LIVING ON MARS

Just the other day I received an article via The Smithsonian about building a school in Madagascar using “printjet” techniques:

The World’s First 3-D Printed School May Soon Be a Reality

Thinking Huts, a nonprofit founded by a 15-year-old, plans to kick off construction in Madagascar this summer

Well, these ideas are not really so new, they’ve been around a while now, but they’ve certainly come a long way since I first read about them. Printing buildings with giant printjets has been tried over many years and in many places. 

From Wikipedia:

The 3D Print Canal House was the first full-scale construction project of its kind to get off the ground. In just a short space of time, the Kamermaker has been further developed to increase its production speed by 300%. However, progress has not been swift enough to claim the title of 'World's First 3D Printed House'.[59]

The first residential building in Europe and the CIS, constructed using the 3D printing construction technology, was the home in Yaroslavl (Russia) with the area of 298,5 sq. meters. The walls of the building were printed by the company SPECAVIA in December 2015. 600 elements of the walls were printed in the shop and assembled at the construction site. After completing the roof structure and interior decoration, the company presented a fully finished 3D building in October 2017.[60]

 

This link shows a range of such buildings created from about 2017

https://www.3dnatives.com/en/3d-printed-architecture030520174/

3D Printed Architecture: Top 12 Most Stunning Buildings

Published on May 3, 2017 by Alexandrea P.

 Such techniques are also being considered for building habitats on Mars. 

Here are some actual sample structures built here on Earth but it is thought that in the future they could be built in situ on Mars.

Now my purpose in writing this piece is not to question the underlying principles, the positives and negatives for buildings created this way, but merely to contrast two alternative applications of this method of construction:

1. A school for people in Madagascar.

2. Buildings for people to live in on Mars.

For me these alternative uses of the construction technology offer many ways of thinking about essential problems facing humanity in 2021:

Why are we talking about living on Mars at all when there are so many problems facing people living on Earth?

What are the comparative difficulties involved in each case?

What are the differences in costs for each application?

What are the benefits of one versus the other?

Let’s take this one step at a time.

Life on Earth v. Life on Mars.

Well, Earth is full of life and Mars has none as far as we know, and if there is

any life there at all, it’s microscopic and a long way from home. Earth has far

too many people and Mars has none!  ZERO POPULATION on Mars, only a

few robots so far, courtesy the US who have landed about five amazing robotic rovers and who currently plan to have people landed on Mars 19 or 20 years from now.  And WHY is that?

The population on Earth is now fast approaching 8 billion people, a huge proportion live in squalor, in terrible conditions, afflicted by the vagaries of climate and beset by illnesses such as Covid 19. The rovers on Mars have it pretty good, state of the art technology, no disease, and just a few issues relating to climate.

 

Earth has fires, floods, earthquakes and other volcanic action, but Mars is relatively quiet and stable, just a few issues relating to “weather”.

 

What are these issues? Well, dust storms for one. Micro-fine dust particles are powered by huge winds sometimes, ripping through the thin Martian atmosphere at incredible speed and covering all the wonderful solar panels and gear on the rovers with a microscopically fine dust.

Then there’s radiation. We on Earth get a lot of radiation from the Sun and from Space, but our atmosphere is very thick compared with Mars and it shields us from extremely large doses of radiation. We make up for lack of this “background radiation” by adding many other sources of extra radiation from electrical appliances, x-ray machines, all the way up to nuclear power plants which collapse as has occurred at Chernobyl and Fukushima. These events immersed locals in frightening levels of radiation and spread fear across neighbouring nations as we witnessed when the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl threatened Western Europe.

Then there’s lack of sunlight. Okay, there is sunlight on Mars, but it’s much weaker than on Earth. A practical way of viewing this is that it’s not only extremely cold for people to live there, but solar panels will take a lot longer to produce the same amount of electricity they might produce on Earth in an average location such as on any suburban rooftop.

But there’s something even more important than all these things… there’s very little water on Mars unless it’s hidden away in underground reserves such as cave lakes similar to our artesian basin water, or else “bound up in rocks” from which it will not be easy to squeeze even minute quantities of water. 

And there’s no free oxygen folks! There’s a very thin atmos of CO2. The US are conducting an experiment now with a little machine called MOXIE to strip off the O2 molecules from the C molecules, hoping to collect some small reserves of O2. 

 

Let’s put these last three parts together: weak sunlight, virtually no water, and no oxygen. Well okay, tiny amounts of hard-to-get-at water, and tiny volumes of oxygen. And what do these things amount to? Very little in the way of lifeforms... no trees, no shrubs, no grasses, no worms, no bugs and no humans, so far.

But let’s give a big shout out for the great thinkers of our age, thinking of what

“might be possible in the future”, “potential scenarios”, “colonising other planets”,

etc. 

JUST LIKE THIS:

It’s really beautiful isn’t it?

I do love it, I’m not joking, I’m serious, I just love it.

But it’s crazy!

I hate to be a naysayer, but this is simply crazy.

You see that little space person at the right of frame? He or she is probably a

gardener about to do a hard day’s work in the Martian greenhouse.

That beautiful little greenhouse is much larger and probably a lot heavier than Perseverance is.

It cost $2.7 BILLION US to land Perseverance on Mars. So I think a evenfew greenhouse pods up there on Mars, with just a few vehicles to service them and a few humans to be their gardeners and grow potatoes like Matt Damon did, well that's a very expensive exercise indeed. 

So what do you reckon it would cost to do some more elaborate like this:

It’s not as if we don’t have a few deserts on Earth which we could “green” a bit. At far less cost and with far greater benefit.

My friend Tom Cowan sent me this article about “regreening the Sinai”:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/mar/20/our-biggest-challenge-lack-of-imagination-the-scientists-turning-the-desert-green?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

   

“Van der Hoeven is a co-founder of the Weather Makers, a Dutch firm of “holistic engineers” with a plan to regreen the Sinai peninsula – the small triangle of land that connects Egypt to Asia. Within a couple of decades, the Weather Makers believe, the Sinai could be transformed from a hot, dry, barren desert into a green haven teeming with life: forests, wetlands, farming land, wild flora and fauna. A regreened Sinai would alter local weather patterns and even change the direction of the winds, bringing more rain, the Weather Makers believe – hence their name.’

 

However, it's not as though we are short of places which have become deserts on our Earth... we have many such places and some are ginormous. So why do we need to go to Mars to start greening a very large desert? Actually the desert on Mars is virtually the entire planet.

But here’s where I really want to take this discussion. There’s a wonderful 15 year old gal who has started a project to build a school in Madagascar.

“Maggie Grout hopes to help change that. Grout, a senior at the University of Colorado studying business management and entrepreneurship, started Thinking Huts, a nonprofit to build 3-D printed schools, when she was just 15 years old. Adopted from a rural village in China, she knew not all children had the privileges she had, and she wanted a way to help. She was inspired to turn to 3-D printing after conversations with her father, Harry Grout, one of the founders of MapQuest, about how to use technology for the greater good. Now Thinking Huts is poised to print its first school, in the African island nation of Madagascar. If successful, it will be the world’s first 3-D printed school.”

 

Isn‘t she beautiful. 

And such a great idea!

So young and such a visionary. 

And she has boundless enthusiasm.

Here’s one of the printers she hopes to use:

Here’s an image of one of the buildings she hopes to create:

And guess what? She has already raised about half of her $350,000 goal. 

Did you notice that is $350 Thousand, not $375 Million or $2.7 BILLION.

So I sent along my $50 as a small downpayment. Yes, it’s only 10 cappuccinos

or 10 lattes, right? It’s just a drop in the bucket and it is not going to change my

life in any way, but her project may change the lives of countless children who

live in Madagascar.

So that leads me to ask, whose lives are going to be changed by putting people

on Mars? These days it takes $2.7 BILLION to land a rover on Mars, and that

rover which is absolutely brilliant, I promise you I’m not against it, weighs only

about the same weight as a small car like my Barina or someone else’s Getz,

or Jazz. That rover is less than half the weight of a landcruiser or large 4 wheel

drive car.

Imagine what it would cost to start a little colony on Mars like this one:

Or this:

And here’s a picture which shows what they’ll have to do to prepare the buildings

for humans to live in before those people are landed on Mars, using robots like

this:

So, although I hate to be a naysayer and I do love this brilliant technology, I

simply have to ask WHY?

Why is it so difficult for this wonderful young girl Maggie Grout to raise $375,000to create a visionary project which will benefit numerous real people here on

Earth while it is so easy for Elon and NASA to spend BILLIONS or TRILLIONS

to settle people on Mars which is a TOXIC place, totally unfit for human habitation. 

WHY?

Couldn’t the people at NASA go without a few cups of coffee for a while?

Or you Elon? It’s only pocket money for you Elon. And you won’t have to watch

your rockets exploding on the launch pad wasting about $100 million each time

they fail becuse you don't need all those rockets going to Madagascar. 

After all, Maggie only needs you to give her project the equivalent of

approximately 35,000 cappuccinos! 

pt