On Martian Meals

[Pedant]

So...what did people eat during the early days of colonization? Was there livestock, or protein packs, or what? And did this change at all once the terraforming started?

[zompist]

Hydroponically grown plants, mostly. Probably some chickens.

No beef at first, because it's a very inefficient use of your expensively excavated living spaces. If people lived on beef, there would either be 1/10 as many of them, or they'd have to build 10 times the number of hydroponics labs (to grow the grain to feed the cattle). Chickens are better since the factor is just 3.

I assume that the technology developed in orbit and on the moon.

It's hard to get into more specifics, because we're talking about ~ 70 years in the future, which is kind of the worst time to make projections about. You can (if you do enough research) do OK with 20 years, and if you make it 300 or 3000 years, then more or less anything goes. But 70 years is too short for major change (like, Star Trek tech), but too long for simple extrapolation.

E.g., 70 years ago was 1950. The prediction rate from sf writers is pretty bad. The obvious problems are riding one's own hobbyhorses, and assuming that the tech you like will come quickly. The non-obvious problem is, well, things happening that no one expected.

That is... a lot of details depend on just what gets done over several decades: interplanetary engines; hydroponics; radiation shielding; effective Lunar/Mars building techniques. Maybe lab-grown beef is a thing by then, too.

[gestaltist]

I'm confused. This is in the Almea subforum. Was there colonization of Mars in Almea? What am I missing?

[alice]

Did they eat a Mars bar a day, to help them work, rest, and play?

(ducks)

[So Haleza Grise]

I'm confused. This is in the Almea subforum. Was there colonization of Mars in Almea? What am I missing?

The Almea subforum covers both Almea and the Incatena (Zompist's sci-fi setting).

[gestaltist]

I'm confused. This is in the Almea subforum. Was there colonization of Mars in Almea? What am I missing?

The Almea subforum covers both Almea and the Incatena (Zompist's sci-fi setting).

Oh, makes sense now.

[Salmoneus]

Hydroponically grown plants, mostly. Probably some chickens.

No beef at first, because it's a very inefficient use of your expensively excavated living spaces. If people lived on beef, there would either be 1/10 as many of them, or they'd have to build 10 times the number of hydroponics labs (to grow the grain to feed the cattle). Chickens are better since the factor is just 3.

I assume that the technology developed in orbit and on the moon.

It's hard to get into more specifics, because we're talking about ~ 70 years in the future, which is kind of the worst time to make projections about. You can (if you do enough research) do OK with 20 years, and if you make it 300 or 3000 years, then more or less anything goes. But 70 years is too short for major change (like, Star Trek tech), but too long for simple extrapolation.

E.g., 70 years ago was 1950. The prediction rate from sf writers is pretty bad. The obvious problems are riding one's own hobbyhorses, and assuming that the tech you like will come quickly. The non-obvious problem is, well, things happening that no one expected.

That is... a lot of details depend on just what gets done over several decades: interplanetary engines; hydroponics; radiation shielding; effective Lunar/Mars building techniques. Maybe lab-grown beef is a thing by then, too.

Presumably, though, if we're talking colonisation of Mars only 70 years from now, then we're not in the realm of 'hard SF' anyway!

[zompist]

Presumably, though, if we're talking colonisation of Mars only 70 years from now, then we're not in the realm of 'hard SF' anyway!

I don't exactly disagree, but I'd note that a large number of people, and probably most sf fans, would be extremely surprised and disappointed if Mars colonization doesn't happen until 2090.

When I wrote the original story the time gap was nearly a hundred years. Plus, I grew up in the '60s when we went from no space flight to moon landings in ten years. NASA could get a lot done when spending was literally ten times greater than it is today.

(I also changed the timeline a bit when doing Hanying, because I wanted the pidgin to develop pre-Collapse.)

[Salmoneus]

Presumably, though, if we're talking colonisation of Mars only 70 years from now, then we're not in the realm of 'hard SF' anyway!

I don't exactly disagree, but I'd note that a large number of people, and probably most sf fans, would be extremely surprised and disappointed if Mars colonization doesn't happen until 2090.

I think those people have unrealistic expectations.

I'd look at it in terms of what has to be done to colonise Mars, even leaving aside the political will:
- we need to learn to reliably get things to Mars and land them there.
- we need to learn how to land heavy loads on Mars
- we need to learn how to transport people to Mars
- we need to send a person to Mars
- we need to establish an experimental base on Mars to prove our habitation concepts
- we need to construct a permanant habitation base on Mars
- given that so far we'll be talking about handfuls, at most dozens, of areonauts, we'll then need to scale up to functioning bases of hundreds of people
- in order to do that we'll need bases to become more or less self-sufficient
- then we'll need to learn how to allow humans to live for long periods on Mars, and how to have babies there
- then we'll need to scale up to thousands of people in bases

Given that we only have a handful of Martian projects each decade, and that to plan, construct and prepare even a mission to send just a little robot to Mars takes about a decade each time... each of the stages above will take decades, even optimistically. And we haven't even completed stage 1 yet - in the last 20 years, we've sent 9 missions to land on Mars, of which only 5 have not catastrophically failed, which isn't an acceptable rate when you start sending people. Sure, we've gotten better - in the last decade, we've had 2 wins and only 1 loss. But still...

[this is leaving aside the broader problem that, beyond perhaps a symbolic research station, we will never colonise Mars]

When I wrote the original story the time gap was nearly a hundred years. Plus, I grew up in the '60s when we went from no space flight to moon landings in ten years.

Yeah, but these days in the UK at least it takes 30 years to build an essential train line to connect the major cities, and over a decade and counting of traumatic national debate just to decide whether to build an airport runway. Colossal hyperprojects conducted purely for the fun of it don't look they have much of a future, at least in the near future.

[gestaltist]

[this is leaving aside the broader problem that, beyond perhaps a symbolic research station, we will never colonise Mars]

"Never" is a very long time. People used to be sure we'll "never" reach India by sailing West.

[Salmoneus]

[this is leaving aside the broader problem that, beyond perhaps a symbolic research station, we will never colonise Mars]

"Never" is a very long time. People used to be sure we'll "never" reach India by sailing West.

People also used to be sure the sun would rise the next morning. Just because someone was wrong about something one time doesn't mean anyone else is wrong about something else another time.

In the case of Mars, I think colonisation will never occur because by the time it becomes economically viable, it will be unnecessary. But I don't really want to argue The Martian Question yet again, since we just had that discussion. My point here was more about The Space Travel Question.

[Moose-tache]

And we haven't even completed stage 1 yet - in the last 20 years, we've sent 9 missions to land on Mars, of which only 5 have not catastrophically failed, which isn't an acceptable rate when you start sending people.

I’m not sure how you’re counting these. I count six NASA landers and rovers: Mars Polar Lander, Spirit, Opportunity, Phoenix, Curiosity, and InSight, of which only one failed to land (the first one, by the way, which suggests that they’ve pretty much figured out the landing process by now). I assume your failure rate is calculated by including the Russians and Chinese, and especially the Ethiopian Space Agency, which crashes robots into Mars with such regularity I’m pretty sure they’re trying to turn the planet into a cyborg. But if we send humans to Mars, there’s an easy solution: just don’t give the contract to the guys who are filling their rockets with Mardi Gras fireworks. You can’t say that humanity doesn’t know how to reliably deliver payloads and land them on the planet just because the ESA treats Mars like a pub dartboard.

EDIT: on a more serious note, NASA has landed five of the last five landers successfully, and their payloads have gone from 180 kg to 899 kg. That's a five-fold increase in payload delivery with no major failures in the space of 15 years. I agree that each of the steps you mentioned may take decades, but if each step takes twenty years, then we're already ahead of schedule.

[Lambuzhao]

Quick question - how did they resolve/solve the issue of heavy water on (alt)Mars?
Is that even an issue?

According to recent theories about (real world) Martian areochronology, most of the 'watery' water seems to have been literally blown off the planet, either by evaporation, winds & weak gravity, as ejecta due to bombardments by (meteo/aste-)roids, or ripped apart by solar radiation into hydrogen (which floated away into space) and oxygen (which either floated away, or became part of the CO/CO2 cycle on Mars). What seems to have remained is heavy water, made with deuterium. Apparently, heavy water was 'massive' enough to resist most of those destructive forces.



Nonetheless, heavy water is virtually useless to (Terran-based) life. heavy water interrupts basic processes of cell respiration and cellular mitosis. It essentially sterilizes organisms that ingest it. Lab rats can apparently smell the difference between "light water" and "heavy water", and in experiments, refuse to drink it, and will die of thirst rather than drink it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water


So, what to do about Mars' dearth of light water, vis-a-vis its relative abundance of quite deleterious heavy water???
Maybe it will turn out that there is still enough light water on Mars for proper colonization, however, still something to consider.

[Moose-tache]

Mars has a much higher concentration of heavy water, but nothing close to the concentration needed to cause negative effects in tests (25-50%). Even on Mars, 999 out of every 1000 water molecules would still be "light" water.