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E. M. Foner on Writing Science Fiction

Giving up on Mars, again..

I think this week marks the fourth time I've given up on the Mars book I've been writing off and on for the last few years. Maybe the fifth time, I've lost track. The failure falls in the category of ideas that are too complete, meaning, I see the outcome of the book as so inevitable that there's nothing to discover and no reason to finish the last few chapters. It takes place roughly a thousand years in the future with a family leaving a utopian Earth (think Flower without the personality or the restraint) to join the Mars cooperative as pathfinders for a larger group, and that's all I'm going to say about it in case I ever finish it up and publish.

Every time I pick the book up it gets me thinking about the challenges of building a sustainable human presence on Mars, which from an engineering standpoint, is a lot tougher than living under the ocean or at the North Pole. I wish Elon Musk the greatest success with Starship, whether it is used for Mars missions or as a cheaper way to lift large payloads to Earth orbit. My own take on colonizing Mars is that there are two practical approaches that we're close to being able to support in terms of technology. Financing is another issue, and neither approach involves transporting people to the red planet any time in the near future.

The first option is to send robots to Mars to prepare for the arrival of humans. Robots require neither oxygen nor food, which are the biggest issues for the long trip and making a colony sustainable. Generating electricity to recharge robot batteries is a trivial engineering challenge, and given enough time, the robots can excavate or construct adequate air-tight shelters, retrieve ice, set up hydroponic gardens or remediate Martian soil and build greenhouses. Robots can do all of the basic preparation so that the eventual human colonists don't need to arrive with a million tons of supplies or be reliant on an endless supply train from Earth.

The second option is to take our time and build a colony ship in Earth orbit. The whole point of colony ships is that they are big enough to sustain life indefinitely, but building a city-sized cylindrical space structure that can be spun up to give the inhabitants weight and providing the motive force to move that much mass out of Earth's orbit to rendezvous with Mars is (my estimate) orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive than sending robots. Building colony ships does have the advantage that they don't have to be sent to Mars, they could be sent anywhere that the power source and reaction mass can bring them. My abandoned novel uses handwavium reactionless drive because I didn't want to get bogged down in math, which has a way of fighting back against space logistics.

I think some people are waiting for artificial general intelligence to become available to push the robots-first plan. The many minutes of radio lag to Mars (it varies between four and twenty-one minutes, depending on the distance between the planets) means that operating robots remotely, like Nasa's Mars Rovers, requires incredibly slow and deliberate movement that is far from ideal for construction. But those rovers were relatively fragile creations that were designed to be as light as possible for the mission they served. Heavy construction robots that can survive anything short of falling into a chasm will soon be available and will still be much cheaper to transport to Mars and maintain there than humans, not to mention that losing multiple robots won't trigger endless media soul searching that risks ending the program.

I had a co-op job back in the 1980's at a military contractor that specialized in radar and space systems, and the library, where my desk was located, included some interesting blue-ribbon panel reports on the space program. I still remember the introduction to one of them which stated that NASA was becoming too invested in safety and that there was an exponential factor in the cost, such that a mission with a 91% chance of success might cost ten times as much as a mission with a 90% chance of success, etc. NASA chose to pursue the maximal safety approach, which didn't prevent the loss of multiple shuttles, and we haven't been back to the moon since I was in grammar school. If we're going to worry about safety, then sending robots is the only option until space travel is developed far beyond the current state-of-the-art.