Entropy Rising
Entropy Rising is a podcast where hosts Jacob and Lucas explore everything from today’s cutting-edge technology to futuristic concepts like Dyson spheres, discussing how these advancements will impact society. Dive into deep conversations about innovation, the future, and the societal shifts that come with the technology of tomorrow or the next thousand years.
Entropy Rising
Mining the Stars and Shaping Mars: Asteroids, Terraforming, and the Space Economy | Entropy Rising episode 2
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In this episode of Entropy Rising, we explore two of the most ambitious ideas in humanity’s journey beyond Earth: asteroid mining and terraforming Mars. Could we truly mine asteroids to fuel technological advancements, free from Earth's environmental constraints? And if so, could these resources help us turn Mars into a habitable world? Join us as we dive into the potential methods, benefits, and mind-bending challenges of mining the stars and reshaping the Red Planet. From capturing asteroids in Earth's orbit to introducing atmospheres on Mars, we break down the science, ethics, and economics behind these futuristic visions. Tune in to imagine what life beyond Earth could look like—and whether we’re ready to make these big ideas a reality.
Catch new episodes of Entropy Rising every other week and join the conversation as we chart humanity’s path toward the final frontier!
Website: https://www.entropy-rising.com/
I think let's go all out instead of taking lasers and shining them on the surface to release the oxygen that way, let's grab something like Ganymede or one of the Jovian moons and just throw them into Mars. I like the way you think Hello and welcome to Entropy Rising, where we talk about science and futurism. I am your host, Jacob, and I am here with my co host, Lucas. Lucas, how are you doing today? I'm doing great, Jake. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. I'm really interested to jump into all these topics we've got picked out for today. So what do you say we hop right into it? Yeah, let's get into it. I know you were excited to talk about asteroid mining
Lucas:yes. So asteroid mining, , super cool concepts because on earth we are limited by our landscape, right? We're limited by the amount of pollution that we create and how much our world can handle. We're limited by, the people that are willing to work there. And do those jobs and then just the raw resources that we have. Some of the upsides of,, asteroid mining is that we're able to remove all the issues of pollution, , that are affecting our planet, right? We don't have to dump any of the dangerous chemicals or any of the oils, , residuals or anything like that into our environment. We can fly up and to asteroids, if we can stop them from spinning and pull them into our earth's orbit. We can mine them pretty efficiently.
Jacob:You want to pull them into Earth's orbit to mine them? Yes. That's interesting. That's not how I envisioned it. Really? Yeah.
Lucas:How did you envision
Jacob:it? I figured you would set up a system where you send probes out to these asteroids, somewhere out in the asteroid belt, where they can mine and process them down to a reasonable extent and then send the raw materials back toward Earth through maybe a gravity assisted trajectory. So you just got this constant supply of raw materials being sent throughout the solar system.
Lucas:That would be excellent. And that could be achievable. I was thinking more like Let's say in 30 years, we decided to mine our first asteroid, right? How would we do it for the first time? So I feel like pulling it somewhere where we can get it to stop spinning and start rotating our planet over, a launch pad or somewhere so that we can get the most efficiency, because it's not going to be cheap. It's going to be incredibly expensive. To send our ships up there to send all the materials up there. But I think that,, if companies were to finally set course for asteroid mining, that would better advance our in orbit infrastructure.
Jacob:Absolutely. And I do think a lot of these resources would be used in orbit more than on earth because it's still quite expensive to get these materials down a gravity well safely. It's cheaper than getting them up the gravity well, there are costs that takes to deorbit stuff.
Lucas:Oh yeah, absolutely. you either have to, use thrusters to push it in or you can, Remove mass or add mass to get it to steady itself.
Jacob:My kind of idea would be maybe design some type of rail gun system that can fire retrograde to Earth's orbit to really kill a lot of that velocity and then use some sort of disposable one time use capsule. there's a lot of, carbon asteroids out there, so you could potentially make a, an ablative heat shield with that carbonous material. Fire it, retrograde to Earth's orbit. It's to kill a lot of its velocity and just have that heat shield protected as it falls to earth and, maybe some parachutes.
Lucas:that is a cool concept. it's we're, you're, we're talking about small asteroids at that point, because trying to pull something out of orbit and pull it into. So our atmosphere is, that would be incredibly dangerous. Yeah. for
Jacob:clarity, I don't think you'd be doing this asteroids. I think you would do as much processing of that material as possible in space. You would want it to be as pure as possible because you don't want to pay that much money. to send rocks down. You want to send rare materials, platinum, gold, iridium, you're not wanting to send rocks. So you're going to want to do as much processing as possible. Absolutely. And for that, I think we could capture a lot of these asteroids in either the L2 or L3 Lagrange point between the moon and earth, which for those who don't know Lagrange point is essentially a point in an orbit where the gravitational pull of two bodies cancel out. So it's a stable. point in an orbit where things aren't moving around a lot. So every two bodies will have Lagrange points there's some between earth and moon and earth and sun. So the earth moon Lagrange points make ideal places to collect resources like this for processing and then maybe rail gun them toward the earth.
Lucas:Yeah. I mean that, that would be definitely, awesome. really the reason why I was focusing on just getting essentially just one asteroid at first to pull into our orbit though, to be able to mine at the level that we're at is because, Reading about it and doing a little bit of research into them. There are multiple asteroids in our asteroid belt that have enough iron. They're like 98 percent iron to sustain us at our current use of that material for a million years or more.
Jacob:It's true. I don't know if it would be economically viable to fund a mission like that for iron though. I think more likely you're going to see a mission like that. A mission get funded to capture rare materials like platinum group elements. But as a side effect of that, especially if you capture an asteroid, especially in your earth asteroid, and you bring it into a stable orbit around, earth, maybe you'll do that. You'll extract all the precious minerals to ship back to earth, but then you'll just leave this huge iron asteroid around, maybe in one of those Lagrange points, and that'll be really helpful for building, orbital infrastructure. Yeah.
Lucas:That's a great point, actually. yeah. And I definitely agree with you on the point that you made before as well, where, we probably wouldn't do it for iron, but we would probably do it for, the rare materials that we use for creating batteries, for example,
Jacob:cobalt, for example, is very rare on earth.
Lucas:Yes. Yeah. so doing stuff like that, but the thing is with what, astronomers have been identifying on asteroids out there is that there are certain asteroids that have, more than we could ever use of gold, of cobalt, of platinum, right? We just have to be able to get to them and bring them back
Jacob:more than we can ever use. Sounds like a challenge. I've got some ideas. Dyson swarm. Here we come. at our current
Lucas:At the current way that we are functioning.
Jacob:So there is also something you have to be really careful about when you're thinking about gathering these types of resources though, because you talk about there being more than we could ever use at our current scale. But you also have to fund the mission to go and get these materials, right? So whenever you are in the funding phase of this mission, you have to think, are we going to bring back so much material that we crash the economy on this material and therefore the, this whole mission is not worth it because you don't want to go and get, billions and billions of tons of platinum, even if you could, which I don't think you could. but let's say you magically could get all the platinum you want in space. You really wouldn't want to do that because then it would be worthless. So it's actually in your best interest to grab a limited amount. And bring it in. So I think there is going to be a natural equilibrium that we reach of. We can only import so much of these materials from space to earth until the price of these materials are dropping too much to be worth getting anymore.
Lucas:So now I understand that affects both, if the government were to do it or if a private company were to do it, either way, that's bad. but let's say that we're working towards a goal. And we need those raw materials and we have a plan for those raw materials, right? But we need a stockpile of them now For a private company at this point asteroid mining would not make sense with the current technology that we have it would be Way more expensive going up there getting the materials and bringing them back than you would make from doing that
Jacob:Yeah, it'd be cheaper to mine them on earth right?
Lucas:Yes but let's say that We needed those materials for a larger project. Like we were preparing to create a Dyson swarm and we needed the batteries. We needed the cobalt to be able to do that. Do you think that it would be worth it right for our government to essentially Pull funding to go and do such a thing. leaving out private companies and things like that.
Jacob:I think building a Dyson swarm or something like that is such a huge undertaking that no one entity is going to take it. I,
Lucas:this would be assuming, I'm sorry, I should clarify. Cause if we're at the point to where we've already maximized our power consumption on earth, and we are a United government body, do you think that it would be more feasible then still assuming that we only have basic rocket thruster propulsion to get off of earth? Do you think that it would still be a feasible idea to essentially not even allocate money? Because if we're one government allocate manpower to do what doing to building the infrastructure to mine? Asteroids like cobalt and bringing in those large amounts, and not introducing it into the economy, but into a stockpile.
Jacob:if you want to build anything in space, it makes sense to grab those materials in space. So if you're doing some large orbital project or solar project, then, always, it's going to make sense to go and mine those materials, in outer space, because trying to get any raw materials up a gravity well, it's just not economical in any way, shape, or form. So it makes sense to get them from an asteroid, which doesn't have very much gravity. The real question is, does it make sense to bring them down to gravity well? and I think it can, in a way. So if we had some large project on Earth, for example, and we needed a ton of rare materials, like maybe, for example, potentially, something we're facing right now is trying to build gridscale energy storage. So would it make sense Assuming we have some orbital infrastructure in place to mine those materials in outer space and bring them to Earth. I think it could. I think it could make sense. I think the economics could align for that under very specific circumstances. but I do think that in general,, it's going to be cheaper to source those materials from earth. But that could change because I could also, especially with the climate crisis we're facing, I could see mining practices becoming more and more strictly regulated, which makes them more and more expensive to do and space travel is getting cheaper and cheaper. So we might eventually hit a tipping point where it's feasible to get material from space to bring it back to earth to do building
Lucas:right now but space travel can only get so cheap right at the point that we are now like the way for us to get up into space it we still Like we can't do much more to reduce the amount of fuel that we're not really using to get into space so I just, I find it hard to believe that a singular company would do the first bit of asteroid mining and, instead of it being like a government entity. Now talking about the metal that we would have in the building of large infrastructure and our. Orbital areas. if we were to bring those metals to, build the infrastructure in our orbit, do you think that would affect earth's economy at that point? Ooh, that's a good one.
Jacob:potentially no, I don't think so. I think the orbital economy and the earth's economy would be. Two separate entities? I think they'd be related and connected in some ways, but for the most part I think they would be two separate entities. I believe so as well. So yeah, you might end up with a situation where, materials that are very expensive on earth are very cheap in space. And I think only the most expensive materials would be transferred between those two, whether that's highly processed raw materials, stuff like pure platinum, gold, platinum group elements like that, or, potentially also technology, I could see being something that's worth going up and down a gravity well for, and, organics too, Earth is the only place you can get, Organics. Yeah. So if you want to grow plants in space and you need live soil, because soil is not a dead thing, like some people think it is, you're going to have to bring that up from earth, which is funny, one of the few things that might be worth bringing up a gravity well is dirt.
Lucas:Yeah. Of course, there are ways that you can revitalize soil, but like you were saying, once those cultures are used up, the organisms that make that living, once they're used up, then you will have to get more soil up there.
Jacob:Yeah, or at least you'll have to get a starter set of soil up there to kick start up your culture. biospheres, assuming you want to grow food and space while you're there too. But trade you three bars of gold for a bag of dirt. Yeah. Well, especially if you have to ship it up at gravity. Well, , it might be a fair exchange rate because getting three bars of gold down a gravity well versus. Um,
Lucas:really another interesting topic that I feel like Asteroid Mining would tie in to would be allowing for us to transport resources from the asteroid to a planet that is not Earth.
Jacob:Okay.
Lucas:So I'm talking about like reforming atmospheres, terraforming different planets. Okay.
Jacob:So you want to talk about terraforming Mars now?
Lucas:yeah, Mars, or any other planet really that we would decide to do so on. Yeah,
Jacob:absolutely. Cause you would need to get a lot of material to those planets. or strip away material depending on the planet. But focusing on Mars, you would need to get a lot of material to that planet. Yeah,
Lucas:absolutely. first talking about Just the amount of gas that we would need, there's a lot of frozen nitrogen on, comets and, asteroids, we could use that essentially, we could pull it from asteroids, or we could pull it from moons, right? And send that to create that nitrogen rich, atmosphere that we need as a base to then start introducing oxygen to make it breathable.
Jacob:Absolutely. if you're talking about Mars specifically, if I wanted to build an atmosphere on Mars, the first thing I would do. Is if you can heat up the planet and melt all of the ice caps, you'll get a lot of carbon dioxide and water vapor in the atmosphere, and you'll get an atmosphere that's about 7 percent as thick as Earth's atmosphere. So not incredible, but it's thicker than it is now. You could do this without melting the ice, but melting the ice makes this more efficient. Once you have a thicker atmosphere on Mars, take some comets, put them in orbit around Mars, where they dip into the atmosphere on the lower part of their orbit. And each time they dip into the atmosphere, they're going to boil off more of that frozen nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water. And as they keep going through the atmosphere, they'll keep boiling off more and more of these gases, and losing them to the planet. Do that with enough asteroids, and you can build yourself a nice little atmosphere.
Lucas:Yeah, absolutely. with the assumption that you already have some kind of either, man made force field or we are able to somehow reignite the core of Mars to give us a magnetic field. there's two, there's a couple ways to do that. Yes, but, before we touch on that, you said something interesting about melting the ice caps. Of course, that would be something that we would want to do because we want liquid water. Yeah. But why not just melt the entire surface of Mars? Yes. Like the regolith? Yes. because it's mostly made up of iron oxides, right? So if we melt it, we release oxygen into the atmosphere.
Jacob:That is absolutely one way we could go about getting oxygen onto Mars. And that's also going to be really nice. Cause it gets rid of a lot of the iron oxides in the regolith that we don't want to deal with. Yeah. Yeah. We could absolutely do that.
Lucas:So if we could, just touching back on, using some of the solar lasers that we're using to power our ships. Just face them towards Mars and just start burning up the entirety of the surface.
Jacob:Yeah, you can do that. my, my main concern would be doing it like that is when do you want to colonize this planet? Because you're going to be waiting for a while for it to cool down if you do that. Absolutely. Yeah. Non discriminatory, glassing the surface. An alternative. Would be if you're already going to be building a society on Mars, potentially you could just set up an industry that gathers up regolith Melts it down takes the iron uses that iron for construction and just releases all the gaseous products into the atmosphere basically you can be the dirtiest most polluting company on Mars and we welcome that release all of your gases to the atmosphere, that's what we want. Okay, and in that way because with your method You can't have people living on the planet while that's happening.
Lucas:No, this would be strictly terraforming, right? Because colonizing for me is, you're going down onto the planet. you're building a small settlement with, special infrastructure, either underground or above ground, with, special like dome buildings and granaries. And then that, that, that's how you're living. as far as terraforming after colonizing, of course your method would be better. Yeah.
Jacob:But If you want to get your method, I think let's go all out instead of taking lasers and shining them on the surface to release the oxygen that way, let's grab something like Ganymede or one of the Jovian moons and just throw them into Mars. I like the way you think. So if you do this, not only are you introducing all the water gases and all that, I mean, Uh, Europa alone has more, I think, it's predicted it might have more volume water than Earth.
Lucas:Yeah.
Jacob:So if you throw that into Mars, you're going to get a lot of water onto Mars. But in addition, the energy of that impact is going to liquefy the whole planet.
Lucas:Yeah, it'll reignite the core.
Jacob:You're adding mass to the planet. So you're adding, getting more
Lucas:gravity.
Jacob:And, if you angle it just right, Because a lot of theories behind our own moon is that it was created when a planet collided with Earth. So you could potentially angle it just right and capture some of that material in orbit of Mars and make an artificial moon. Or, I guess it's not really artificial at that point.
Lucas:Yeah, no, that's, it's man made, but it's not artificial. Because there's a lot of
Jacob:benefits to having a moon.
Lucas:That, that, that would be, a best case and worst case in a lot of, in a lot of situations. You're not
Jacob:colonizing that planet for a while after that. no,
Lucas:like we're talking 40, 50 generations. You start thinking about it, you know? Yeah, it's not longer, yeah. But that of course would be best case as far as creating a larger planet for us that we have higher gravity because realistically going and living on Mars, we could terraform it all we want, but if the gravity is the way that it is, then we're not going to be able to live there full time.
Jacob:we don't know that really yet, but that's the issue. We don't know. We don't know how much gravity we need to be healthy, right? It could be that Mars was fine, but. It could be that it's not, we just don't know. Okay.
Lucas:that's fair. We
Jacob:know no gravity isn't doable. We need some gravity, but we don't have any experiments showing people living in low gravity.
Lucas:Okay. That's a, that's interesting. Actually, I guess it all has just been speculation that I've read into, About what will happen because in no gravity, You get the lower bone density and. the issues with your height and then when you come back, your spine compresses and yeah, no, it's bad.
Jacob:And it's likely low gravity. You'll have those issues too, but we just don't know how much gravity we need to be healthy. okay. But if you want to, if you want to terraform Mars a little less destructively, I was thinking about this too. You could potentially. Drill down into the core of the planet. And if you have some type of solar collecting system on our sun, like a Dyson swarm, you don't even need a whole Dyson swarm, you could have the beginning baby stages of a Dyson swarm, 1 percent of a Dyson swarm, even with 1 percent of a Dyson swarm. If you could direct all of that energy into Mars's core, it would only take 18 minutes to reliquify the core of Mars.
Lucas:Wow.
Jacob:Yeah. and you don't want to do it in 18 minutes, that'd be horrible, but realistically, even with 01 percent of a Dyson swarm, you could extract the energy to start heating up the core of the planet and kick off that magnetic field. Wow. Which, the magnetic field isn't even as important as you might think it is.
Lucas:yeah, you could build artificial, blockers of solar radiation. Yeah,
Jacob:or you could surround the planet in superconducting coils and generate your own magnetic field, and as a byproduct, doing that would heat up the planet, almost like wireless charging. So you could generate a magnetic field. And heat up the planet at the same time.
Lucas:Now that how much would it heat up the planet? Because are we talking as it's creating this magnetic field, we would have to lower the magnetic field at certain points and not heat the planet up too much.
Jacob:eventually you would, but that would be the goal, right? You've heated up the core of the planet enough that it's generating its own magnetic field. Of course. Yeah. But the magnetic field is not as important as, some people Would lead you to believe you could 100 percent colonize Mars without a magnetic field.
Lucas:You can colonize it, right? But you could terraform it. You could terraform it without a magnetic field.
Jacob:So you will lose atmosphere over time due to the atmosphere leaking away because it's not protected by the magnetic field. But we're talking about on the scale of millennia, if you were to somehow establish an earthlike atmosphere on Mars, And just not touch it, not even replenish it, it could potentially take over a million years for that planet or for that atmosphere to get to the point of being inhabitable. Really?
Lucas:Take a million
Jacob:years to strip the atmosphere? If not longer. It takes a long time to strip the atmosphere. Especially for Mars, it's a little further away than Earth.
Lucas:So why is it always portrayed as such a big issue when it comes to terraforming that we need to have a protective barrier against the sun's solar wind?
Jacob:it is nice, especially because without a magnetic field, you're more susceptible to solar storms. which if you get hit by like a coronal mass ejection without a magnetic field, you're in a lot more trouble than like on earth. So there are definite benefits and it does reduce the chance of cancer, but an atmosphere does a great job of that too. And if you wanted an earth like atmosphere on Mars, you're by definition, going to need a thicker atmosphere because of the lower gravity. So you've got more air anyways, blocking radiation. So radiation probably wouldn't be an issue. It's just, you would need to replenish that atmosphere over time. Thank you.
Lucas:Okay, which I mean, I guess we do a pretty good job of doing here on earth already.
Jacob:Yeah. and also if you can build the atmosphere in the first place, you probably have the technology to top it off from time to time.
Lucas:Yeah. It's just, it's so interesting to think that, that we don't need that, magnetic blanket essentially protecting us.
Jacob:And also if you've gotten this type of technology, it might just be easier to throw up an artificial magnetic blanket. blocker and magnetic shield and, the Lagrange point between the sun and Mars and just artificially block it.
Lucas:Yeah. yeah, I don't know. I, that is that, that, that is crazy to wrap my head around my entire life. I've just thought that, as soon as there's no magnetic field around the planet and the solar winds hit, it just strips it off. Like you're blowing sand off of a marble.
Jacob:It takes a very long time to strip the atmosphere off of a planet. Now, without a magnetic field, you will lose lighter elements, , faster, which happens on Earth, too. But it'll happen even faster on Mars without a magnetic field, especially coupled with its lower gravity. So there are huge benefits to having one, let's be clear, we could get by without it.
Lucas:Okay. then, with assuming that, and we don't have to restore that, we can leave the core cold. We can go and we can colonize and start terraforming, right now. What are our first steps when we get onto the planet? So thinking about it, we need to establish the colonies, right? We need to make sure that, it's safe. So we send. a team of 150, of the brightest people to go and start colonizing Mars, right? And those people need to build infrastructure. They need to build, the proper encampments for themselves. Do you think it would be better to build above ground or below ground? Oh yeah. Below
Jacob:ground. No question. with that many people living on the surface of Mars, I think you're exposed to something like, three or 4%. or three or four millisieverts, per year or something like that. I know it's 10 times the radiation you're exposed to on Earth. And if I'm not mistaken, it increases your chance of cancer over a 20 year period by almost like 10%. Which when you have a population of 150, you're talking about 15 people getting cancer over a 20 year period that wouldn't have otherwise gotten it for a 20 year mission. It's a pretty significant risk. So I think any type of Mars mission is going to have to live underground.
Lucas:then I think that a 20 year mission would be generous then. because let's think about the crew of submarines. Those people, they go out on for sometimes the longest tour is there'll be six years on a submarine. They have to be psych evaluated and usually, they have to spend a lot of time after those tours. they can't go back on to duty for a long time if ever. Let's do a submarine.
Jacob:Let me be clear. They can still go on to the surface of the planet. They just don't want to be on the surface of the planet at all times. So it's okay to have some exposure to that. It's just, you don't want to be exposed to that level of radiation constantly.
Lucas:But the thing is, even with that, but the other harshness that Mars has, like it's dust storms that can last weeks or months at a time. and then they're confined to these small spaces. It's really what I'm wondering is how long realistically do you think that these people could spend on mission on Mars? Cause I'm thinking that it's max eight years.
Jacob:Max eight years. Yeah. it's going to be psychologically crazy. and there's also the whole idea of just being that isolated from humanity. What that does to a person. We don't know. no one's been that far before. assuming we can get them back, then yeah, we might need to rotate people out. I could see that being a plausible condition, but if you want to settle the planet, then people need to be able to live their whole lives on there.
Lucas:Yeah. So are you thinking that we would settle before we terraformed?
Jacob:I think so. I think we'll try to get some type of presence on an extra planet as well before we have the technology to terraform. Okay.
Lucas:So that's assuming that people are coming to Mars. To live their lives there and hopefully raise other generations on that planet. Okay. So now the people of the colonies, they've flourished and we've made some kind of infrastructure to where these people can come and they feel like they can settle. You were talking about building infrastructure factories that pump out, greenhouse gases to help restore atmosphere or create an atmosphere in Mars. What are they producing and who are they producing it for?
Jacob:So you could potentially scoop up that regolith, which is very rich in iron and use it to manufacture iron, which would be used to build the colony, any infrastructure you need. Now, let's be very clear. That would 100 percent only be used on Mars. It's just not cost effective to ship that up the gravity. Well, right. It just doesn't make sense, especially when we have a ton of iron in the solar system. any excuse you can find, you're going to want to pump gas into that atmosphere on an incredible scale. to the point you might even, if you have the technology, try to design, just little probes that'll go and self replicate throughout the planet. Just scoop up regolith and just melt it for no reason. Just literally scoop it up, melt it in iron, release those gases, and then move on to the next one. because you really, you want to pollute that planet as much as you can, as crazy as it sounds.
Lucas:Yeah. And, but do you feel like that would even come close to being enough?
Jacob:No, that would take, you would need so many people on the planet to actually make that feasible. no, I don't think that would happen. You're talking about thousands of years at that rate, if not longer. Exactly. And that's factoring in accelerating technology.
Lucas:So then, the, what you were talking about before where we would have asteroids passing over, And around the planet, dropping off their gases and resources, to its atmosphere. does that seem like something that would be safe while we had people also trying colonize Mars?
Jacob:I think so. I think we can make that very safe. you would try to not have these in an orbit where they directly pass over a colony or over where people are living, but presumably it'd be reasonably safe you would probably ship these asteroids from The asteroid belt, or really you would want to do comments. You would get them from the deeper parts of the solar system. Chances are when you launched them toward the planet for safety, you would not launch them on an intercept course. You would launch them on a course where they would miss the planet. That way you could catch them once they became closer to Mars and decelerate them into an orbit. That way, if you mess up, they don't slam into the planet and kill everybody.
Lucas:Yeah. It just sounds like a, , risky thing for the colonists and, settlers who would want to go and live on the planet.
Jacob:how, Incredibly unlucky would it be to manage to screw up catching an asteroid and have it land exactly on one of the few colonies on the whole planet. that's fairly unlikely in and of itself.
Lucas:Yeah, but the issue with it hitting let's say that it didn't hit the colony But it hit the planet it hit Mars. It would launch tiny meteors back up into space because of its lower gravity But it would still be enough gravity for it to pull them back in eventually, right? So now you're talking about it hit on the other side of the planet but now you have big and small chunks of regolith coming back down and To crush you and your loved ones.
Jacob:hopefully you're living underground, right? yeah, I guess
Lucas:but when we get to settling I feel like living underground like you can hire people whose passion it is to be able to go out there and colonize a place, but getting people to come and settle is another option, right?
Jacob:Yeah, you're going to need some type of protection for that radiation regardless, which is most likely going to be living underground. If it's not living underground, it's going to be really thick shielding on whatever material you're using anyways. unless you're throwing comets at this planet that are planet killers, then I don't think it's a huge risk. if you have, as long as you're doing smaller comets and smaller things, I think you'd be fine.
Lucas:have you ever read the, the Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars? I have, yeah. the way that they talk about it, with using the huge bubble, late like civilizations, with the, would you think that would be a feasible way?
Jacob:I don't know off the top of my head that part. I do know the Red Mars book, which is the one that I read. A lot of the ideas I'm talking about come from that, because they have to live underground when they first colonized. And they do introduce a lot of moisture to the planet via atmospheric breaking of comets.
Lucas:but when they start moving forward into starting to melt the ice to make blue Mars, they are able to, build, those small pockets of cities that are essentially in bubbles, but they're massive, but they're small on the scale of the planet, right? But they use that. They never go into detail about what they're made out of or how they regulate. But do you think. Something like that being feasible, I don't think it would be just because there's nothing, there's no atmosphere still. So something comes out of space, it just kills everybody.
Jacob:Absolutely. That seems like way too big of a risk. That's the same thing with trying to build like domes on the moon. It just, you don't want one big failure point to kill that many people. I think you really need isolated habitats.
Lucas:So realistically, it would all have to be underground. It would just be, and how do you attract people to want to settle? There's some crazy people out there who would want to, but are there enough crazy people?
Jacob:Didn't they did a while back, someone put out an ad asking for people to take a one way trip to Mars, trying to build a crew. I think they were trying to find like a hundred people to do it. And Tens of thousands signed up for it.
Lucas:But do you think that of those tens of thousands, there were women and children willing to go as well? Or was it just people like us?
Jacob:It was not people like me, I can promise you that. I think it was a pretty broad span, a lot of people wanted to go, yeah. I don't think it was all just men, I think plenty of women signed up for it too. Okay. Children. I don't think they were accepting applicants. Of course, but Like families. the cool thing is if you send men and women, you can make children. Self replicating probes. No,
Lucas:that is very interesting. honestly having the comet circle the planet, I don't even remember reading that in the first book, but my original thoughts of getting those gases to the planet would be using essentially just, Slingshot systems set up in low, gravity moons where we would mine those resources or Suck up those resources if we're talking about the gases and then essentially transport them in capsules That would just explode onto the surface of the
Jacob:no Yeah, a lot of the carbon asteroids, they have a lot of water and gases on
Lucas:them. But now going back into having no magnetic field And I know that you said that radiation is a little bit more violent because I know that radiation does get through and it hits on like our inner, magnetosphere on our planet. And that's what creates our Northern lights. And it pulls that into our poles. If all of that is still leeching through, what about our plant life that we would want to sustain on the planet?
Jacob:there would definitely be higher rates of mutation, but if I'm not mistaken, Earth's atmosphere filters out 93 percent of the radiation. the magnetosphere is only filtering out the last seven, so it's not as huge as you would think. It's still good that we have it, but, 7 percent increase in radiation is a lot. It's not nothing, but it would be even better on Mars. If you wanted one earth atmosphere on Mars, like atmospheric pressure, you can need way more gas on Mars because of the lower gravity. And in fact, that atmosphere, so Earth's about a hundred kilometers off the planet. Whereas Mars is atmosphere to achieve. The same pressure would extend about 250, kilometers off the planet. So it would be denser, to achieve the same density, right? Because of the less gravity, you would need way more. Gas ahead of you. We need a taller air column above you to have enough gas to press down to give you one atmosphere of pressure. So it would likely block even more radiation than earth's atmosphere. If you could get it up to one atmospheric pressure. Okay.
Lucas:the last thing really that I want to touch on is when do you feel like. It would be possible for us to actually start putting these plans into motion because we've had talk about going out and colonizing Mars for a long time. We've had individuals like Elon Musk who have wanted to do it on a, a company wide scale. We've had. books written about it for over the last 40 years, right? Colonizing Mars. so what are your thoughts on us actually being able to go out there and these, if we do this,
Jacob:I guess it depends what you mean by colonize, if you mean get some people on the planet that had been there and maybe stay for, I really just starting off six month period. Yeah. I think we could see that in the next. 20 years. I don't think that's unreasonable to see the first person on Mars in our lifetime in the next 20 years or so for permanent habitation of Mars. If we ever do that, cause there's not really much on Mars, to be honest with you, I don't know. I think we might end up seeing like a scientific outpost there. Some similar, like what we have in Antarctica, maybe in a hundred years. as far as like a city on Mars. to be honest with you, there's no economical reason to build one. So if we do build one, it's probably going to be in spite of the economics. Maybe we'll do that, but I don't know. I would say a hundred years would be, okay. I think maybe a conservative guess on actually having people live on the planet, not just visit maybe 20 years for the first person who actually puts their feet on the planet though.
Lucas:All right. you say that it has no, real economic value or no reason to want to live on Mars. But, it could be an option because our planet is becoming more and more polluted, more and more populated. And really, if I feel like people, if they had an option to get that chance to essentially. Break out and create a new frontier the same way that they did when we settled the west in the united states I feel like that could be reason enough to have people want to go out there and start calling
Jacob:Maybe but it's just any work you do making mars habitable You could do on earth and you would be a lot take a lot less effort.
Lucas:Yeah, but Let's say that if you went out there, and you were one of the first colonists to start working on the planet, then you would have claim to land on the planet, for example. that is something that we have seen in history people are willing to die for.
Jacob:But, it would be much better to just get some land handed to you in like the Sierra Desert. I guess, if you wanted to go colonize the frontier. Yeah. Because at least you can breathe there. And not to mention just giving, getting some land given to you on Mars doesn't mean much unless you can build the infrastructure, like you're going to have to build a habitat. And then how are you going to generate any type of, there's nothing Earth needs from Mars really. So unless there's already some type of presence on Mars, then that's, there's no economic reason for me to move there. Even if I am given a huge amount of land, it's not like I can do anything with it.
Lucas:Yeah, no, that, that is a fair point. I'm really just trying to theorize like how we would get people to Mars and why they would want to go.
Jacob:I think some people will always want to go there just for the sake of doing it. And maybe that'll be enough. Maybe it's just. This innate drive to move on to a new frontier, to move on to a new place. The question is, how can we get the money in place for that to happen? Maybe it'll have to be sponsored by a government. Yeah. Maybe there'll be, cause there is this kind of idea that we should have a backup plan for earth. We need to make life multi planetary or human civilization multi planetary. But I think as far as colonization goes. Mars is like the favorite topic of it, but the moon makes way more sense, building colony on the moon. The only benefit I see economically to Mars. Would be maybe a refueling platform, but you'd probably build that on like Phobos, no,
Lucas:that would make sense. I don't know. It's sad to think about that, that there really is no value in settling Mars other than it being a plan B to some kind of catastrophic disaster happening on. earth.
Jacob:Yeah, not yet. Maybe in the future, if we have a lot of space based infrastructure and People living in the asteroid belt, it could make more sense to have some type of colony on a planet. Because there are certain protections Mars give over living on like an asteroid. It has a weak atmosphere, but it does have one, especially if we build it up. but yeah, no, I think if we're going to colonize anything, the moon makes way more sense.
Lucas:Yes,
Jacob:absolutely. But that would be a different episode. Thank you so much for listening to the show. We both sincerely hope you enjoyed it. You can keep up on the latest news over on our website at entropy rising. com or join the conversation at our subreddit, Rising Entropy. We release a new episode every other week, so follow to stay in the loop.
