Before finding this channel, "dang, it's only Thursday. I thought it was Friday already." After finding this channel,"dang, it's only Wednesday. I thought it was Arthursday." I love your content. I look forward to Thursdays now.
Seeing the title of this video and knowing that I get to hear him say, “Oorth” and “Maws.” Pure gold, as are his presentations. One of the best channels on TH-cam!
The nice thing about those Aldrin cyclers is that they can be repurposed as interplanetary cargo ships (if they last long enough) once an economy is established between Earth and Mars. Raw and other non-perishable goods can be moved back and forth for low energy and financial cost, much like is done with modern ocean liners today. Big ships, skeleton crew, slow pace riding the currents for guidance and a boost. The future equivalent of planes could meanwhile be used for time-sensitive shipments and passenger traffic.
Oh I have no expectation of something like that (the Aldrin cycler shipping lanes) being developed anytime soon, and likely not even this century as things currently go, but long term the possibility is there and makes sense to do so on multiple levels.
So I don't get the point of using the cyclers for transferring durable goods: Whether you use the cycler or not, the fuel cost to transport something is the same, because you either burn fuel to free-fly without the cycler, or you need to burn fuel to match the cycler's speed and then burn fuel to match the speed of the destination. What the cycler gives you is, for example the infrastructure of a habitat for keeping people alive. You only burn the fuel once for that infrastructure, to get it into the cycler's orbit, and if people re-use that infrastructure over and over, you burn fuel to move each group of people in/out of the cycler, but you only burned the infrastructure's fuel once, so eventually you are paying overall less. But for durable goods, they don't need the infrastructure of the cycler (hydrogen or machinery or whatever does not need oxygen, heat, and food), so why bother sending it thru the cycler? Using the cycler takes longer. Durable goods will be sent in the way that uses the least fuel, and then if there are two paths that are both the least fuel, durable goods will be sent the fastest of those. The "fastest of those" is NEVER the cycler.
I don't see why those castles would be empty any time, they're perfectly good rotating habitats, that just happen to have a very intense and regular tourist season. Kinda think the terms "city" or "town" would be more appropiate for rotating habitats, "habitat" and "station" sound so small and empty...
I was thinkin some research could be done on asteroids, both on the apoapsis segment and when inside Earth's orbit. You can see Earth crossing asteroids more easily from there.
@@vickas54 That may all deppend on wether it's more cost effective to turn an asteroid that's alreadh on a close enough orbit into a habitat, or build it on an already established drydock-like facility and move.it all the way to the proper orbit. I'm affraid that, until we get some manufacture going outside the earth, the equation for both options has more holes than actual data.
The Aldrin cyclers sound like an exaggerated form of those small towns which are really popular during tourist season and then mostly survive on the income reaped during that brief season. About five months on, about twenty off...yay. Some of the other possibilities listed on Wikipedia are even crazier. One has a transfer time of only 75 days, but an orbital period of about ten years and eight months. It has passengers less than 2% of the time. Children would grow up seeing only one "tourist season," spending the entire rest of their childhoods in cavernous, underpopulated passenger cabins. Tell me that doesn't sound like an awesome setting.
People would be getting on them every few months and then departing, only a few would be permanently there. They would be full almost always, but the community would be lasting only few months at a time before being swapped with another one. It would be interesting. Also in would mean when you're getting out on Mars, you already know everyone that's arriving with you.
But please just know that I truly enjoyed your videos I have always .will sometimes we might not see eye-to-eye but that's okay it just leave more room to explore LOL have an amazing day and God bless your friend always🌺🌺🌺
Good episode, good episode. The quick way to get mars up and running will be tunnels, natural or made. Spray-sealant any cracks, add your power source of choice, and you can grow-light the plants and subsequently bugs & fish, generate all the oxygen, recycle organic wastes back to fertilizer/food, and boom-boom you're sustainable. Might have to import a few tons of liquid ammonia, rich organic soil samples and mushroom spores to kick it off, but that's a small matter by comparison. Soil makes soil and that makes life from there. Composting is king. The great thing about setting up your own system is you can make every species one that is useful to your goals, directly or indirectly, concentrating the ecological output compared to earth. All you need to start is a tunnel with a slight tilt to let the water roll downhill on its own, and there are already "earth-ship" and "food-forest" techniques known for getting and keeping the biological engine running. Wastewater goes in the top, filters through the root-webs in the soil, sequesters in long tanks for your hydro-culture, another run of root-water filters, and gives you clean water at the end to drink or recirculate. The whole thing only has to be a few meters wide, and you can run them as far as you like. You could even have a system set up with the right microbes to break down the perchlorates from the native soil, and over a (long) period of time cleanse the whole planet of that issue. I'm thinking that atmospheric modification will also help with that. If mars has, or can be given by imports, enough water to form a hydro cycle, the dust will stay down and microbes can clean the water supply exponentially on their own. O'Neill cylinder ships could tug-boat a lot of very big chunks of solid nitrogen and other useful ices to drop on the far side of mars to rebuild the atmosphere. Pick a side, any side, and let the sun evaporate the ices on the other side to make your air. Anyway, if you must settle and terraform a planet, that's one way to do it, and to get it going as quickly as possible...
Hey Isaac, I’ve been watching for several years rarely saying anything in the comments. I can say that you have entertained and informed me and I thank you for that. I have noticed the changes in you speech impediment and I congratulate you on the improvement you have made with your speech therapy. Anyway just wanted to say thank you and hope that you will continue with your channel for years to come.
I recently discovered this channel, I listened to about a dozen videos or so, I must say I'm impressed. This is an amazing example of how intelligent, informed and creative one can be without ever breaking any accepted paradigms. In other words, this is the most meticulous and high magnification inspection of the inside of the proverbial box we're sometimes encouraged to think out of. Fascinating, I will eagerly continue to dig into this channel.
Aldrin Cyclers could have rotating crews, as well as dead-heading crews to and from Mars. They would make awesome observation platforms, esp cataloguing and transponder-tagging all the NEOs they come across.
For good or ill, I'm stuck st home in quarantine. Luckily, I have drink and a snack all ready and waiting for this! Time to explore another step in our future with SFIA
An Aldrin cycler repeats its journey every 26 months. It would make sense that it would be a commercial vessel and that there would be more than 1 ship in that fleet. It would also make sense that each ship could be a family or extended multi-family venture. And being in a stable orbit there would be no real limit to its size either. It would be interesting to see an episode on that subject.
Hydrogen to Mars was part of an ISRU plan when we weren't certain that there was accesible water. We're now fairly certain that even at the latitudes we're expecting to land, there's likely to be permafrost layers just under the surface that can be mined for water. Extracting it will take more equipment than bringing hydrogen from Earth, but as Issac Arthur effectively said, 'Go big or stay home!' Even so, the whole point of only taking hydrogen was to minimise outgoing mass. Ammoinia (NH3) is actually heavier than the methane (CH4) you would produce on Mars. Breaking it down would produce far more nitrogen than you'd need for life support.
@@calvingreene90 Doesn't invalidate my point. The reason you take hydrogen is because it's light. You just have to find a way to ensure it's storeable long term, which admittedly is a problem.
@@stainlesssteelfox1 I see a role for this nitrogen in growing veggies on site. Could we mark that as a little plus in the NH3 column on the white-board?
I kinda wish Isaac had mentioned Robert Zubrin's "Mars Direct" approach to colonizing Mars, and why he thinks the approach of building a lunar infrastructure makes more sense. I think we should at least build a rotating space station first, and test long-term closed-cycle life-support, and the effects of lower gravity (the Moon, Mars) on the human body. Also, make sure that spin-gravity doesn't have any side effects with long-term use.
Mars Direct, as originally envisioned, was too optimistic with its projections on margins and provisions and thus was unlikely to work as envisioned. This is the reason NASA basically threw it away. MIT also did a study way back about Mars One that showed that any early Mars colonization effort would be highly reliant on Earth on the near term due to the inability to build sufficient spare parts (do not underestimate the difficulty of rebuilding supply chains on a different planet). It also showed that bringing in food from Earth would cost less on the near term. In other words, any near term base will be highly dependant on Earth, and Mars is a bad place to build such a base. Eventually, you may be able to master the tech to make a base more sustainable, but you’re not going to try that on the different *planet* first, because that’s just....dumb. Remember that openings to get to Mars only occur every approx. 2 years as well. There’s also no economic incentive as to why you’d go Mars first. Other than tourism, Mars doesn’t have anything particularly special in economic terms. Venus is also better for terraforming. The idea of ‘Mars First’ (at least to Zubrin) is based off a singular focus on going to Mars, rather than taking a holistic approach of what the most practical way to expand into space is. You don’t run before you walk.
@@innosam123 Good points. I think that mining asteroids and building rotating settlements is the better way to go, because you can customize the right level of gravity, interior atmosphere, etc. instead of crossing fingers and hoping Lunar or Martian gravity, dust, contaminants, etc. won't be deadly. Plus you don't have to plunge into and climb back out of a gravity well. :)
@@kevincrady2831 Yep, but Lunar is also much closer to Earth and more diverse in mineral/resource concentration. So you have to weigh the cost/benefits of both. We don't focus much on human exploration of asteroids because it's hard to get political support for manned exploration of them (no cool geology). On the other hand, it's exceptionally easy to send robotic probes to asteroids with extensive instrument suites and capabilities (at least compared to everywhere else) and bring samples back from Asteroids.
Part of the appeal of a Mars First plan is the fact that if we have a three-step Orbit>Luna>Mars plan, there's a good chance that steps 2 and 3 will get cancelled or defunded and we'll be back to square one, or we'll waste time and resources on stuff that we don't need (e.g. Lunar Gateway). Then there's the idiots that don't know how astrophysics works and think we can use Luna as a pit stop between Earth and Mars.... But yeah, a moonbase is closer to Earth, and would be a good testbed. If we can survive the lack of atmosphere and minimal gravity and infertile razor glass regolith, Mars should be a cakewalk.
@@HowlingWolf518 And Mars’s soil is toxic. Lunar soil is not that hard to deal with. Just make sure everything that goes outside, stays outside. If you need to bring it inside, bring along a vacuum cleaner and make sure you get every spot. And you’ve basically proven my point about Zubrin; this is exactly his line of thinking. Why Mars? Why does it *have* to be Mars? Don’t ask how to get to Mars, ask how to get to *space*. And no, Lunar Gateway *is* useful. It holds provisions and is a stop point between the Moon and the Earth’s surface. It may eventually allow for refuelling once we get Lunar oxygen ISRU, (the H2 would be stored in Lunar Orbit) allowing for multiple ‘hops’ around the Moon’s surface. As it was intended to be for the near term by NASA, it would be a place to study deep space habitation (impossible on the ISS), and be a stopgap between the ISS and whatever comes next. Don’t underestimate the science on the ISS. Remember that NASA is a scientific agency. Yes, we *can* use Lunar (Space) as a pit stop between Earth and Mars. The rocket equation comes into play here. Smaller rockets are more efficient than larger ones due to the rocket equation, and stopping at DRLO allows you to use smaller rockets. Nobody is asking the mission to land on the Moon and get off again, that’s dumb. NASA also assumes manned missions using electric drives will go from CisLunar space to avoid the astronauts having to experience (and suffer the radiation from) the otherwise long spiral out of Earth Orbit. These are the baseline, since nuclear rockets aren’t getting built any time soon.
I agree this channel is not only a good escape into the world of possibilities that awaits us in the future... But as a person 1yr into the future of your comment the world is Clearly more Crazy Now than it was in Early 2021..I'm sure you would agree.. Sad as that is.. There is Hope Still We can Win this War ... Spread the Word of the Evil We Face 💉☠💉☠ and Hope our Friends and Families are Still Alive to see January 2023.. Peace is the Prise... Survival of Humanity is the Necessity.... Space Colony's are already being envisioned just Slower than we would like..
Question Everything - Thought Provoking Ideas That's a giood quote but I much more prefer Arthur C. Clark's Third "Law" Any sufficently advanced technology is indistinguisable from magic.
19:13 reality of 3D printers: while you can make an object some designed shape, you have no idea what its stress tolerances are-part strength depends on the spicific printer, its age, and state of maintenance
Finding water is at mid-latitudes will not be a problem at all. You don't have to go to the poles. There's a huge amount of massive, shallow subsurface ice in the Utopia Planitia and Arcadia Planitia regions. Heck, even much closer to the equator, the Martian soil is something like 4 or 5% disseminated ice.
@marios gianopoulos I think that won't be possible. Imagine you're in the shell, the gravitational force on you will be towards the planet and you will have to have orbital velocity which will give a centrifugal force away from the planet (these two forces balance each other to keep the shell in the orbit but also you will experiencing microgravity just like ISS).
I've been a proponent of the cylinder-first idea, because it gives you a safer place to live while developing or removing resources from the planet/asteroid. I do think it would be interesting to have mars as an earth 2.0 if it works out gravitationally. Drop enough solid nitrogen and ice chunks from the outer solar system on it, and mars could hold an atmosphere for a long time, and life forms could provide what it takes to terraform & greenhouse gas it on their own. Triton and various comets are good for this. That kind of planet-shaping is labor intensive and definitely needs big cylinder ships to manage, so I don't see anything else in the solar system that's worth trying it on. The rest of the asteroids, most moons, even venus are disposable to make ships, as far as I'm concerned. At least if some kind of trouble comes zooming through, ships can get out of the way. Planets are great as an ecological mass reservation, but they are also huge targets with a "kick me" sign on. All that considered, SpaceX is still going to have their mars colony, because they want to and they'll do it anyway by their own hand. The good news is that this could generate more willpower and use-cases to assemble some cylinder ships as well along the way. All we need is 1 refining/construction cylinder ship that can duplicate itself, and the rest of the fleet will inevitably follow. Just give us that 1 ship to start!
One minor point... the shuttle orbit just works for one leg being short - but you can choose that as either outbound or inbound. Multiples, you'd have the long leg for cargo and the short leg for passengers. Then the long leg could buffer passenger capacity for the short leg, allowing more passengers than could be sustainably supported.
@@sonarsphere I can't believe this video is going to kill me from Covid because I had the temerity to have a cookie and a glass of water. There should be more warning signs at the beginning of videos. Do you think they'll let me talk to TH-cam's manager?
I can hear it already. "Welcome, I'm Dr. Samuel Hadyen I'm the head of this facility. I think we can work together and resolve this problem in a way that benifits us both." *"Demonic presence at unsafe levels, lockdown in effect!"* But in all reality I'm praying we get to Mars soon.
Honestly, the castles sound like a great lifestyle. Infrequent bursts of admittedly intense work with a long time between them. A relatively small crew could easily pursue a life of study and hedonism. :)
@@Roxor128 Is it just me, or do Doom sound effects show up just about everywhere? I mean Doom sound effects. Doom 1. From the 90s. Seems like I hear them in shows and movies all the time....
@@corwinweber693 You're right. They do. Lots of Doom's sound effects came from, or are modified versions of, sound effects out of a couple of common libraries.
Martian regolith contains large amounts of perchlorate salts, which are a handy source of oxygen if needed in a pinch. And of course you can bake it out of the rocks if needed.
Off topic, but you should make a video about quantum entanglement being used for FTL. The general idea would be to use entanglement to create a form of faster-than-light communication, to digitally map humans brains to computers, and to use the aforementioned method of quantum communication to send that data from system to system to artificial "bodies." This would allow a form of transfer transit between systems, meaning humanity only really has to make an initial trip to a star in order to move between its colonized systems.
21:18 - I was just getting used to the clips of people in futuristic suits looking serious ... then this guy breaks the fourth wall !! What the heck was that? Why?
Some people just do not like anything....I'm thinking that laughing and feeling joy is something alien to them. Perhaps, they have clinical depression.
@@_nebulousthoughts If you're talking about cylinder/spinning habitats, yes, it works best to make them in opposing spin pairs to cancel out the wobbles (precession). For really high stability & safety, you can make them in 6-packs around a central core and wrap the whole thing in an outer shell. If you look at a piece of hex graph paper and see how 6 hexagons surround a 7th, that's the idea. You spin the cylinders in alternating directions, and the middle hex would have no spin gravity. Then things can't fly way off into space by accident, the outer skin takes the brunt of the micro-meteor damage, and you don't have to worry about the spinning cylinders getting scraped by passing shuttles etc. The zero-g central core is good for bulk storage, spaceport moorings, main engines & fuel for the whole thing, stuff like that.
Unless panspermia is a real thing and all life we encounter is very similar to ours, ALL alien life is a biohazard and humans will never be able to live in another planet's biosphere.
That wouldn't be much of a problem for living, actually. They are underground and thus they are already pretty well isolated. You simply place a highly capable filtration system on any well pump tapping into those lakes and you are good to go. Underground biohazards complicates deep subsurface work like mining. But even then we got ways to do it - such as robots.
@@yaldabaoth2 Not necessarily, it can go either way. While I can easily see alien microbes being toxic to Earth Life, it's entirely plausible that it's LESS likely to make us sick than our microbes if only from a lack of ability to chemically interact.
Millions of years exposed to raidation Mars is notihing but a BIO HAZZARDOUS waste landfill, but by then they should have a way of cleaing it up for human use
@@caslaBBalsac Yes and no. Not being able to interact with it, is what kills us. Who would win? This ultra-sophisticated 3 billion year old product of evolution will all kinds of nooks and crannies to fit infections into or this single cell amoeba that likes to digest the carbohydrates that make up your intestinal wall? Or your brain? You can't stop it because your T-cells don't know what the hell that is but it might just see food.
6:23 they can simply have a (spare) orbiting ship around Mars, ready to be controlled both from Earth or from the Mars surface. More or less like they keep life buoys by the harbours.
12:20 Every time I see this space station on this show I love it. For some reason, I just really like the way it looks and would want to live on it in particular.
Bernard Isosceles - it's a variation on the Stanford Torus. See NASA publication SP-413 available at large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/martelaro2/docs/nasa-sp-413.pdf and a few other places, such as space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/75SummerStudy/Design.html BTW the National Space Society is a dense website with LOTS of information. For instance, check out the NSS home page space.nss.org/ and especially space.nss.org/space-settlement-national-space-society/ and their space.nss.org/nss-roadmap-to-space-settlement-3rd-edition-2018-contents/ which Isaac quoted and provided the URL link.
another NASA publication on settlement and space habitats is SP-428 availabel at saintannsny.org/depart/computer/classes/spacol/articles/sp-428(1979_nasa+oneill).pdf
I love your science 🧬 so amazingly on point and inspiring although sometimes I get bored with all the details, I always go back and finish the videos. This information is so important for people that are feeling based orientated because dreams are just prayers without scientific method! Love your work Brother!!
@@willyreeves319 I got 15.23853 - so technically 15.238 is incorrect, as it rounds to 15.239. I too have not checked Brilliant though, so perhaps we are all way off :D
@@willyreeves319 hey guys, I've thought about it some more and came to a new result: 11.524 m/s The first time around I did not square the speed (because it doesn't matter at first, square of 1 is still 1). My formula is as follows (12/12)^(1/2) + (12/11)^(1/2) + ... +(12/4)^(1/2) = 11.525 m/s What do you thing
@@matth9103 my error was rounding at each step to 3 places and then adding - seems like a small error, but if you are off 1/1000th of a meter per sec for 500 sec you are gonna miss that handrail as it whizzes by you just out of reach :(
@@AlecJr21 yes i think so from E=M*S^2, because she isn't imparting speed she is imparting energy the result of that energy is all speed (no heat etc) good catch - still no word on whether that is enough to get her back to the station though. or the highly unlikeliness that she can accurately throw objects that each have 25% of her mass with the same force 9 consecutive times at precisely the same angle. she's still doomed
Creators of the game went with tech that was already known or proposed. There are only a handful of end-game techs that are sci-fi. For instance, "concrete extractor" building and concept from the start of the game is taken almost verbatim from the existing concept of regolith mining system for Luna. I think that the game is pretty crap though, management sim like hundreds of others just with a different make up - when they could have made it really mean something that you are on Mars.
@@Wustenfuchs109 If they made a game which reported the successful strategies used to meet in-game goals. Free entertainment for us, free research for them, clear path of advancement for mankind. Win, win, win situation.
:3 I smoke a bowl with my dad and watch your show, been doing it for 2yrs (we take the Carl Sagan route of enjoying life) , wonder what Mars weed is like?
Unicornul Sarvy - one bad thing about the time out and back is deteriation in micro-g . . . that can be avoided by artificial gravity from rotation. Two ships rotating about a common center using a one kilometer tether, rotating at one rpm will feel one g. During the trip out they can be slowed to Mars equivalant; on the trip back they can be gradually increased to Earth normal. Communication delay speed of light problem means no conversations in real time with people back home . . . just "video letters". News and entertainment will not be interactive, either, just "canned". And as Arthur says, *_in situ resource utilization_* will be necessary or the cargo will be insane.
@@michaelpettersson4919 - no, I was born when we had POTUS.FDR. If I can get to Longevity Eacape Velocity and then the Technological Singularity, then . . . maybe.
@@robertgraybeard3750 Communication delay mean no interplanetary chat going on. People will actually have time to write proper, well thought out and hopefully well spelled letters. Writing letters take time do you will have time to contemplate if you should write that letter at all. Perhaps we can look forward to a more civilized future? 😉
@@michaelpettersson4919 - indeed The U.S.A. was founded by "gentlemen of letters", they created a type of government that was truly a gift to humanity/civilization. The growth of science and technology stems from well writen, peer reviewed articles in journals. The Future will be interesting.
Mars is gonna be hard. Radiation, perchlorates, virtually no atmosphere, fractional gravity, insane cold, little water, and many minutes lag time to earth....
@marios gianopoulos even better a swarm of habitats, that dont have to have gravity or atmo either. Gravity only limits movenent and puts stress in infrastructure if your critters dont need it, and atmo the same, but can help in cooling so not that bad. Anyway thats very long down the way, it will start being on the surface and gradually doing orbotal stuff
Is there information on the upgraded MOXIE that's supposed to make 2kg O2 per hour? Would it really be able to manage that on the meager power output from a MMRTG?
Does he really? He does have the most aggressive PR for it, but in reality, who knows. They've just pushed back their roadmap 2 years a few days ago. And given the fact that SpaceX is NOT some company with REAL capital value but depends mostly on investor capital (that can melt away in a single night if someone so chooses), who knows really. Apart from pioneering modern reusable rockets, SpaceX is not really top of the pile. Going to Mars takes more than rockets - a whole slue of fields outside of SpaceX's work. Also, takes money. To be fair, if USA decided not to fund its military for one year in 1980's, or lower the budget for 10% for 10 years (more realistic option), you'd have a man on Mars in that decade. Because the tech was there - instead of one ship, people proposed a convoy of ships for living, supply, fuel and so on, assembled in Earth's orbit and then sent to Mars. In similar way that MIR and ISS were constructed. But no one would throw away all that money. Humans could have done it... it would have been expensive though. And while it is less expensive today, it still is, especially if you want to go with a single rocket there and back again. So, SpaceX... who knows. They are one big X, an unknown. They could have a huge success... or they could fall apart within a month. I mean, a few fucked up tweets from Musk, money backs away, they have a crisis or two, the company is pretty much done. Remember what happened with Tesla and the damage control they had to do in order to prevent the company from tanking?
@@Wustenfuchs109 I wouldn't bet against Musk. You're forgetting the Starlink project which is putting 60 sats a week into a planet-wide internet from orbit system which is already providing the US with speeds greater than most terrestrial internet - and it's still in Alpha testing (by the end of deployment, the constellation will provide gigabit internet beating private trading fiber cables - for all of the Earth). That service alone will eclipse revenue for the rest of SpaceX's launch contracts. More than enough for a Mars project. It should eclipse annual revenue of the Apollo program (in it's entirety). Tesla motors is doing beyond fine. With their battery program and advance orders they're poised to rival the largest auto makers on the planet - and more. Just one of their cars sells more than all the luxury 4 doors - combined. This year.
@@mgabrysSF I am not a betting man, that's for someone who doesn't know math. And I am not forgetting anything. Starlink is not an open program and it would have a very limited user base due to its cost. And no, its speed is not going to "eclipse" anything, it's advantage on the market is latency which will be lowered by a few milliseconds, which is only important for major international financial institutions. You should familiarize yourself more with the project. Yes, it will bring quite some revenue... as long as it works, keeps working, and people decide to use it instead of standard internet connection. Which is a lot of "if". That being said, Starlink constellation is a disaster for orbit, pure and simple. Not to mention that a single glitch can singlehandedly bring about Kessler Syndrome with that amount of satellites up there. As for Tesla, yes, they are working well once again, once the damage control was done, company went public and Musk taken out of the important loop. But that is all besides the point - which was, American millionaires and billionaires rarely have even a fraction of their supposed wealth in something realistic and it all depends on the good will of some other entities if their wealth is kept, declines or grows. We have seen gigantic companies in USA fail over night, for stupid reasons. SpaceX or Amazon's program can all end up in a gutter. Tomorrow a government decides that Amazon is long overdue for its taxes and added to that decides to enforce anti-monopoly laws that it currently neglects - Amazon falls like a house of cards. Will it do it? Probably not. Or, maybe it will. Who knows. I am just pointing out that wealth is a relative term in USA and projects that depend on it should not be sanctified like they currently are. That is why large, expensive and long term projects are everywhere conducted by governments, not private investors. That being said, Musk got shitloads of help from that same government and his program, especially SpaceX, is as private as a Chinese Space Agency.
I think the real reason (who the frak are the trolls answering you?) is because on a video like this, saying, "The first mars base will be whatever the heck SpaceX feels like doing" takes out most of the fun and almost all of the discussion. It's more fun to pretend that there is going to be some actual debate to be had about it. Truth is, even for SpaceX, if they are going to be starting on their current 2024/2026 projected schedule, then they will simply have to do whatever can be put together at launch time, then work for improvements on subsequent trips. It won't be a debate so much as a scramble to innovate first possible solutions for setting up the in-situ base.
Quick question: the feasability of a RF-accelerated plasma engine(like the VASIMR) that uses plasma as a propellant? I've heard rumblings in the past couple years but nothing concrete, and was wondering if you might cover it as a potential method of faster travel to mars/the belt.
Earthlings.. "We trashed our planet so we brought our predilection for arrogance and self-supposed superiority to your planet". Give us a few years, we'll have a trash heap as big as Olympus Mons.
@@calvingreene90 Their argument wasn't that different from Elon's, actually. They thought saving their soul was important enough to justify horrendous torture and death, even if the odds of converting them was low.
Interesting Video. One Additional Solution for the Water Problem, could be the Colonization of the Moons of Jupiter and Saturn, when the Mars Settlements are consolidated. Just a thought, because of the Water, and you can Trade it.
Although space is almost a true vacuum, it does have something that can cause drag, especially on a large area. Another thought is inertia. Try starting a battleship to move by pulling on a cable.
I like your version of what is essentially the delta glider from Orbiter, but that docking port seems unrealistic. The DG has its docking port in the nose cone.
To become an interplanetary species, we don't NEED to colonize any of those other planets.... ....we could always build one! *gets a power drill and a crazy expression*
A think a good starting point for manned missions to Mars could be a mission not to the planet itself, but to its moons Phobos and Deimos. Staying up there collecting samples and doing other things until the next launch window back to Earth
Will most water ice be mixed with dust ,dirt and rock debris that will make it difficult to access and filter for drinking ? I’m also wondering what other possible contaminates could be present in different water ice across the solar system and universe possibly things we have no knowledge of ?
Sitting in my car at 22:10 EST on 10/22 staring at Mars out of my driver side window while listening to this. Its sooo far away. So small in the sky. Insanity must be kept in check for long haulers headed to Mars. I fear this will be a huge obstacle.
There is a 3d printer on the ISS. They used it to print a torque wrench to fix some issue. You can download the file for it and print one yourself if you have a 3d printer (there are quite a few decent ones under $500, and even under $300).
How big or how many current Ion drives would be required to produce 1g of thrust? I understand that current ion drives only give a few Newton’s of thrust. But if mass wasn’t the issue. Could it be possible to make an ion drive large enough?
I don't know the exact answer for a given model, but you also have to consider that ion drives tend to use rare and expensive materials, so they may not be so good for massive propulsion. I think xenon gas or equivalent is a typical fuel for ion drives, so trying to pay for (or even find) many tons of that for each rocket mission would be prohibitively expensive, if even possible.
I don't think that the first people to visit Mars should expect to return - it puts too many constraints on the Mission profile. However, if the Martian society develops fast enough, then this could become plausible!
Very good episode, goes in hand with latest talk about Mars and interest in mission to it... as far as i heard at the earliest ( and thats if everything goes really really well ) ..spaceX would be able to send unmanned starship at 2024 window.. and if that goes well possibly manned one at 2026 or 2029 window. Also.. i dont get why going to Mars needs much energy, looking at orbits..it seems like you just hold onto momentum you have from Earth, by lanching from there, and expend energy to elongate your orbit to cross Mars's orbit and then basically break whole time to catch up with Mars just in time. I mean it seems like for going to Mars you dont even need to have classic speed up.. then brake to get to your destination... because you are going faster then Mars by default by just being on Earth.
Before finding this channel, "dang, it's only Thursday. I thought it was Friday already."
After finding this channel,"dang, it's only Wednesday. I thought it was Arthursday."
I love your content. I look forward to Thursdays now.
Seeing the title of this video and knowing that I get to hear him say, “Oorth” and “Maws.” Pure gold, as are his presentations. One of the best channels on TH-cam!
The nice thing about those Aldrin cyclers is that they can be repurposed as interplanetary cargo ships (if they last long enough) once an economy is established between Earth and Mars. Raw and other non-perishable goods can be moved back and forth for low energy and financial cost, much like is done with modern ocean liners today. Big ships, skeleton crew, slow pace riding the currents for guidance and a boost. The future equivalent of planes could meanwhile be used for time-sensitive shipments and passenger traffic.
While yes this is true; it wont happen fluently in our lifetime
Although you could wait until neuralink is released and 5ransfer your mind t0 an AI
Oh I have no expectation of something like that (the Aldrin cycler shipping lanes) being developed anytime soon, and likely not even this century as things currently go, but long term the possibility is there and makes sense to do so on multiple levels.
So I don't get the point of using the cyclers for transferring durable goods: Whether you use the cycler or not, the fuel cost to transport something is the same, because you either burn fuel to free-fly without the cycler, or you need to burn fuel to match the cycler's speed and then burn fuel to match the speed of the destination.
What the cycler gives you is, for example the infrastructure of a habitat for keeping people alive. You only burn the fuel once for that infrastructure, to get it into the cycler's orbit, and if people re-use that infrastructure over and over, you burn fuel to move each group of people in/out of the cycler, but you only burned the infrastructure's fuel once, so eventually you are paying overall less.
But for durable goods, they don't need the infrastructure of the cycler (hydrogen or machinery or whatever does not need oxygen, heat, and food), so why bother sending it thru the cycler? Using the cycler takes longer. Durable goods will be sent in the way that uses the least fuel, and then if there are two paths that are both the least fuel, durable goods will be sent the fastest of those. The "fastest of those" is NEVER the cycler.
@@ThanoSalt gl with your neuralink delusions
I don't see why those castles would be empty any time, they're perfectly good rotating habitats, that just happen to have a very intense and regular tourist season.
Kinda think the terms "city" or "town" would be more appropiate for rotating habitats, "habitat" and "station" sound so small and empty...
I was thinkin some research could be done on asteroids, both on the apoapsis segment and when inside Earth's orbit. You can see Earth crossing asteroids more easily from there.
@@vickas54 That may all deppend on wether it's more cost effective to turn an asteroid that's alreadh on a close enough orbit into a habitat, or build it on an already established drydock-like facility and move.it all the way to the proper orbit.
I'm affraid that, until we get some manufacture going outside the earth, the equation for both options has more holes than actual data.
The Aldrin cyclers sound like an exaggerated form of those small towns which are really popular during tourist season and then mostly survive on the income reaped during that brief season. About five months on, about twenty off...yay.
Some of the other possibilities listed on Wikipedia are even crazier. One has a transfer time of only 75 days, but an orbital period of about ten years and eight months. It has passengers less than 2% of the time. Children would grow up seeing only one "tourist season," spending the entire rest of their childhoods in cavernous, underpopulated passenger cabins.
Tell me that doesn't sound like an awesome setting.
People would be getting on them every few months and then departing, only a few would be permanently there. They would be full almost always, but the community would be lasting only few months at a time before being swapped with another one. It would be interesting. Also in would mean when you're getting out on Mars, you already know everyone that's arriving with you.
That 2kg per hour figure is INCREDIBLY IMPRESSIVE. Hats off to the brilliant folks working on this tech.
But please just know that I truly enjoyed your videos I have always .will sometimes we might not see eye-to-eye but that's okay it just leave more room to explore LOL have an amazing day and God bless your friend always🌺🌺🌺
The IRSU, correct?
@@lilab.stevenson7609 get over yourself
@@spacexvanityprojectslimite3315 What’d it say before it was edited?
Good episode, good episode.
The quick way to get mars up and running will be tunnels, natural or made. Spray-sealant any cracks, add your power source of choice, and you can grow-light the plants and subsequently bugs & fish, generate all the oxygen, recycle organic wastes back to fertilizer/food, and boom-boom you're sustainable.
Might have to import a few tons of liquid ammonia, rich organic soil samples and mushroom spores to kick it off, but that's a small matter by comparison. Soil makes soil and that makes life from there. Composting is king. The great thing about setting up your own system is you can make every species one that is useful to your goals, directly or indirectly, concentrating the ecological output compared to earth.
All you need to start is a tunnel with a slight tilt to let the water roll downhill on its own, and there are already "earth-ship" and "food-forest" techniques known for getting and keeping the biological engine running.
Wastewater goes in the top, filters through the root-webs in the soil, sequesters in long tanks for your hydro-culture, another run of root-water filters, and gives you clean water at the end to drink or recirculate. The whole thing only has to be a few meters wide, and you can run them as far as you like.
You could even have a system set up with the right microbes to break down the perchlorates from the native soil, and over a (long) period of time cleanse the whole planet of that issue. I'm thinking that atmospheric modification will also help with that. If mars has, or can be given by imports, enough water to form a hydro cycle, the dust will stay down and microbes can clean the water supply exponentially on their own.
O'Neill cylinder ships could tug-boat a lot of very big chunks of solid nitrogen and other useful ices to drop on the far side of mars to rebuild the atmosphere. Pick a side, any side, and let the sun evaporate the ices on the other side to make your air.
Anyway, if you must settle and terraform a planet, that's one way to do it, and to get it going as quickly as possible...
Hey Isaac, I’ve been watching for several years rarely saying anything in the comments. I can say that you have entertained and informed me and I thank you for that. I have noticed the changes in you speech impediment and I congratulate you on the improvement you have made with your speech therapy. Anyway just wanted to say thank you and hope that you will continue with your channel for years to come.
I recently discovered this channel, I listened to about a dozen videos or so, I must say I'm impressed. This is an amazing example of how intelligent, informed and creative one can be without ever breaking any accepted paradigms. In other words, this is the most meticulous and high magnification inspection of the inside of the proverbial box we're sometimes encouraged to think out of. Fascinating, I will eagerly continue to dig into this channel.
The "Outward Bound" and "Upward Bound" series on this channel is awesome if you like thinking space development. I think it's a playlist.
Aldrin Cyclers could have rotating crews, as well as dead-heading crews to and from Mars. They would make awesome observation platforms, esp cataloguing and transponder-tagging all the NEOs they come across.
"Demonic presence at high levels. Lockdown in effect."
lol RIP, and you're there without weapons
@@JonathanS89 rip and tear
For good or ill, I'm stuck st home in quarantine. Luckily, I have drink and a snack all ready and waiting for this! Time to explore another step in our future with SFIA
Gotta start making a special snack for ArThursday
I have my drink and a pizza in the oven.
Mars: "Don't say it, don't say it...!"
Earth: "ON YOUR LEFT!"
An Aldrin cycler repeats its journey every 26 months. It would make sense that it would be a commercial vessel and that there would be more than 1 ship in that fleet. It would also make sense that each ship could be a family or extended multi-family venture. And being in a stable orbit there would be no real limit to its size either. It would be interesting to see an episode on that subject.
Assuming that you are shipping hydrogen to Mars I would actually bring ammonia as it is far easier to hold onto ammonia and it also contains nitrogen.
oh, wow, that's actually a great idea!
Hydrogen to Mars was part of an ISRU plan when we weren't certain that there was accesible water. We're now fairly certain that even at the latitudes we're expecting to land, there's likely to be permafrost layers just under the surface that can be mined for water. Extracting it will take more equipment than bringing hydrogen from Earth, but as Issac Arthur effectively said, 'Go big or stay home!'
Even so, the whole point of only taking hydrogen was to minimise outgoing mass. Ammoinia (NH3) is actually heavier than the methane (CH4) you would produce on Mars. Breaking it down would produce far more nitrogen than you'd need for life support.
@@stainlesssteelfox1
You can freeze ammonia at temperatures that methane won't liquefy at. That can be useful.
@@calvingreene90 Doesn't invalidate my point. The reason you take hydrogen is because it's light. You just have to find a way to ensure it's storeable long term, which admittedly is a problem.
@@stainlesssteelfox1 I see a role for this nitrogen in growing veggies on site. Could we mark that as a little plus in the NH3 column on the white-board?
Not a particularly smart or insightful comment, but I love how you pronounce "Mars."
“Mawz”
Would build base just bc this
It's got the cursed r letter
In Isaac's inevitable space empire, we'll abolish the letter R from the alphabet
@@coalnel I would transcribe it as Mau'wwz like it's a planet from Frank Herbert's Dune universe
I kinda wish Isaac had mentioned Robert Zubrin's "Mars Direct" approach to colonizing Mars, and why he thinks the approach of building a lunar infrastructure makes more sense. I think we should at least build a rotating space station first, and test long-term closed-cycle life-support, and the effects of lower gravity (the Moon, Mars) on the human body. Also, make sure that spin-gravity doesn't have any side effects with long-term use.
Mars Direct, as originally envisioned, was too optimistic with its projections on margins and provisions and thus was unlikely to work as envisioned. This is the reason NASA basically threw it away.
MIT also did a study way back about Mars One that showed that any early Mars colonization effort would be highly reliant on Earth on the near term due to the inability to build sufficient spare parts (do not underestimate the difficulty of rebuilding supply chains on a different planet). It also showed that bringing in food from Earth would cost less on the near term.
In other words, any near term base will be highly dependant on Earth, and Mars is a bad place to build such a base. Eventually, you may be able to master the tech to make a base more sustainable, but you’re not going to try that on the different *planet* first, because that’s just....dumb.
Remember that openings to get to Mars only occur every approx. 2 years as well.
There’s also no economic incentive as to why you’d go Mars first. Other than tourism, Mars doesn’t have anything particularly special in economic terms. Venus is also better for terraforming.
The idea of ‘Mars First’ (at least to Zubrin) is based off a singular focus on going to Mars, rather than taking a holistic approach of what the most practical way to expand into space is. You don’t run before you walk.
@@innosam123 Good points. I think that mining asteroids and building rotating settlements is the better way to go, because you can customize the right level of gravity, interior atmosphere, etc. instead of crossing fingers and hoping Lunar or Martian gravity, dust, contaminants, etc. won't be deadly. Plus you don't have to plunge into and climb back out of a gravity well. :)
@@kevincrady2831 Yep, but Lunar is also much closer to Earth and more diverse in mineral/resource concentration. So you have to weigh the cost/benefits of both.
We don't focus much on human exploration of asteroids because it's hard to get political support for manned exploration of them (no cool geology). On the other hand, it's exceptionally easy to send robotic probes to asteroids with extensive instrument suites and capabilities (at least compared to everywhere else) and bring samples back from Asteroids.
Part of the appeal of a Mars First plan is the fact that if we have a three-step Orbit>Luna>Mars plan, there's a good chance that steps 2 and 3 will get cancelled or defunded and we'll be back to square one, or we'll waste time and resources on stuff that we don't need (e.g. Lunar Gateway). Then there's the idiots that don't know how astrophysics works and think we can use Luna as a pit stop between Earth and Mars....
But yeah, a moonbase is closer to Earth, and would be a good testbed. If we can survive the lack of atmosphere and minimal gravity and infertile razor glass regolith, Mars should be a cakewalk.
@@HowlingWolf518 And Mars’s soil is toxic.
Lunar soil is not that hard to deal with. Just make sure everything that goes outside, stays outside. If you need to bring it inside, bring along a vacuum cleaner and make sure you get every spot.
And you’ve basically proven my point about Zubrin; this is exactly his line of thinking. Why Mars? Why does it *have* to be Mars?
Don’t ask how to get to Mars, ask how to get to *space*.
And no, Lunar Gateway *is* useful. It holds provisions and is a stop point between the Moon and the Earth’s surface. It may eventually allow for refuelling once we get Lunar oxygen ISRU, (the H2 would be stored in Lunar Orbit) allowing for multiple ‘hops’ around the Moon’s surface.
As it was intended to be for the near term by NASA, it would be a place to study deep space habitation (impossible on the ISS), and be a stopgap between the ISS and whatever comes next. Don’t underestimate the science on the ISS. Remember that NASA is a scientific agency.
Yes, we *can* use Lunar (Space) as a pit stop between Earth and Mars. The rocket equation comes into play here. Smaller rockets are more efficient than larger ones due to the rocket equation, and stopping at DRLO allows you to use smaller rockets. Nobody is asking the mission to land on the Moon and get off again, that’s dumb.
NASA also assumes manned missions using electric drives will go from CisLunar space to avoid the astronauts having to experience (and suffer the radiation from) the otherwise long spiral out of Earth Orbit. These are the baseline, since nuclear rockets aren’t getting built any time soon.
Thank you Issac for being an island of solace and peace from madness, just when the world is at peak crazy.
I agree this channel is not only a good escape into the world of possibilities that awaits us in the future...
But as a person 1yr into the future of your comment the world is Clearly more Crazy Now than it was in Early 2021..I'm sure you would agree..
Sad as that is..
There is Hope Still We can Win this War ...
Spread the Word of the Evil We Face 💉☠💉☠ and Hope our Friends and Families are Still Alive to see January 2023..
Peace is the Prise...
Survival of Humanity is the Necessity....
Space Colony's are already being envisioned just Slower than we would like..
Praise the Omnisshiah, for He has revealed to us, through His prophet Isaac, our Holy Land!
Can't wait for my mechadendrite. I can finally scratch that spot on my back.
I though Isaac's TH-cams were non-Prophet!
Can't wait to worship my toaster!
Yes! Praise the Omnissiah!
So... Dibs on Fabricator General!
“Without science, everything is a miracle.”
-- Lawrence Krauss
I'd say everything is a miracle with science or not. The more you learn, the more miraculous everything seems.
The ordinary is never a miracle.
@@DenGuleBalje - "The more you learn, the more you learn there's more to learn"
Question Everything - Thought Provoking Ideas
That's a giood quote but I much more prefer Arthur C. Clark's Third "Law"
Any sufficently advanced technology is indistinguisable from magic.
How many scientists agree on this? LOL..
Upward and Outward bound always my favourite by far, and that intro music is just icing on the cake.
I'm getting closer to finishing my degree in geology, and hopefully I can use it on Mars one day.
I hope you can too. My generation wasted time.
Specialize in radio spectrometry for satellite prospecting or soil engineering if you really want to go there.
19:13 reality of 3D printers: while you can make an object some designed shape, you have no idea what its stress tolerances are-part strength depends on the spicific printer, its age, and state of maintenance
i am a simple man, i see an SFIA video i press the like button
I wait until I've watched it, but I can't remember if any of them ever failed to live up to the quality requirements.
Finding water is at mid-latitudes will not be a problem at all. You don't have to go to the poles. There's a huge amount of massive, shallow subsurface ice in the Utopia Planitia and Arcadia Planitia regions.
Heck, even much closer to the equator, the Martian soil is something like 4 or 5% disseminated ice.
Reject terraforming, embrace the cylinder.
Large rock bad, tin can good.
@@merrittanimation7721
High Brow Space Politics right there.
Cylinder's first, terraforming for holiday's later
@marios gianopoulos I think that won't be possible. Imagine you're in the shell, the gravitational force on you will be towards the planet and you will have to have orbital velocity which will give a centrifugal force away from the planet (these two forces balance each other to keep the shell in the orbit but also you will experiencing microgravity just like ISS).
I've been a proponent of the cylinder-first idea, because it gives you a safer place to live while developing or removing resources from the planet/asteroid. I do think it would be interesting to have mars as an earth 2.0 if it works out gravitationally.
Drop enough solid nitrogen and ice chunks from the outer solar system on it, and mars could hold an atmosphere for a long time, and life forms could provide what it takes to terraform & greenhouse gas it on their own. Triton and various comets are good for this.
That kind of planet-shaping is labor intensive and definitely needs big cylinder ships to manage, so I don't see anything else in the solar system that's worth trying it on. The rest of the asteroids, most moons, even venus are disposable to make ships, as far as I'm concerned.
At least if some kind of trouble comes zooming through, ships can get out of the way. Planets are great as an ecological mass reservation, but they are also huge targets with a "kick me" sign on.
All that considered, SpaceX is still going to have their mars colony, because they want to and they'll do it anyway by their own hand. The good news is that this could generate more willpower and use-cases to assemble some cylinder ships as well along the way.
All we need is 1 refining/construction cylinder ship that can duplicate itself, and the rest of the fleet will inevitably follow. Just give us that 1 ship to start!
What about dropships that once they land, are your buildings to start your base?
15:23
For those of you confused by the not-standard units, one Tennessee is equal to approximately 34.8 Rhode Islands....
One minor point... the shuttle orbit just works for one leg being short - but you can choose that as either outbound or inbound. Multiples, you'd have the long leg for cargo and the short leg for passengers. Then the long leg could buffer passenger capacity for the short leg, allowing more passengers than could be sustainably supported.
Drink and snack ready.
😀
Snacking = obesity = death from COVID.
@@sonarsphere I can't believe this video is going to kill me from Covid because I had the temerity to have a cookie and a glass of water. There should be more warning signs at the beginning of videos. Do you think they'll let me talk to TH-cam's manager?
It's a 25 minute video, you shouldn't need a drink and a snack to get through it, control yourself.
@@rollieroulston I'm a simple man. If I see an Isaac Arthur video, I get a drink and snack ready as is custom.
Thanks Isaac, l love (really, really love) hearing you speak on all things Mars!
More please! 😍😍😍
I can hear it already. "Welcome, I'm Dr. Samuel Hadyen I'm the head of this facility. I think we can work together and resolve this problem in a way that benifits us both." *"Demonic presence at unsafe levels, lockdown in effect!"*
But in all reality I'm praying we get to Mars soon.
I had no idea how interested I was in this, until I was 11 videos in and still watching, damn man. Thanks for the information and entertainment!
you gotta love an addition to the upward bound series
Honestly, the castles sound like a great lifestyle. Infrequent bursts of admittedly intense work with a long time between them. A relatively small crew could easily pursue a life of study and hedonism. :)
Shotgun: Check, Chainsaw: check, Drink: check, Snack: Check.
Heh. I was watching a video about Doom's sound effects before I started on this one.
@Erik I'm saving Mermaider for the next ocean world video.
@@flamingtp4947 everyone is a badass until the Doom Slayer shows up.
@@Roxor128 Is it just me, or do Doom sound effects show up just about everywhere? I mean Doom sound effects. Doom 1. From the 90s. Seems like I hear them in shows and movies all the time....
@@corwinweber693 You're right. They do. Lots of Doom's sound effects came from, or are modified versions of, sound effects out of a couple of common libraries.
Martian regolith contains large amounts of perchlorate salts, which are a handy source of oxygen if needed in a pinch. And of course you can bake it out of the rocks if needed.
As mark watney would’ve said “Let’s science the shit out of this”
Off topic, but you should make a video about quantum entanglement being used for FTL. The general idea would be to use entanglement to create a form of faster-than-light communication, to digitally map humans brains to computers, and to use the aforementioned method of quantum communication to send that data from system to system to artificial "bodies." This would allow a form of transfer transit between systems, meaning humanity only really has to make an initial trip to a star in order to move between its colonized systems.
Mention about 3D printing so long as we have the blueprint... *whistles nervously thinking of Warhammer STCs*
Don't worry, we'll have at least a few hundred thousand years of prosperity before anything bad happens.
@@werewolf4358 tfw no Warp.
This is just about the only channel I've kept up with. Great stuff.
I'm not about to do the math but ill just say she gets lighter as she throws rocks and thus gets more change in her own velocity as she throws them.
Love your videos. They are awesome. Great job! Pro Mars! Liked and subscribed!
Just gonna go ahead pre-like and share. I'll come back and listen after work haha
21:18 - I was just getting used to the clips of people in futuristic suits looking serious ... then this guy breaks the fourth wall !! What the heck was that? Why?
“A Cycle of Castles” - there is a novel in here somewhere....
I really like the Upward Bound theme 👍
I often wonder who dislikes SFIA videos
Flat earthers and technophobes.
Some people just do not like anything....I'm thinking that laughing and feeling joy is something alien to them. Perhaps, they have clinical depression.
Luddite and primitivists
I'm really looking forward to the episode schedule lineup for the next two months! Good episode on Mars Base Isaac!
When I see that spinning cycler I think of that spinning wing nut on Veritasium. Would not be fun if it flipped.
I think that effect could be countered by 2 counter rotating rings?
@@_nebulousthoughts If you're talking about cylinder/spinning habitats, yes, it works best to make them in opposing spin pairs to cancel out the wobbles (precession). For really high stability & safety, you can make them in 6-packs around a central core and wrap the whole thing in an outer shell.
If you look at a piece of hex graph paper and see how 6 hexagons surround a 7th, that's the idea. You spin the cylinders in alternating directions, and the middle hex would have no spin gravity.
Then things can't fly way off into space by accident, the outer skin takes the brunt of the micro-meteor damage, and you don't have to worry about the spinning cylinders getting scraped by passing shuttles etc. The zero-g central core is good for bulk storage, spaceport moorings, main engines & fuel for the whole thing, stuff like that.
Awesome episode, Isaac & fantastic music at the end of the video 😃
The outro sounds like the audio's been stacked and offset by a fraction of a second. Also sounds like Arthur's saying, "whatever" at the very end. lol
I heard "one of our"
;) i heard his wife saying,''enough!''
Thanks IA for continuing to provide such excellent content. This is truly one of the top channels, and you are one of the best creators.
With the *confirmation* of Martian Underwater Lakes let us hopes that those Lakes doesn't include potential *biohazardous* threats
Unless panspermia is a real thing and all life we encounter is very similar to ours, ALL alien life is a biohazard and humans will never be able to live in another planet's biosphere.
That wouldn't be much of a problem for living, actually. They are underground and thus they are already pretty well isolated. You simply place a highly capable filtration system on any well pump tapping into those lakes and you are good to go.
Underground biohazards complicates deep subsurface work like mining. But even then we got ways to do it - such as robots.
@@yaldabaoth2 Not necessarily, it can go either way. While I can easily see alien microbes being toxic to Earth Life, it's entirely plausible that it's LESS likely to make us sick than our microbes if only from a lack of ability to chemically interact.
Millions of years exposed to raidation Mars is notihing but a BIO HAZZARDOUS waste landfill, but by then they should have a way of cleaing it up for human use
@@caslaBBalsac Yes and no. Not being able to interact with it, is what kills us. Who would win? This ultra-sophisticated 3 billion year old product of evolution will all kinds of nooks and crannies to fit infections into or this single cell amoeba that likes to digest the carbohydrates that make up your intestinal wall? Or your brain? You can't stop it because your T-cells don't know what the hell that is but it might just see food.
6:23 they can simply have a (spare) orbiting ship around Mars, ready to be controlled both from Earth or from the Mars surface. More or less like they keep life buoys by the harbours.
Would love to see Isaac go on the Lex Fridman Podcast
12:20 Every time I see this space station on this show I love it. For some reason, I just really like the way it looks and would want to live on it in particular.
Bernard Isosceles
- it's a variation on the Stanford Torus. See NASA publication SP-413 available at large.stanford.edu/courses/2016/ph240/martelaro2/docs/nasa-sp-413.pdf
and a few other places, such as space.nss.org/settlement/nasa/75SummerStudy/Design.html BTW the National Space Society is a dense website with LOTS of information.
For instance, check out the NSS home page space.nss.org/ and especially space.nss.org/space-settlement-national-space-society/ and their
space.nss.org/nss-roadmap-to-space-settlement-3rd-edition-2018-contents/ which Isaac quoted and provided the URL link.
another NASA publication on settlement and space habitats is SP-428 availabel at
saintannsny.org/depart/computer/classes/spacol/articles/sp-428(1979_nasa+oneill).pdf
the basic types of space habitats is illustrated in SP-413 with Figure 4-2
dumbell, torus, and cylinder with hemispherical ends
Send me a ticket when they get high-speed internet.
there will be high lag internet from earth
@@Discount_Friendly 5 to 20 minute ping times lol
@@Minecraft_at_Night still about 2-3s of ping
Well elon musk is going to set up starlink on mars
The only thing high speed about living on Mars will be death.
I love your science 🧬 so amazingly on point and inspiring although sometimes I get bored with all the details, I always go back and finish the videos. This information is so important for people that are feeling based orientated because dreams are just prayers without scientific method! Love your work Brother!!
It's 15.24 m/s right? If this is correct I gotta send a gift basket to my math teacher from 7 years ago 😂
i got 15.238 (so just a different rounding point) - didn't check either tho lol
@@willyreeves319 I got 15.23853 - so technically 15.238 is incorrect, as it rounds to 15.239. I too have not checked Brilliant though, so perhaps we are all way off :D
@@willyreeves319 hey guys, I've thought about it some more and came to a new result: 11.524 m/s
The first time around I did not square the speed (because it doesn't matter at first, square of 1 is still 1).
My formula is as follows
(12/12)^(1/2) + (12/11)^(1/2) + ... +(12/4)^(1/2) = 11.525 m/s
What do you thing
@@matth9103 my error was rounding at each step to 3 places and then adding - seems like a small error, but if you are off 1/1000th of a meter per sec for 500 sec you are gonna miss that handrail as it whizzes by you just out of reach :(
@@AlecJr21 yes i think so from E=M*S^2, because she isn't imparting speed she is imparting energy the result of that energy is all speed (no heat etc) good catch - still no word on whether that is enough to get her back to the station though. or the highly unlikeliness that she can accurately throw objects that each have 25% of her mass with the same force 9 consecutive times at precisely the same angle. she's still doomed
Love your channel. Keep it up.. love from Australia mate.. 👍👍👍🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺
Ah, the real life 'Surviving Mars'. I do wonder if some of the tech from that game would be feasible in real life.
The Perseverance rover that NASA just launched has a MOXIE on it.
Creators of the game went with tech that was already known or proposed. There are only a handful of end-game techs that are sci-fi. For instance, "concrete extractor" building and concept from the start of the game is taken almost verbatim from the existing concept of regolith mining system for Luna. I think that the game is pretty crap though, management sim like hundreds of others just with a different make up - when they could have made it really mean something that you are on Mars.
@@Wustenfuchs109 If they made a game which reported the successful strategies used to meet in-game goals. Free entertainment for us, free research for them, clear path of advancement for mankind. Win, win, win situation.
Your intro music always gets me so pumped!
:3 I smoke a bowl with my dad and watch your show, been doing it for 2yrs (we take the Carl Sagan route of enjoying life) , wonder what Mars weed is like?
It's out of this world.
It's red
@@diamondturtle7954 Well there's already purple cannabis, so it may be easy to make a red version, even if it requires genetic modification.
I get pumped hearing the upward bound intro music!
1 year travel time ist bad...i already stayed in the house in 2020 for almost a year now
Unicornul Sarvy
- one bad thing about the time out and back is deteriation in micro-g . . . that can be avoided by artificial gravity from rotation. Two ships rotating about a common center using a one kilometer tether, rotating at one rpm will feel one g. During the trip out they can be slowed to Mars equivalant; on the trip back they can be gradually increased to Earth normal. Communication delay speed of light problem means no conversations in real time with people back home . . . just "video letters". News and entertainment will not be interactive, either, just "canned". And as Arthur says, *_in situ resource utilization_* will be necessary or the cargo will be insane.
Good, you got experience then. Put it on CV when applying for the trip.
@@michaelpettersson4919 - no, I was born when we had POTUS.FDR. If I can get to Longevity Eacape Velocity and then the Technological Singularity, then . . . maybe.
@@robertgraybeard3750 Communication delay mean no interplanetary chat going on. People will actually have time to write proper, well thought out and hopefully well spelled letters. Writing letters take time do you will have time to contemplate if you should write that letter at all. Perhaps we can look forward to a more civilized future? 😉
@@michaelpettersson4919 - indeed
The U.S.A. was founded by "gentlemen of letters", they created a type of government that was truly a gift to humanity/civilization. The growth of science and technology stems from well writen, peer reviewed articles in journals. The Future will be interesting.
I love the Upward Bound series because of the intro music as much as anything else.
""A new planet.... (dramatic music)... MAWRS!"
😂
mindblowing. Also love the graphics
Mars is gonna be hard. Radiation, perchlorates, virtually no atmosphere, fractional gravity, insane cold, little water, and many minutes lag time to earth....
No drink and snack...
The communication lag with earth is one of the attractions of going to Mars.
@marios gianopoulos If by shell you mean ring fine but spinning a shell will only create gravity on the equator anyway, so why build a shell?
@marios gianopoulos even better a swarm of habitats, that dont have to have gravity or atmo either. Gravity only limits movenent and puts stress in infrastructure if your critters dont need it, and atmo the same, but can help in cooling so not that bad. Anyway thats very long down the way, it will start being on the surface and gradually doing orbotal stuff
Is there information on the upgraded MOXIE that's supposed to make 2kg O2 per hour? Would it really be able to manage that on the meager power output from a MMRTG?
ooh this is gonna be a good dinner
Where do I buy the black and white space-gardener wetsuits
Hmm. I'll never understand why SpaceX is never mentioned - considering they have the most aggressive project for going to Mars with Starship.
Because Elon Musk is a sociopath, and he should be tossed out an airlock at the first possible opportunity.
Does he really? He does have the most aggressive PR for it, but in reality, who knows. They've just pushed back their roadmap 2 years a few days ago. And given the fact that SpaceX is NOT some company with REAL capital value but depends mostly on investor capital (that can melt away in a single night if someone so chooses), who knows really. Apart from pioneering modern reusable rockets, SpaceX is not really top of the pile. Going to Mars takes more than rockets - a whole slue of fields outside of SpaceX's work. Also, takes money. To be fair, if USA decided not to fund its military for one year in 1980's, or lower the budget for 10% for 10 years (more realistic option), you'd have a man on Mars in that decade. Because the tech was there - instead of one ship, people proposed a convoy of ships for living, supply, fuel and so on, assembled in Earth's orbit and then sent to Mars. In similar way that MIR and ISS were constructed.
But no one would throw away all that money. Humans could have done it... it would have been expensive though. And while it is less expensive today, it still is, especially if you want to go with a single rocket there and back again. So, SpaceX... who knows. They are one big X, an unknown. They could have a huge success... or they could fall apart within a month. I mean, a few fucked up tweets from Musk, money backs away, they have a crisis or two, the company is pretty much done.
Remember what happened with Tesla and the damage control they had to do in order to prevent the company from tanking?
@@Wustenfuchs109 I wouldn't bet against Musk. You're forgetting the Starlink project which is putting 60 sats a week into a planet-wide internet from orbit system which is already providing the US with speeds greater than most terrestrial internet - and it's still in Alpha testing (by the end of deployment, the constellation will provide gigabit internet beating private trading fiber cables - for all of the Earth).
That service alone will eclipse revenue for the rest of SpaceX's launch contracts. More than enough for a Mars project. It should eclipse annual revenue of the Apollo program (in it's entirety).
Tesla motors is doing beyond fine. With their battery program and advance orders they're poised to rival the largest auto makers on the planet - and more. Just one of their cars sells more than all the luxury 4 doors - combined. This year.
@@mgabrysSF I am not a betting man, that's for someone who doesn't know math.
And I am not forgetting anything. Starlink is not an open program and it would have a very limited user base due to its cost. And no, its speed is not going to "eclipse" anything, it's advantage on the market is latency which will be lowered by a few milliseconds, which is only important for major international financial institutions. You should familiarize yourself more with the project.
Yes, it will bring quite some revenue... as long as it works, keeps working, and people decide to use it instead of standard internet connection.
Which is a lot of "if".
That being said, Starlink constellation is a disaster for orbit, pure and simple. Not to mention that a single glitch can singlehandedly bring about Kessler Syndrome with that amount of satellites up there.
As for Tesla, yes, they are working well once again, once the damage control was done, company went public and Musk taken out of the important loop.
But that is all besides the point - which was, American millionaires and billionaires rarely have even a fraction of their supposed wealth in something realistic and it all depends on the good will of some other entities if their wealth is kept, declines or grows.
We have seen gigantic companies in USA fail over night, for stupid reasons.
SpaceX or Amazon's program can all end up in a gutter. Tomorrow a government decides that Amazon is long overdue for its taxes and added to that decides to enforce anti-monopoly laws that it currently neglects - Amazon falls like a house of cards.
Will it do it? Probably not. Or, maybe it will. Who knows. I am just pointing out that wealth is a relative term in USA and projects that depend on it should not be sanctified like they currently are.
That is why large, expensive and long term projects are everywhere conducted by governments, not private investors. That being said, Musk got shitloads of help from that same government and his program, especially SpaceX, is as private as a Chinese Space Agency.
I think the real reason (who the frak are the trolls answering you?) is because on a video like this, saying, "The first mars base will be whatever the heck SpaceX feels like doing" takes out most of the fun and almost all of the discussion. It's more fun to pretend that there is going to be some actual debate to be had about it.
Truth is, even for SpaceX, if they are going to be starting on their current 2024/2026 projected schedule, then they will simply have to do whatever can be put together at launch time, then work for improvements on subsequent trips. It won't be a debate so much as a scramble to innovate first possible solutions for setting up the in-situ base.
Your speech has improved a good bit. Well done mate.
The 3D printer will be the first thing to break.
I find your accent pleasant and voice quite soothing for enjoying your videos
I'd go to Venus, I don't think I'd go to Mars.
Quick question: the feasability of a RF-accelerated plasma engine(like the VASIMR) that uses plasma as a propellant? I've heard rumblings in the past couple years but nothing concrete, and was wondering if you might cover it as a potential method of faster travel to mars/the belt.
Earthlings.. "We trashed our planet so we brought our predilection for arrogance and self-supposed superiority to your planet". Give us a few years, we'll have a trash heap as big as Olympus Mons.
I 1st heard you Event Horizon I think you're absolutely fantastic... I can't wait to learn more from you
"When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor."
--Elon Musk
That logic could be used to justify some truly horrendous acts. Musk is good at funding other people's ideas, not so great at coming up with his own.
@@thetruth45678
The most terrible of the inquisition were motivated by love of their fellow man. Anything can be used to justify terrible things.
@@calvingreene90 Their argument wasn't that different from Elon's, actually. They thought saving their soul was important enough to justify horrendous torture and death, even if the odds of converting them was low.
@@thetruth45678
But does that mean we should not try to cure cancer stage 4 cancer patients because the odds of success is low?
@@thetruth45678
Besides that just proves the correctness of Elon's observation.
Interesting Video. One Additional Solution for the Water Problem, could be the Colonization of the Moons of Jupiter and Saturn, when the Mars Settlements are consolidated. Just a thought, because of the Water, and you can Trade it.
Although space is almost a true vacuum, it does have something that can cause drag, especially on a large area. Another thought is inertia. Try starting a battleship to move by pulling on a cable.
The worst drag come from neysaying politicans that rather fund wars where we blow each other to pieces.
Thanks Isaac!
I like your version of what is essentially the delta glider from Orbiter, but that docking port seems unrealistic. The DG has its docking port in the nose cone.
To become an interplanetary species, we don't NEED to colonize any of those other planets....
....we could always build one! *gets a power drill and a crazy expression*
A think a good starting point for manned missions to Mars could be a mission not to the planet itself, but to its moons Phobos and Deimos. Staying up there collecting samples and doing other things until the next launch window back to Earth
I totally agree on the large oportunity of mars moons. Mars loOks like the perfect configuration for starting space exploration.
Will most water ice be mixed with dust ,dirt and rock debris that will make it difficult to access and filter for drinking ?
I’m also wondering what other possible contaminates could be present in different water ice across the solar system and universe possibly things we have no knowledge of ?
kick back & relax, it's a new Isaac Arthur video
Sitting in my car at 22:10 EST on 10/22 staring at Mars out of my driver side window while listening to this. Its sooo far away. So small in the sky. Insanity must be kept in check for long haulers headed to Mars. I fear this will be a huge obstacle.
There is a 3d printer on the ISS. They used it to print a torque wrench to fix some issue. You can download the file for it and print one yourself if you have a 3d printer (there are quite a few decent ones under $500, and even under $300).
Amazing as always! I wonder if I've seen every video Isaac has done?
How big or how many current Ion drives would be required to produce 1g of thrust? I understand that current ion drives only give a few Newton’s of thrust. But if mass wasn’t the issue. Could it be possible to make an ion drive large enough?
I don't know the exact answer for a given model, but you also have to consider that ion drives tend to use rare and expensive materials, so they may not be so good for massive propulsion. I think xenon gas or equivalent is a typical fuel for ion drives, so trying to pay for (or even find) many tons of that for each rocket mission would be prohibitively expensive, if even possible.
Love your videos as always 😄
I don't think that the first people to visit Mars should expect to return - it puts too many constraints on the Mission profile. However, if the Martian society develops fast enough, then this could become plausible!
Very good episode, goes in hand with latest talk about Mars and interest in mission to it... as far as i heard at the earliest ( and thats if everything goes really really well ) ..spaceX would be able to send unmanned starship at 2024 window.. and if that goes well possibly manned one at 2026 or 2029 window.
Also.. i dont get why going to Mars needs much energy, looking at orbits..it seems like you just hold onto momentum you have from Earth, by lanching from there, and expend energy to elongate your orbit to cross Mars's orbit and then basically break whole time to catch up with Mars just in time.
I mean it seems like for going to Mars you dont even need to have classic speed up.. then brake to get to your destination... because you are going faster then Mars by default by just being on Earth.
As she throws the rocks she becomes lighter after each one. So the next throw will give more acceleration.
everytime i see a new video by you, I always get excited
I remember reading Aldrin's article in Omni back in 1986 laying out the cycler concept