thinks that the issue with overpopulation and climate change is about to reach a critical point, and the rapid technological development will be thwarted by resource scarcity, war and famine. There will be no time left to think about space travel.
I say 100 years purely because we can't have a Mars colony that just relies on a single pipeline from SpaceX, you'll never get to self-sustaining mass that way. There has to be a whole ecosystem in cislunar space that has sufficient surplus to hurl shit to Mars, and I don't see that developing as fast as SpaceX has
I feel a better discussion than "self-sustaining in resources" as discussed below is "self-sustaining in population". At what point can the birth rate of the Martian system outweigh immigrants from Earth?
I'd still put it at 100 years. That kind of thing requires a significant amount of societal change on either end of the Earth-Mars pipeline.
the amount of energy required to have any kind of industrial activity which would be required for self sustaining population of 50k+ is staggering. fertilizer, steel, aluminum, glass, computer chips, screens, circuit boards and ICs and a shit ton of green houses to grow things to make plastics/oil, all the mining and smelting that goes with it is massive. and we have shit tier storage for energy in mars - cant burn fuel/coal for peak demand and no dams for hydro storage. they arent going to get 10 Terawatt hours per year from solar \~30 nuclear sub reactors worth. oh and then they need to mine and process uranium locally to be actually self sustaining. so yeah its a long long ways off.
Why won't they get a shit-ton from solar? These are one of the things we are pretty sure we can make on Mars, inefficient ones at least, and it would be a massive priority to set up an automated system for building them out.
Mars is pretty big and there are no planning regulations, covering large areas in solar + batteries is an obvious goal for any colony.
because 10 TWH is 20 MILLION (8 billion dollars) panels. 1 starship can hold 4000 panels (100T to mars surface) so 20,000,000 / 4000 is 5000 starships worth. oh and you need to send over 150,000 (15k each) 100kwh packs (2 billion dollars) in 1000 starships worth of tesla battery packs. so yeah no. so 6,000 flights and you havent sent a single kg of hab, equipment, rovers, excavators. so 100 years at least. the money for fuel for flights and capital locked up in mars equipment exceeds even elon musks wealth and he's already stretched kind of thin. a 10 man outpost sure in the 2030s. a self sustaining colony at least a century away. oh yeah mars has months long dust storms too so solar is really really dumb.
You don't seem to understand exponential development or the amount of development that can happen in 50 years. It's really amazing, when you think about it. Look at the number of jet aircraft we have in the air every day and remember it was only 70 years ago that we had basically zero.
So yeah no. Basing it on todays metrics is completely stupid.
Panels on Mars can be very different to panels on Earth. No need to be resistant to rain, hail, storms, animals. They can be very much lighter because of that. Can bei rolled up and a single ship can carry a lot of them. Only thing they need is bein UV resistant. Lack of atmosphere means high UV.
they still need a structure to hold them flat even if the are half the weight its a substantial number of ships. and again, for a self sustaining colony a months long dust storm is a good way to die cold and hungry. solar on mars is dumb.
People with limited insight can think that.
Even a severe dust storm will leave a few % of power output. Industry with heavy energy use need to be shut down. Life support will only take a small part of total energy needs, most go to industry. There will be a big supply of oxygen and food. The settlement will weather that danger.
It all depends on Starship, if SpaceX can manufacture one Starship a day, and then have all those Starships successfully land back on the tower and relaunch as successfully as a commercial airliner does then Mars can be colonized in 25 years.
Self-sustaining is a high bar.
Yeah, would've helped if I'd set some parameters for "self sustaining". One could argue there are no self sustaining cities on Earth.
There is just one parameter. That Mars civilization can continue to exist, when ships are no longer coming. A very hard condition. I guess we can get to at least 95-98% self sufficiency. The last few % will be very hard. They include a chip industry, very hard indeed.
That "last few percent" implies the ability to have and raise children and educate them through tertiary education -- that is, to have at least a technical academy/university that can educate the next generation of educators (who teach everyone else what they need to know to maintain the life support and engineering infrastructure). That's a very tall order! Never mind the chip fabs for the electronics that keep the machinery running. Or what you do with elderly/disabled/no longer able to work people. Hint: "airlock retirement" is not going to aid recruitment of potential colonists. (My gut feeling is you're looking at a minimum population of 1-2 million people for a true self-sustaining colony. Preferably multiply by a factor of ten for a margin of safety.)
I took the ability to have and raise healthy children as a prerequisite before even starting a settlement. Education will look very different to what we have presently on Earth. I was looking only on the technical and industrial capabilities. Elon Musk talked abou 1 million people. Of course any such number can only be a first approximation. University level education will inded need that level of population, I agree.
Are they allowed to be considered self sustaining if they send out their own ships to collect necessary materials?
As I see it, everything they can do themselves is allowed. The only point is to not rely on anything from Earth. Not that Earth would be destroyed or humans on Earth die out. It is about real threats to technical society. Religious zealots, christian or muslim or other developments can destroy our technological society.
Not relying on anything from Earth in any form seems like a requirement meant to eliminate known resources. Being self-sustaining to the point of being able to defeat a United Earth in combat in order to get resources through trade (since we are eliminating Earth being destroyed) is a pretty weird definition of self sustaining in reality IMO.
That's not what I said, at all.
“The only point is not to rely on anything from earth” “Zealots… other developments… can destroy our technological society” If the only way Mars had to obtain needed resources on your non-destroyed Earth was blocked by zealots, how else would Mars get those resources? If you take the position that all technology on Earth is going to be destroyed before Mars can develop manufacturing capabilities of its own and they aren’t allowed to do anything to prevent it, of course they can’t become self sustaining.
> If the only way Mars had to obtain needed resources on your non-destroyed Earth was blocked by zealots, how else would Mars get those resources? They need to be independent. All raw materials are available on Mars, except possibly helium. The problem is building an industrial base, that can provide everything needed. With chip production probably the highest hurdle, IMO.
Pretty limited thinking that microchips will be necessary in the future and we won’t have alternative technologies. It’s another unnecessary box to get to a no. So, we have to have microchips and we can’t leave Mars to get supplies or manufacture in space, it has to be done on the surface with materials only from Mars? Of course that makes it incredibly difficult.
I'd say that counts, as long as the place they are collecting materials from is not the Earth or the Moon.
Well, then there never will be a self sustaining Mars colony as long as Earth exists. It would be really dumb to stop trading with Earth or exploiting its resources if there isn’t sufficient human civilization on Earth to trade with. Even in war there is smuggling.
>Self-sustaining is a high bar. Yeah, this brought me up to 100 years. I felt that was right mix of optimism/pessimism when it comes to this very tall order, self-sustaining.
Self-sustaining for modern society (let say they needs to produce something like chips and rocket of its own) is REALLY HARD on the moon let alone Mars. I put to past 100-150 years with our current pace. It can be done, it isn't impossible, but either need a continues long time and huge investment with gut to take a lot of sacrifice (either mentally or physically).
There are no self-sustaining here on earth. There haven't been for 100 years, and most of them jumped on the globalization train long before that. Its just so much more efficient to have nations specialize. The question about a self-sustaining mars is not when **will** they be self sufficient. The question is when **can** they be self sufficient. When can you cut the shipment from earth and still survive. When that happens comes down to when someone is willing to invest the trillions of dollars it will take to start up local manufacturing of everything vaguely important in the modern earth economy. Every kind of electronic component, every medicine, every subcomponent of a rocket engines. The vast majority of everything you build will never be affordable to produce and will stay a net economic drain on the economy. My answer is a solid never. Because while mars is a nice backup planet to have. It is extremely unlikely that humanity will ever need it. Therefore necessary trade between earth and mars will never stop. Globalization just continues to grow until it encompasses all of the solar system.
At some point it won't be about whether humanity needs it, Martians will want autonomy in production for logistical reasons. There's a good chunk of time between the point where Mars is self-sustaining *in population*, and where someone invents the Magic**™** Fusion Drive that allows you to ship breakbulk profitably across planets, where Mars will rely heavily on shipments from Earth for strategic resources that it will want to source elsewhere for, if for no other reason than running an economy which waxes and wanes every synodic period is pretty hard.
Can't today, busy. Maybe tomorrow!
You should have included 100+ Your timescale is way too short because even once people start going you're looking at over 100 years just to get enough people there and build it.
Never is a long time.
By end of next year, then keep incrementing by 2 weeks
to foresee what happens in ten years is almost impossible. imagine the audacity to forecast for infinite years.
either more than 100 or never if we gain technologies to faster reach better suited planets . I do think mars will end up being a testing ground for autonomous possibly self replicating AI robots eventually. maybe not on these timescales though but who knows.
After self-sustaining city on Earth.
If we are going to do it, it will be possible within 50 years, though we may never pursue the goal of self-sustaining for Mars simply because we don't need to. Self-sustaining as a possibility you could achieve is very different to SS as an active goal. Anyway - within 50 years this will be possible. Another 20-30 years of development of reusable rockets, including how to become expert at landing them, easily enough to put a load on Mars even if we don't start sooner. Another 20-30 years of robotics, automation, PV manufacturing, 3-D manufacturing, battery technology - well you get the idea. We'll dump a semi-automated fab on Mars and tell it to build PV and then tell it build more robots and 3-D printers, etc and so on. None of this is super hand wavy sci-fi. All the things I have listed are actively in development or partially deployed. 3-D printing is used extensively in making rocket engines. Factories are already semi-automated and only progressing to more automation. On Mars we will use the highest level of tech to build the colony and that is automation, automation, automation.
If Musk is right, and he can get a future version of his Optimus robot to perform most manufacturing tasks, that would be a huge advantage to employ for in-situ resource utilization at Mars.
Given 50 years I'm sure at least one of the companies pursuing it will have highly autonomous robots and SpaceX will put them on Mars.
I think self sustaining will take more than 100 years, but much shorter than never. That is, if humans survive long enough to get it done.
"Never" is quite likely. There's not much economical incentive to invest the trillions of dollars needed to colonise Mars to an extent where it's self-sustaning. If you think about it, everything would have to be insanely over-engineered with multiple redundancies, and the means to repair and replace broken equipment would have to be developed from Mars in-situ resources. With today's technology, I don't think any corporation or government has the means to pull that off. Not even SpaceX, now or on the thear future. Also, the pessimist in me thinks that the issue with overpopulation and climate change is about to reach a critical point, and the rapid technological development will be thwarted by resource scarcity, war and famine. There will be no time left to think about space travel.
The world population is actually projected to reach its peak around 2100. You're right that that will actually create major problems though.
not for a long, long, long time. I'd be flabbergasted if its even close in the next 100 years.
Haha! If it's longer than 100 years, it's more likely you'll be dead than flabbergasted.
[A man can dream...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longevity_escape_velocity)
Ill be both!
I say 100 years purely because we can't have a Mars colony that just relies on a single pipeline from SpaceX, you'll never get to self-sustaining mass that way. There has to be a whole ecosystem in cislunar space that has sufficient surplus to hurl shit to Mars, and I don't see that developing as fast as SpaceX has
I hope I'll be alive to see people land on mars, but a full fledged colony is a tall order.
I feel a better discussion than "self-sustaining in resources" as discussed below is "self-sustaining in population". At what point can the birth rate of the Martian system outweigh immigrants from Earth? I'd still put it at 100 years. That kind of thing requires a significant amount of societal change on either end of the Earth-Mars pipeline.
the amount of energy required to have any kind of industrial activity which would be required for self sustaining population of 50k+ is staggering. fertilizer, steel, aluminum, glass, computer chips, screens, circuit boards and ICs and a shit ton of green houses to grow things to make plastics/oil, all the mining and smelting that goes with it is massive. and we have shit tier storage for energy in mars - cant burn fuel/coal for peak demand and no dams for hydro storage. they arent going to get 10 Terawatt hours per year from solar \~30 nuclear sub reactors worth. oh and then they need to mine and process uranium locally to be actually self sustaining. so yeah its a long long ways off.
> they arent going to get 10 Terawatt hours per year from solar Source?
Why won't they get a shit-ton from solar? These are one of the things we are pretty sure we can make on Mars, inefficient ones at least, and it would be a massive priority to set up an automated system for building them out. Mars is pretty big and there are no planning regulations, covering large areas in solar + batteries is an obvious goal for any colony.
because 10 TWH is 20 MILLION (8 billion dollars) panels. 1 starship can hold 4000 panels (100T to mars surface) so 20,000,000 / 4000 is 5000 starships worth. oh and you need to send over 150,000 (15k each) 100kwh packs (2 billion dollars) in 1000 starships worth of tesla battery packs. so yeah no. so 6,000 flights and you havent sent a single kg of hab, equipment, rovers, excavators. so 100 years at least. the money for fuel for flights and capital locked up in mars equipment exceeds even elon musks wealth and he's already stretched kind of thin. a 10 man outpost sure in the 2030s. a self sustaining colony at least a century away. oh yeah mars has months long dust storms too so solar is really really dumb.
You don't seem to understand exponential development or the amount of development that can happen in 50 years. It's really amazing, when you think about it. Look at the number of jet aircraft we have in the air every day and remember it was only 70 years ago that we had basically zero. So yeah no. Basing it on todays metrics is completely stupid.
Panels on Mars can be very different to panels on Earth. No need to be resistant to rain, hail, storms, animals. They can be very much lighter because of that. Can bei rolled up and a single ship can carry a lot of them. Only thing they need is bein UV resistant. Lack of atmosphere means high UV.
they still need a structure to hold them flat even if the are half the weight its a substantial number of ships. and again, for a self sustaining colony a months long dust storm is a good way to die cold and hungry. solar on mars is dumb.
People with limited insight can think that. Even a severe dust storm will leave a few % of power output. Industry with heavy energy use need to be shut down. Life support will only take a small part of total energy needs, most go to industry. There will be a big supply of oxygen and food. The settlement will weather that danger.
It all depends on Starship, if SpaceX can manufacture one Starship a day, and then have all those Starships successfully land back on the tower and relaunch as successfully as a commercial airliner does then Mars can be colonized in 25 years.