why is he so fucking insistent on mars? mars is dogshit, there's nothing of value there. if you're gonna be a "humanity's destiny is in space" you can just fuckin build o'neill cylinders like gundam instead it would be way easier and just as "safe" (dangerous)
Big Mars fan here but also there's no way in hell it's even minimally independently habitable in 20 years lmao. Probably not self-sufficient in 200, it'll need Earth for a long, long time barring some Trek-like tech breakthroughs.
Energy I don't imagine would be the biggest problem (solar, nuclear, chemical reactors to produce fuel from available materials a la Mars Express plans), it's things like usable soil, organic stuff, spare parts that can be fabricated there for the first few decades, medicines, etc.
Just look into how difficult and global scale microchip fabrication is on earth and you quickly realize how every single tech tree here relies on a planets worth of material and labor.
the perchlorates in mars' "soil" are definitely going to be one of the biggest problems. basically mars is exactly as deadly to human existence as the vacuum of outer space so why waste all of that energy getting yourself up off a gravity well only to fall down another one
PV cells also degrade pretty quickly. I would imagine even faster if exposed to Martian climate.
Also, the further you are from the sun? The less efficiently PVs produce.
If you want to bring power, you're probably gonna have to go Nuclear... but then you need water.
in space you have no shortage of room and if you can produce even low-efficiency PV cells en-masse it doesn't matter if you need thousands of square kms for reasonable power production
and, also, all those Trek-like tech breakthroughs could be applied to ensuring earth remains habitable so we never actually need mars
as much as I want Aria to be real
that would be the only reasonable argument for mars, that the technologies we'd need to make mars habitable are also the ones we'll need to fix our own planet lol
manned space exploration right now beyond low earth orbit just feels like a huge waste. that money would go towards so much more unmanned missions that would produce way more scientific understanding, and if you're specifically interested in how humans live in space, low earth orbit is Good Enough
iirc nasa put out a research paper back in the 80s that said it'd take several hundreds of years to terraform mars with conventional technology. It'd take forever and the atmosphere would eventually dissipate anyway due to mars' lacking magnetic field
to make it work at all would take a degree of active maintenance that we simply lack any sort of understanding of. bright side is that knowledge would almost certainly help us back here on earth i suppose
