Louhy

It's true I'm thinking of the standard "boots on the ground" approach rather than a hybrid with some automation (humans only in orbit), etc. But this is what most everyone seems to mean when they say "colonize Mars". And of course, without boots on the ground, it's certainly less "fun" and interesting from the public's perspective and would probably get less support.

So anyway, speaking only on the "boots on ground" approach (wrong or not), I'm still skeptical that the problems are really solvable on a long term basis. I'm aware of the redundancy strategy space programs take - but I still feel like it's a rather thin layer of protection for a multi-year or permanent mission.

Manufacturing in space, I don't see any chance of anything significant at all in our lifetimes. A good primer on how hard manufacturing from scratch is (on Earth!) - "I, Pencil": www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYO3tOqDISE

i.e. Okay, so we've grabbed that huge metal/ice asteroid - what are the next 100-500 steps and how do we do them in the environment of space? If it is possible to do anything useful with that rock, surely it'd involve a lot of "cheating" and bringing other stuff from Earth.

If just a simple pencil is that challenging for humans to produce on Earth, requiring a large free market economy, I can't imagine a small number of people building anything of the required complexity and quality required off-planet. So to me, other than a handful of feasible production ideas such as fuel manufacturing or 3D printed items, it doesn't seem to help much. Even something seemingly simple like a solar panel (which I doubt is simple at all), or mirrors, I am guessing would be extremely difficult to produce without a ton of infrastructure in place already.

It was mentioned that some of the environmental concerns I raised (air going bad, crops dying off, etc.) are all solvable, and that I don't deny. Each problem seems to have a feasible solution. But when taken as a whole, isn't the number of problems overwhelming? Even just monitoring for problems seems challenging. The plants aren't going to tell you if something bad leaked into their water supply, dangerous odorless gasses can only be detected by sensors if they're onboard and working... (it's not so hard to imagine problems). Miss just one critical problem...

So, while I like what SpaceX is trying to do and all, are Musk and other "leaders" looking to do permanent settlement off-world uninformed and overly optimistic? Am I overly pessimistic? I feel like 20 years from now we'll end up realizing that they were all at the "peak of mount stupid", and at best we'll have a small ISS-like moon base, underfunded with an uncertain future.

Yeah, maybe I'm just way too pessimistic, but I feel like the problems are just far too numerous and hard to solve. Even with lots of robotics - mechanical stuff breaks down, and needs to be fixed. And that fixing, even if you have a human on hand who can do it in an Earth-like environment, still requires replacement parts. Unless there's also other robots to fix the broken ones, or they can fix themselves (sounds sketchy), I just can't see it working out without lots of other advances to go with it.

The "hopping" approach like you suggest improves feasibility significantly, but of course that'd put the timeline for getting anything permanent on Mars out... probably centuries? (Unless we get some breakthrough tech which lets us build in space, or something game changing.)

Are there any plans for Mars base topics using near-term (or even basically current) technology? By near term/near future here I mean from tomorrow to ~20 years from now. I'm aware of all the current videos on the topics, but they're a little further into the future. What I'm thinking of is a "deep dive" on the realism of a long term/permanent Mars (especially) or maybe a Moon base.

I can see two categories of problems:
1) Challenges getting there with enough "stuff" to stay
2) Challenges staying there (in a "not dead" state) permanently

For the first one, which I regard as much easier but still hard to do safely:
1A) How much do we know for sure about travel far beyond low Earth orbit?
1B) What don't we know?
1C) What plans have been proposed or are being actively worked on? (And by who?)
1D) What are current proposals forgetting or glossing over?

For the second category:
2A) Combating "entropy" - how do you solve manufacturing & repair problems? I see these challenges as huge, probably insurmountable in the near term. For Moon this isn't nearly as bad, if time required to launch (from no plans to rockets in the air) can be reduced enough. For Mars, reliance on Earth for replacements seems to be unrealistic for all serious problems. (Serious implying - you can't wait for months to fix it! Maybe not even days.) Based on the number of things which you can imagine going wrong, I have doubts that staying permanently on Mars with a "base" smaller than at least an entire city (minimum) is even realistic.

2B) Environment/climate - how do you ensure the "climate" of such a small base remains stable enough to support both human & plant life? What can go wrong here? The types of things that can go wrong seem very serious, ex. air poisoning (carbon dioxiode/monoxide, smoke from fire, sudden air loss / depressurization) and these things need to be fixed FAST.

2C) Human needs (other than climate/air) - while obviously we know how to grow plants, recycle water, and so on... what happens if things just go wrong? Ex. plants get a disease and fail, water gets contaminated, battery/power failure, temperature control failure, medical emergencies, resolving serious personality conflicts, or even "economic" issues such as how to share limited resources.

2D) What else can go wrong and what contingency plans are realistic?

You can tell which one I've thought about more. Discussion/expansion of those here is welcome, even though I'm also asking about any plans to turn these topics into a video or video series. There's lots of "talk" and plans to do these things, and also lots of criticisms, and sorting it all out is a challenge.

Well I'm not chuck, but to answer the question above, Fermi Paradox and alien stuff is big for me. Where are those buggers?

Just a suggestion - have you considered (if possible) a dark forum theme to go along with the "space" theme? (Ok, I admit it, all the white just makes my eyes hurt.)