The questions remain - why do you want silicon? What's the energy source? Iron's a possibility. sure, but the obstacles are the same. Will the shoe box carry all this electrolysis/smelting gear around? The entire concept is ridiculous.
Which is at least a century or three, otherwise we wouldn't need the mineshafts at all. If you can ride out a nuclear war by hiding in a prepper bunker or lead-lined refrigerator for a decade or so, you call that an apocalypse? I don't. I'd bet there'd even be places on the surface untouched by the grace of the atom. No, no, for your analogy to work it has to be a level of armageddon devastating enough for someone on Mars to look up from their meager subsistence lives barely clinging on despite the full extent of technology at their disposal and still go "whoo dang, sure glad that ain't us!"
They won't be saying that, they'll be saying "◊◊◊◊, there goes our supply of replacement solar panels, antibiotics, anaesthetics and ..."
The way I see it, we're a good 1000-2000 years away from having any chance at all of establishing a self-sustaining colony on Mars. It's so far away that there's no point in planning for it now, or even working towards it now. We should be working on all kinds of things for their own sake, because they have immediate beneficial applications here on Earth.
Silly comparison, she was saying they already had the technology. All I and I suspect others are saying is that its worth working on a little at a time. As far as I can tell nobody in this thread is saying it is something we can achieve anytime soon or even something we need to start some Apollo type program to due. Its true, it can not be done with the knowledge and technology we have right now. I have no idea what we will be able to do in 100 years, 500 years what ever. As noted by some detractor a good portion of the technology we'd need to do it would likely be directly applicable to living on earth.
What we have here is a failure of imagination.
Life started from nothing on Earth 3.7 Billion years ago. And today we have self-driving cars.
Can someone show me why the billions of years of random walk natural selection could not be replicated in a much shorter period of time by a society just a little bit more advanced than ours. (30 years, 50 years, 100?)?
We have the model. We know it can be done.
Baby steps guys. Baby steps.
How do you build something on Mars?
Let's say you've picked the perfect spot for building a settlement on Mars. But this opens up some pretty nasty questions. Building…what? And building….with what? There are no trees to chop down to construct temporary structures. There are no campfires you can build to keep warm while you start...phys.org
And, for those missing the point on the shoe-box, think of it as a seed that contains the programming to make a more complex entity. This entity does things the original box could not do such as build machines with even more abilities.
I suppose you could put a battery inside?
And carry a small solar panel. You could do 10 yards every few days, except that it would get stuck on the rocky surface in no time flat.
Or it could brew a cuppa.
www.theregister.com
According to the linked article "Unfortunately, the Martian tea failed to grow at all." This is not Overnight to Moon, so off topicOr it could brew a cuppa.
Brit scientists over the Moon after tea grown in lunar soil
: It's one small sip for man...
One of those, 'we have so much money we don't know what to spend it on', dilemmas.
I've been saying for a while that the next stage of human space travel will be wealthy hobbyists self-funding their hobby. That's the way I think it should be. Manned missions to Mars should be a private venture, not a public works project. I don't have any problem with that. I don't even have any problem with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos taking public funds to develop their pet technologies - as long as those technologies have other, more immediate applications in the public good. It's very depressing to me that NASA is investing in manned spaceflight right now.
I've been saying that too. They're the only ones who can afford such blue-sky projects. Governments certainly can't.
