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A comment on Mars’ underground brine could be a good source of oxygen. Parent comment

Re:Mars’ underground brine could be a good source of oxygen by ethagknight on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @07:43AM (#25275825)
It makes me think of that Russian mining town that is very far north with high pollution and horrible winters that basically last year round.. no one lives there except for the people paid very nicely (in relative terms) to be there to mine valuable materials. There are probably materials in abundance on/in Mars that people get paid to live there to extract, process, and send back to earth. Only then does it make sense to say “well we could really use a dentist up here, and a little deli, and maybe a store for home goods. And we can’t keep the team members away from each other, what do we do with all these children that have popped up, perhaps an elementary school?” Like many colonies, the first large foray of onto another planet may involve slave or political exile labor.

I’m not much of a sci fi person, but there are real economic reasons to set up shop on Mars beyond a mere achievement for mankind.

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Re:Mars’ underground brine could be a good source of oxygen by lazide on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @08:24AM (#25276110)
That remote mining town also has something going for it that Mars doesn't - economic viability. The energy cost of going to and from mars makes any sort of known resource extraction economically unviable. Palladium, one of the most valuable elements in existence (and probably the most valuable in wide use), is ~$2400/troy oz. At 21967 troy oz/ton, that is ~ $53 million/ton or $76k/kg. Ignoring decreases in prices if a supply was found large enough to fund a Mars colony (2018 saw only 9 million ozt or 409 tons of supply), current return costs are in the billions of $/KG. 3 order of magnitude decrease would still be millions $/KG, and that is assuming there are nuggets lying on the ground that a robot could easily pick up and ship back.

Now one can argue - that is current technology. And that is correct. But you would need to get interplanetary total mining/collection/launch/return costs to sub $76k/kg to even be economically neutral, in the most ideal situation, for literal palladium nuggets sitting on the ground in essentially a big pile near your launch site.

We could speculate on the potential improvement in costs, etc. and they might eventually come. But what we don't have so far is anything on mars economically worth getting or living there to get, even at 'drive there in my car' costs, let along launch costs.

Going to mars as a purely a exploration/discovery/science project/hobby - totally worthwhile. So far we have no reason to believe it's economically worthwhile actually living there.

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Re:Mars’ underground brine could be a good source of oxygen by m4rtink on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @08:00AM (#25275911)
Resouces from Mars will most likely be sent to orbiting shipyards to build ships for conquering The Belt rather than to Earth.
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Re:Mars’ underground brine could be a good source of oxygen by rbanffy on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @08:05AM (#25275954)
In that regard, the Moon may be a much better spot - lower delta-v to orbit, simple availability of highly specialized, long supply-chain components (from Earth), abundant solar (4+x Mars). It gets hotter than Mars, which is an issue, but I'd assume most delicate things would live underground, in lava tubes or similar places (which probably have abundant water ice easily extractable).
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Re:Mars’ underground brine could be a good source of oxygen by girvo on Wednesday December 02, 2020 @08:29AM (#25276141)
The lack of even a thin atmosphere might prove troubling, but we’ll have to conquer that if we wish to expand to the belt regardless, I think...

The Expanse books really got my imagination going!

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Re:Mars’ underground brine could be a good source of oxygen by m4rtink on Thursday December 03, 2020 @12:06AM (#25285596)
Right ? And they did that just by introducing a super efficient torch drive. Otherwise most technology is not that much advanced from what we have now, yet there is a believable human civilization spanning preatty much the entire Solar System.

Expanse is a really nice demonstration that drive technology is one of the most important if not the most important technology for space settlement. :)

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