r/interestingasfuck
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u/22Fingers
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Jul 01 '22
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NASA's future habitats on mars Not interesting as fuck
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u/MaybeUnderTheBed Jul 01 '22
This company was actually part of a competition presented by NASA, that had the goal of designing a house that can be made on Mars without humans, but this particular company didn't win, due to the fact that NASA said there were to many moving parts to guarantee success.
The team that did win, had the idea of sending a 3d printing platform that would 3d print a tall 'vase like' house, that even had windows! . After winning they decided to use the 3d printer to help construct houses in impoverished areas in South America.
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u/InconsistentEffort20 Jul 01 '22
there were to many moving parts to guarantee success.
AKA the idea is so excessively optimistic about technology that it is in fact ridiculous.
They've made things as fancy as possible to look cool when the most important rule of engineering is to make things as simple as possible.
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u/Foreign-Teach5870 Jul 01 '22 edited Jul 04 '22
The brum gatherer was a good idea and one that with much more revision(AKA make the rest of it much more simpler) is still usable. NASA are still considering using one day.
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u/Ludwigofthepotatoppl Jul 02 '22
Total sci-fi pipedream stuff. It’s cool as fuck, i can’t deny that, but… all the little unicycles are bullshit.
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u/Crispy_AI Jul 01 '22
CGI has a lot to answer for when it comes to false expectations.
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u/Who_said_that_ Jul 01 '22
Just slap a chill ncs beat and some cgi together and your Kickstarter campaign is ready to disappoint all the backers.
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u/Crispy_AI Jul 01 '22
Thats it. From Musk’s hair-brained futurism to indigogo free energy scams, if it can be animated then some idiot will give money to it.
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u/squirrel_trousers Jul 01 '22
That first robot - claptrap, what happened to you?!
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u/MistaYinSiege Jul 01 '22
Why not build underground? Like 40 feet down or maybe more. Wouldn't that be safer from the elements on the surface of Mars.
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u/certain_people Jul 01 '22
Lava tubes. Natural enormous underground cave systems. It is the obvious solution.
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u/LordShrekOgre Jul 02 '22
Would it better to land on the ice caps and get a North Pole like thing going on? or is that a super dumb idea?
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u/certain_people Jul 02 '22
I mean you'll reduce your radiation but introduce a heap of other problems like access to the resources we'd need in the rocks
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u/Rickk020 Jul 01 '22
So another 150 years or so?
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u/luovahulluus Jul 01 '22
I believe SpaceX will drag NASA kicking and screaming to Mars in the next 20 years.
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u/Sethjolsen Jul 01 '22
This is just a fancy animation, the science and mechanics behind it are most likely nonexistent.
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u/AffectionateBus672 Jul 01 '22
Hahahah, how can one wheel steer on itself ? Kick a cylindrical object, it will streght forward and backward only.
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u/Who_said_that_ Jul 01 '22
With the power of bullshit cgi. You just gotta believe, then maybe anything is possible. But probably not.
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u/cronx42 Jul 01 '22
How about we learn how to make self sustaining habitats here on earth first. Then if we can do that, maybe try on Mars?
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u/kester76a Jul 01 '22
Not really sure how these robots stand up to high speed winds, my guessing is not very well. I always assumed that they would have smaller robots that worked like termites constructing individual nests and joining to finish the design.
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u/slybob Jul 01 '22
With 1% the air density of earth and top wind speeds at the surface of only 65mph, high speed winds don't cause much damage at all on Mars. But the dust gets everywhere.
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u/kester76a Jul 01 '22
I've heard it's statically charged so it sticks to pretty much any surface. I guess the robots have a discharge system for cleaning and hunker down during storms. Does the lower pressure reduce the power of the storm?
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u/slybob Jul 01 '22 edited Jul 13 '22
Vastly, yes. You could barely even fly a kite (though the higher you go the faster the windstorms). The wind storm at the beginning of The Martian was exaggerated for dramatic effect, it wouldn't even have knocked anything over.
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u/tren0r Jul 01 '22
stop trying to colonize mars its a living hellhole. we have a perfectly inhabitable planet at our disposal, we should first work on trying to not fuck it up.
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u/mauriciomb Jul 01 '22
yeah because NASA and its miniscule budget is going to solve that.
Will you tell other agencies to stop doing what they're doing and instead focus on saving the planet?
NASA has nothing to do with "not fucking up this planet." Their purpose is space and beyond.
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u/MatsRivel Jul 01 '22
I mean, it is pretty cool. Though ut is also sadly not even remotely realistic in the near future. I've worked with automated warehouse robots and there is always one getting stuck or doing some dumb shit. They work as individuals, so imagine giving one in a supplychain break down....
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u/benabart Jul 01 '22
3d printing in the building industry?
On a regular soil?
This is a big nono for me.
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u/SharkCream Jul 01 '22
The single wheeled robots can turn?
Maybe the wheel can change diameters on each side? seems tricky
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u/BonjinTheMark Jul 01 '22
The nail biter is that any one of these devices that malfunctions means instant doom
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u/BadeBik Jul 01 '22
Everything looks nice, but what is the solution for radiation that is 40x Earth's in value? Humans wouldn't even make it to the surface, let alone live there.
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u/PepperNovel4276 Jul 01 '22
The humans will destroy also Mars
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u/Who_said_that_ Jul 01 '22
We aren't even capable of destroying earth. Do you know how much energy is required to crush a planet? All nuclear warheads combined wouldn't suffice.
Edit spelling.
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u/jealousmonk88 Jul 01 '22
obviously the best first step is living in dug tunnels. 3d printing a habitat on mars is retarded.
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u/Klaus_Von_Richter Jul 01 '22
I understand exploring Mars and other planets . I do not understand why people would want to colonize mars. No matter how bad Earth gets it will still be better than Mars.
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u/OnionToothpaste Jul 01 '22
The point isn't to replace earth. The few people who think we'll escape to Mars when climate change gets too bad on earth are absolute morons.
The point is that, in a long time when a Mars colony is self-sufficient without supplies from earth, we'll have a backup of humanity and all other life we bring along. It's only a matter of time until some catastrophe wipes us out on earth. Asteroids, super vulcanos, whatever. Eventually it will happen. If at that point we're still only on earth, we go extinct. If we're on multiple planets, we don't.
With each additional planet, the chance of total extinction rapidly approaches zero. If we don't colonise any other planets at all, the chance slowly approaches one.
It all boils down to one simple question: Do you want humanity and earthly life in general to continue existing for as long as possible? If your answer is yes, you should be in favour of the colonisation of Mars and beyond. Refusing to expand means guaranteed extinction.
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u/Crispy_AI Jul 01 '22
Personally, I couldn’t give a shit about whether humankind survives a planet destroying apocalypse. I’m genuinely curious, why would it be considered important, and important enough to invest so many resources in?
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u/OnionToothpaste Jul 01 '22
Regarding that first part, of course you can have that opinion, but I'd assume most people would disagree. Personally, I like existing and I think it'd be a good thing if life continues for a long time after I'm gone.
Also remember it's not just humanity. Life on earth in general will not be around forever. So far we're the only species in the history of this planet that can potentially leave it, to begin slowly spreading life throughout the solar system and eventually the galaxy. Billions and billions of planets full of life, countless individuals of many different species that can experience joy and sadness, love and heartbreak, make music and art and learn about this insanely interesting universe of ours that we know next to nothing about yet.
I don't understand how anyone could think that would be a bad thing, or even be indifferent to it. Wouldn't it be deeply sad if all of this potential is wasted? I honestly can't think of anything more important in the long term.
Of course we have many other problems here and now, but solving those does not depend on the miniscule amount of resources we currently dedicate to space. For example, the entire budget of NASA is less than half a percent of the US federal budget. And getting mass to orbit is about to become significantly cheaper with the development of reusable heavy lift launch vehicles like Starship.
Even if all of the above is completely irrelevant to you, and all you care about are the problems of people living on earth right now, investing in space related technology is still worth it, for the simple fact that it forces us to solve difficult engineering problems and make scientific discoveries that will inevitably have useful applications on earth. It's not like we're shooting money into space instead of solving world hunger or climate change or whatever. If anything, living off earth will help us solve these problems, for example by forcing us to develop new methods to efficiently produce food or scrub CO2 from the air. Look up a list of technologies developed for space related things, it's almost unbelievable how many useful things there are. Innovation happens out of necessity and it's important that we always challenge ourselves to solve new difficult problems, even if we don't know in advance what other uses their solutions might have.
Well this got a bit longer than I expected, sorry lol.
TLDR: Space exploration is important in the long term (opinion) and useful in the short term (fact).
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u/Crispy_AI Jul 01 '22
That was longer than I expected. You started with ‘I like existing’ and I don’t disagree with that, but we’re very much talking at the macro level when considering the survival of the species beyond planet earth. All of the value of human life that you identified exists only in the human mind, individually or collectively. Remove the humans and the value disappears.
Remove one human and there are negative consequences on other humans, remove all humans (via an apocalyptic event) and the cosmos returns to where it was just a blink of a metaphorical cosmological eye ago, there’s nobody left to care. So we’re left with a potential choice of saving human kind in a likely very limited way and leaving people to care about the deaths of billions of fellow humans, or don’t and leave nobody or anything to care.
I accept all you say about space exploration and scientific understanding, but think the benefits of actually inhabiting other worlds is more marginal.
Anyway, that was a bit rushed and a someone disjointed, but
TLDR: I don’t think it actually matters either way.
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u/My_Lucid_Dreams Jul 02 '22
It’s all fun and games the heat runs out. Let the private billionaires waste their money in space. We need every dime to save ourselves here. Your dreams, while romantic, are simply not possible.
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u/Butterbuddha Jul 01 '22
Vulcanos. Spock riding up in a low rider on air bags with the Virgin Mary painted on the hood.
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u/My_Lucid_Dreams Jul 02 '22
Mars will never be self-sufficient unless you like living underground eating slime.
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u/SPPANK666 Jul 01 '22
Too bad you’ll die of radiation poison on mars. And the dust is pervasive and lethal too.
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u/Drunk_General Jul 01 '22
Hmmm is it just me or does this concept look like it needs a couple of more years in the own? Very high tech robots doubt heavy duty industrial jobs, balancing on top of a structure in an insanely harsh environment? Might look like it works in concept but hard to believe in reality.
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u/radiddillyatler87 Jul 01 '22
Cool a video to hype up rich people so that soon they and there families can leave the earth they helped destroy behind. Yay!!
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u/Number127 Jul 01 '22
No matter how badly we fuck up Earth, it'll still be a lot more pleasant to live on than Mars.
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u/Black6Blue Jul 01 '22
Thought everything looked way over-designed, then I saw it was a concept from an architecture firm.
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u/UrbanwoodBrew Jul 01 '22
Would person alive today ? No. We can't even live on Earth without problems, tf makes you think just being alive on Mars isn't a giant problem alone?
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u/Avarus_Lux Jul 01 '22
With the exception of some of the details like for example the holographic display and unicycle robot bodies this looks pretty feasible even with todays technology. The biggest challenge i suppose would probably be getting the required and likely fairly heavy components into space which is apparently a lot of parts and many separate modules along with their backups because in such a complex system there's bound to be errors and failing parts making this very expensive to get into space to begin with. also getting these on the surface of mars in the next step and land safely in a coordinated effort, close and reliable enough, for it to actually be executed is probably why it can't be done yet.
Would i live there? Maybe... I know i'd likely would here on earth....
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u/rodgek8 Jul 01 '22
The robots alone make this unfeasible. What is the plan for dust or maintenance on the robots? How are they powered? What happens when a robots battery dies? How does a mono wheel robot turn? With what money do you build these robots? What about the chip shortage? What do you do with malfunctioning robots in the way of construction? Just doesn’t make sense practically.
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u/Avarus_Lux Jul 01 '22 edited Jul 01 '22
Maintenance and Dust, probably similar to the rovers already there and built to withstand that, so none, these should at least be built to last just long enough to finish the construction job as us their goal.
Power? Probably nuclear RTG's, like the perseverance rover is currently using. Maybe the whole setup is combined with additional solar power modules creating additional output options for resource processing. Batteries are your least concern and have been used on rovers for decades, storage modules can be brought along, their biggest isseu is the weight, but this weight issue will be a problem for all of this project and getting it there like i mentioned.
I agree on the mono-wheel being an issue as i said. Turning and balancing them is possible as on earth you can use gyroscopes which can even make solid block robots move (the link is from 2013, tech has advanced even more since then), this mono-wheel design is quite silly and not practical though, yet the swarm idea is valid in it's own right. I do think a multifunctional swarm with interchangeable parts and options has a bigger chance of survival, success and completion then several specialist machines where if one fails all fail. This swarm aspect does add to the complexity though.
Chip shortage is irrelevant in this discussion, that's a political and monetary problem and in this what if scenario we must assume the necessary chips and components are available. And seeing we can buy computers and advanced electronics as consumers still, the government and companies as Nasa have less issues on that aspect as they are higher priority and will be able to get what they need.
To combat Malfunctioning robots you would bring spares, i literally mentioned that. If one is detected to be broken or not performing right it is put aside, deactivated and replaced, practically speaking we have done such practices in the past with machines and components. Then once live crews get to mars after construction examinations for repairs and maintenance can be made for more projects or they're simply recycled and reused for the need of the people that are supposed to live there.
It makes sense and could be executed, its just very complex, weighs a lot and is very expensive with many individual parts and this is why nasa didn't accept this as winner. Another quite similar 3d printing concept did win.
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