That's where a larger group helps versus the 3 men on Apollo, or 4 people for Artemis. Having a larger pool of personal will ease a lot of social friction. It's also likely that a laser comms connection will be readily available, that is a large part of why starlink developed laser link between satellites.
I expect before people go that SpaceX will put a small constellation of starlink satellites in orbit of mars. I could also see them putting a bunch of probes on a starship and having them separate in martian orbit, landing at candidate sites. The combination of the 2 will lead to a lot of valuable data to decide where humans will land first.
Around mars it's likely the satellites will be in a higher orbit, but there's no internet needing low latency there either, at least not at first. They could be a basis for a mars positioning system. If a lower orbit is used they could potentially use synthetic aperture radar to get high resolution scans of the surface. It's probable that many starships will already be waiting on the surface by the time humans make the trek out there. Presumably loaded with food, equipment parts etc... For how quickly the ships are fabricated we aren't looking at a scenario where ships are in short supply.
The reduced air pressure on mars also means keeping warm will be significantly easier than in Antarctica. Convective heat transfer is much slower. Protecting against conduction isn't too challenging. Seeing how a spacesuit is necessary on mars building one that can retain enough heat to be comfortable isn't really a herculean effort. Far easier than a suit for the moon, mars doesn't really have grains of regolith that are consistently sharp and abrasive like earths moon has. On mars there's more a fine powdery substance, it was called "fines" in the red mars novel.
It's irritating to see people claim it's colder than antarctica but never a discussion how the reduced atmospheric pressure makes it easier to keep warm.
Mars not having a magnetosphere isn't as short term a need. The atmosphere stripping away is on geologic timescales, not human ones. Even then, we could put a superconducting ring between Sol and Mars and get the same effect as far as solar wind stripping the atmosphere. It would be a big project, but not impossible. It's also a project that won't possibly start until people live there permanently.
Worrying about the atmosphere stripping away is akin to worrying about the smaller of Mars two moons being on a path that will impact in 100,000+ years with the surface of mars.
In many problem domains mars is an easier target for long term habitation than the moon, the biggest challenge is getting there. The retorts from people here about farming miss that we don't need 'soil' to farm, there are techniques that mostly just need water and vitamins that can dissolve into it. At Epcot they have a system to breed fish and use the fish waste for feeding plants to grow. Throw in mycelium for handling human waste and you have an efficient system for augmenting food production.
A serious effort for mars will have as many or more spinoff technologies as Apollo gave us. The computers we are using today are further along in development from the massive influx of effort to make computers that could fit in space capsules. With the acidification we are causing in the ocean, a reliable way of converting C02 to oxygen at scale might be needed here on earth to prevent an oxygen collapse within decades. Climate change is a bitch, and it could give an excuse to start charging people for breathable air here on earth so the cynics may be right about that eventually happening. That possible disaster just isn't on even most climate scientist radars yet.
There will be other spinoff technologies we just don't see yet. The large rocketry needed to get there also opens up resource extraction from near earth objects. There's massive material wealth just barely outside our present grasp. It would be nice for materials like platinum and gold to follow in the footsteps of aluminum in becoming common enough to be usable for trivial items. Aluminum was a precious metal just a few hundred years ago in its refined form. Gold nanoparticles look like a candidate that could make current GLP-1 drugs obsolete, it works in animal studies but not tested in humans yet. Manufacturing in space is also on the verge of practicality. Metal foams, ultra low attenuation glass and optically transparent aerogels can be made in microgravity that are superior to the versions that can be made here on earth. Metal foams would be ideal for making ships, cars and planes that are much lower weight than we can make now without loss of strength, less weight means fewer watts per mile and less material needed.
The people whining about the idea always seem to miss the secondary effects of making the effort and always see to paint the optimistic take as naive, really they are just demonstrating short sighted thinking.
I have an automation that turns it on whenever I take the phone off the charger. You can also set it up with locations. So I have an automation that tweaks a few settings when I get to one of the disney parks here in FL. It's usually keep the screen fairly dim on manual brightness, but set it to auto there. Its really hard to see the screen when it's bright in the great big room.
I have an M2 Max with 64Gb of ram. It handles everything I throw at it. Runs the 30ish gigabyte deepseek model fine. I will admit for gaming I pretty much just stick to Cyberpunk 2077, Minecraft, Stray, Viscera Cleanup Simulator and old games with open source engine options. I'm happy I can play Cyberpunk with my screen on full brightness using 30w, compared to my Xeon windows machine taking 250w for lower frame rates.
The Hobbit films were shot in native 3D, and 48hz. It's a shame we can't get the high frame rate version at home, more of a shame we can't get Avatar The Way of Water at 48. The hobbit could've worked as 2 films, but 3 was stretching it too far.
If you take stereo photos and want a way to view them. Go to an Antique store and get a stereoscope. They can be purchased inexpensively. Have your photos printed on 5x7 with the images arranged like a stereo card. Perfect color, prints are inexpensive, if your willing to send away you can get photos on matte paper so they look better than most stereo cards.
The lenses you can get for an SLR tho are much better than what rPi cameras usually come with. If you use film era fully manual lenses you can get amazing quality for next to nothing. If your shooting objects that are still, taking longer exposures or exposure brackets is trivial. I wish there was an GUI program for tethered cameras that still had an option to capture multiple frames each time you trigger it and average them for an output frame. It's strange that feature was removed, in the SD video era there were lots of options for that.
The catch is that if you charge less than a small difference to your next closest competitor people will think something is wrong with it. Saw it happen many times working at an antique store for years. It was amazing how often raising prices made things sell that had been sitting there for months, or longer. You rarely want to make something too inexpensive, along with never using the word "cheap". There's also issues with trying to give something away for free. Generally people value something more depending on what they paid for it. Upscale brands like Coach and Channel exploit that aspect of consumer psychology.
That makes sense unless you are in an area with hurricanes. In places with a high probability of a hurricane hit they have started doing framing with the zip sheathing so it looks like a monopoly house, then they add overhangs that can break off in severe wind rather than taking the roof with it.
It's a shame more houses don't get built with ICF, including the roof. Living in an area that gets hurricanes at least every other year I would happily take a smaller house to get something that could stand up to category 4-5 hurricane.
I expect before people go that SpaceX will put a small constellation of starlink satellites in orbit of mars. I could also see them putting a bunch of probes on a starship and having them separate in martian orbit, landing at candidate sites. The combination of the 2 will lead to a lot of valuable data to decide where humans will land first.
Around mars it's likely the satellites will be in a higher orbit, but there's no internet needing low latency there either, at least not at first. They could be a basis for a mars positioning system. If a lower orbit is used they could potentially use synthetic aperture radar to get high resolution scans of the surface. It's probable that many starships will already be waiting on the surface by the time humans make the trek out there. Presumably loaded with food, equipment parts etc... For how quickly the ships are fabricated we aren't looking at a scenario where ships are in short supply.
reply