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Title: Elon Musk will take us to Mars – will it be home? | Reinier Zeldenrust | TEDxLondonBusinessSchool
Published: 2017-07-07
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P54QZ3HYf8g
so like most kids I grew up loving space lab space I'm and when I can really become an astronaut like many people I became an astrophysicist instead but I also I also love buildings so for the last two years I've been working on and on making buildings more sustainable but I never been able to combine these two loves swim quite frustrating until last year because last
year my hero even musk came up and and and and presented missed this %HESITATION vision of of going to Mars and next in the next decade to send us this the fetus spaceships tomorrow's and send a million people there by the end of the century and it was a wonderful story wonderful vision it was forty story reusable rocket hundred day trip to Mars not for only
two hundred thousand dollars you know I'm sold and %HESITATION at first I was really in all of this technological vision I was I was very impressed I'm but by the end you know that he he I'm sure this video and it by the end of the video I was most intrigued by the final shot of the video because it shows this barren desert so if we're
going to move million people to Mars and this is what it looks like where they had to live what kind of buildings how will we build them and how willingly make them systemic so tune Johnson his questions and I'd like to take you on a trip with me so a few years ago and my fiance cheated me for my birthday on a on a camping trip
but we didn't just take our bags and and when camping and we went camping by kayak which meant that we had to load attacks with everything we needed for this trip as we know it loaded up our tent sleeping bags very carefully measured amounts of food got the spreadsheets with down to the ground how much food we brought and it was many fire wood on on
the island so we asked as we took fire witnesses well and and we loaded our cat paddle to the middle of the lake and we stayed on this beautiful island for two short days sadly and then you know we have to break up can and go back to society and why am I telling you this well because so far that's kind of what we've been doing
in space no we went to the moon on a camping trip we we took a tent lunar lander and we took freeze dried food took a fuel cell to parity and the power of the expedition and we stay for three days that was the longest stay on on the moon and then we went back with a few souvenirs and this is also kind of what we've
been so far you know how do you mind from Martin's so this is %HESITATION drawing from the eighties illustrating what scientists are planning then emission from my eyes and you can see many of the same elements %HESITATION that were there were needed for the moon so it's a it's a minimal picker both here at lander she took her longer chit because %HESITATION Mars is three hundred
times further away than than the moon is so if you go you have to go for longer and I have to have a bigger faster rocket to get there you need nuclear reactor to power your stay here stay and I need to do with the psychological issues that come from long period of isolation but ultimately it is a bit like at a camping trip and %HESITATION
you know there's there's a few challenges but most of these challenges are some mountable and the real question is of political will and money but technically it can be done beat we can count on Mars so and so the question here is then why you know what will we need to do to make Mars more than camping trip so it's a bit like going from building
attend to building a house you know you need more protection against the elements you need %HESITATION you need a sturdier bigger building and you need a steady supply of fuel so let's start with action against the elements so it doesn't rain on Mars but lot of radiation because it's thin atmosphere and lack of magnetic field and this is fine for a short stay and by a
short time in two years just fine for short rents in the short stay but he stayed for twenty years I'm one three inhabitants would get cancer so you need to do is have a very thick layer of and material between you and I can meet her so between you and the radiation shield yourself and that's quite bulky so and Mars is foreign it's offensive to bring
stuff there's so that we can't really do that so we'll have to find local materials have to look locally become just take everything with us and so what can you do well so you can either go underground so you can either big yourself a whole one or building something here and it'll be a building or you can find one of the caves that Mars has and
be said of original settler be a caveman now that's a good option and many will work and another option is to to see them take the local building to so it turns out that if you take sound of Mars cold regolith if you take that and compress it with enough force it turns into a brick stronger than reinforced concrete and this is because of the high
iron comes into the so which is also why it's rent because it's bust colored it's basically made of rust so that's what a good option and in recent years we've also learned that Mars has a lot of water on on that polar caps for those underneath the surface so another marvelous solution I love this one is said they got the water and and melt it and
shape into an ice house the benefit is not just it I mean it is really cool but it's not just cool because it also %HESITATION is is also a good idea because it lets in light for and so you to grow and feared that this in daylight that we'll need as humans so you know it seems like we have the materials on Mars we need to
build a place we can live in for years but it's not exactly easy to build stuff on Mars because well the new work force at least not for awhile and even if there was a work force can you imagine laying bricks in a very clunky space suits it they'd be nightmare and I am no thirdly because of the radiation you kind of want the buildings to
be finished before you get there see can one round up and have your building many free so with this in mind NASA launched a few innovation challenges two years ago to look at how we can use robotics on Mars to build a building and one common approach is to take plastic that we bring from earth and Phil so build a wall and then fill it with
Martian sand and this works pretty well because your means bring bring a bit of plastic is quite lightweight and most of the bulky stuff you can find their this is a good solution the tricky thing is if ya wanna too complicated machines and something goes wrong stuck you can fix them especially if you send them before you go and and love stuff goes wrong on Mars
so far Haas of Mars landings it failed so this is quite risky and that's why there's another method which is what I'm really my favorite which is to use many many small robots not work together like insects to to serve as a swarm to build something and the benefit of this is that even if house of embrace but you still have the other house building something
for you and even if it takes longer it is a solid process that that that will complete and of course this is a very slick visualization I'm but it's actually something that people are looking at in real life as well so I'm sitting over there somewhere yep that's me I'm and I am side I was in Sweden for a week %HESITATION with a team of the
architectural firm foster and partners and we were looking at how to make these drugs so we made the robots we we probe that program them with very basic intelligence and and the real challenge was to look at how would that explore the landscape how did they shared the knowledge with each other and how do they coordinate so that they can actually work together like insects and
it was a great week and so the research in this field is actually accelerating and if you fuse tests of skill are being planned for the next few years so whether we do it fired three printers or robots working like a swarm I have a lot of confidence that we can actually build something on Mars but the the next question is can we can empower what
we build because we need a lot of power on Mars for one we need electricity to to construct the buildings you know these robots and I'm gonna work for free then one needs more money to heat our buildings I don't need to use the money to log on like to grow our food and and %HESITATION and powerful and a house so one problem is Mars has
no fossil fuels unless we suddenly discover that day Anna we had ancient civilization but they have no fossil fuels and because the wind is it %HESITATION because the atmosphere is a hundred times thinner than it is on earth you know despite what you see in the Martian of these big storms and the wind is fast but it's very thin so doesn't really do anything see Khan
Ryan wind energy so really all we can do is solar so %HESITATION so it's actually take a little example and say okay well London Mars and it's you know people who live in London don't like the weather it's cold in London but Mars is kind of a cold day so although on Mars you hope you will have days that isn't twenty five degrees but then the
nights will be minus fifty five so I guess it gets really cold you need to heat and unevenness and and the amount of sunlight that you get because of the distance is about Hough is less than half than that is America so even if you take a really efficient solar panels any insulate your building really well you still need four to five times the amount of
solar panels on Mars is you don't earth for the same purpose but I'm they can be done this is question bring low so there and the other idea is to use them so it's not most space missions I'm relying on nuclear power with plutonium and other %HESITATION elements we being from earth the Mars actually has quite a lot of and fuel for nuclear power as well
both for traditional power that we have the money but also deuterium which is a great feel for when you find the crack nuclear fusion so we can count on ours and by the looks of it we can settle there as well but there are many places that we have settled or that we have camped that we don't settle like Mount Everest or Antarctica those are some
of playgrounds for the adventurous are for the rich or other areas for scientific research but there are homes so what would it take for us to actually settle on Mars I'm I'm just thinking about this question I I I I look back at history and wondered why how humans settled in new places and the way I thought about it there is set of three main reasons
%HESITATION first one being a resources very simple second fleeing from disaster back home and third priding conquest so let's start with the easiest one most practical and resources so as I said Mars as loan deuterium which is a great fuel for nuclear fusion and it's very expensive on earth is a thousand dollars a kilogram so even accounting for transport costs it might be worth bringing back
from Mars to earth but that's relatively small compared to the next bit which is %HESITATION as action soon in the next goldrush in now in in this solar system is this asteroid mining so asteroids angrily valuable because they made of pure metal and not just Iran or any old metal is that met metals like platinum titanium and they eat so that because it's so concentrated the
relatively and is it to mine once you get there but that there is the the asteroid belt which is between Mars and Jupiter is estimated to be worth enough to make everyone every single person on earth billionaire a hundred times over there is serious money in the asteroid belt which is why you know assuming that this work won me fully automated why are first settlement on
Mars might well be financially driven because Markham Mars could be great outpost food for this kind of work so that's the that's the resources bit in the next bit is next option to set on Mars me fleeing from disaster back home but I'm actually quite cynical about this one because you Mars doesn't have much of an atmosphere it's climate is worse than the UK %HESITATION de
you know it's not easy to settle there or to make life sustainable so Mars is not a backup Perth even if we get hit by an asteroid engage in nuclear warfare or mess of climate change you'll still be easier to live on live on earth than on Mars and let's see climate change so this is a map of Europe after bully I some north is noted
eighty meters of sea level rise and it is a catastrophe I mean I lived in London on some Brussels no all gone and it'll bring you know hundreds of millions of people will need to move and when they look can't housing hundreds of millions of people you will try and house them and the easiest easiest location you want try and ship them to Mars because even
after all this catastrophe Europe still wasn't a physical space to host hundreds of millions of people and it any easier to host a refugee camp on the summit of a mountain than to bring them all tomorrow's and I also feel like if we can have the foresight to %HESITATION rally around something as complex an expensive been fundamentally life changing as setting up a new planet for
to live on then we might as well take extreme measures to cook cartel climate change I'd say what's left for earth so I don't buy this back a breathless and the next reason for settling there might well be pride in conquest so historically this this has a bad connotation because it's associated with colonialism structure and bloodshed but Mars will be different because it doesn't have an
indigenous population there is no virgin ecosystem for us to destroy so settling on Mars would be a victimless endeavor and yeah I would prefer countries to compete over something in space then compete over power here on earth and cause conflict here so I'd prefer us to return to space to a space race where countries competed over piece of rock and gain peace and scientific progress in
return sounds like a good deal to me so because that that is another thing to take into account that we will gain from all this settlement research to even there the research are going up that's going on the moment into agriculture on Mars is benefiting cyst food system production here on earth and these advanced construction methods that will likely be pay off first on Mars will
hopefully be used here on earth as well so there are many many reasons that we might go to Mars and I wish I could tell the future and tell us where we're going but if we're going and if we feel the need to go then you know I'm sure we can camp there I'm sure we can settle there and and you know it looks like we