Elon Musk's ticket to Mars will be less meaningful (if we take the word 'colonization' seriously) unless somebody can stick several thousand people into a hermetic sealed box and they are still alive and thriving after 10 years.
I've been disappointed with the lack of progress in closed loop systems to date. There was Biosphere 2, a great ambitious start. Then a few years ago there was Kamen's Slingshot (outcome unknown). That and the ISS toilet doesn't work properly. It's an un-sexy topic and there hasn't been much progress.
I see houses are heading towards zero energy from the grid, but a magic box which would reliably and cheaply convert black/gray water to high quality drinking water and turn poop and organics into energy bricks to eliminate sewage plants and septic tanks seems like a technology we should have invented a long time ago.
Off topic, I enjoyed 'A Colder War' and was curious about your thoughts on Gene Wolfe.
a magic box which would reliably and cheaply convert black/gray water to high quality drinking water and turn poop and organics into energy bricks to eliminate sewage plants and septic tanks seems like a technology we should have invented a long time ago.
We have invented such a "magic box" -- but it's large-scale: that's what municipal sewage farms mostly do (modulo the final step of turning poop into energy bricks: sewage is generally too contaminated to be economical to turn into safe biofuel without expensive treatment). Also, it relies extensively on bacterial fermentation and takes a lot of human intervention to control.
The ISS toilet that keeps malfunctioning is the American one, no? Because I seem to recall the USSR cracking the urine-to-drinking-water problem on Mir a couple of decades ago. (Not Invented Here is a besetting problem with NASA, which for political reasons isn't allowed to Buy Foreign.)
That would be huge. Together with passive house technology each and every house in a city, town or countryside would be 'off grid'. That kind of independence would make our infrastructure much less fragile. Building downwards (a recent topic) will be easier.
- Our magic box is an isolation point for dangerous and toxic substances.
That will prevent every household from contributing toxicity to the surrounding environment. Adaptions to new forms of waste become possible at source.
If toxic elements can be compacted and stored, useful compounds/elements derived, and some used for energy, then in the future we won't need pipes anymore than we needed pneumatic tubes for sending messages/parcels once we developed automotive transport. The self driving bots will simply visit periodically for a new cargo to be delivered as industrial inputs. Since the magic box performs some level of element/compound sorting there is probably a market where your waste is automatically profiled and sold. It pays for at least part of its own operation.
Last but not least many countries have no ability to construct decent infrastructure for political reasons. The magic box solves that problem in a way that scales with population.
tldr; Back to the future, since 'night soil' historically was a commodity collected from each household.
> The ISS toilet that keeps malfunctioning is the American one, no? Because I seem to recall the USSR cracking the urine-to-drinking-water problem on Mir a couple of decades ago.
Yes. Calcium from astronaut bones (another serious issue) was clogging up the system at a much higher rate than on the terrestrial surface.
I don't know how the Russians solved it but I sometimes think with Americans Business acumen and Russian Science there would be very little we couldn't get accomplished. I'm sure you've heard of Russian phage technology for medical treatment. Cures for alcoholism.
One of the things that is fascinating about the Cold War is how we saw Science developing differently. That is something that should trouble the thoughts of more people.
The thing is, they don't need to be hermetically sealed for 10 years on a small scale. They just need to be self-sufficient long enough for the next supply wessels initially, until they can build up sufficient scale to be able to start solving the problems themselves and the environmental scale is sufficient that you buy time to fix problems that pop up.
Scale "solves" a lot of these issues by buying time and providing a population large enough to do the work required to fix things.
By '10 years' in a hermetically sealed box I meant an experiment on Earth to understand the inputs/outputs so we could give scientific and engineering advice when something goes wrong in the Mars biosphere. Biosphere 2 failed for unforeseen circumstances. This experiment would also be a good way to select for the kind of people capable of being the first explorers.
You need to bootstrap the process but due to changes of government, economic troubles, you have a finite window in which to scale successfully. Building that biosphere becomes important fast.
Even the most exacting monarchs had limited control over what happened in the colonies due to distance and time. The further you extend your reach, the more autonomy you have to give to the peripheral. It's like a law of nature.
Talking of giving up control there's a funny book by Wernher von Braun (of German rocket science fame) where he claims the leader of the Martians will be called 'Elon'. I wouldn't have believed it if I had not seen it.
I agree it definitively increases risk. But I also think that it is inevitable that such a colony will be highly dependent on supply runs for longer than we'd like.
> where he claims the leader of the Martians will be called 'Elon'. I wouldn't have believed it if I had not seen it.
It's a funny coincidence, but not that improbable: Elon is a biblical name.
I've been disappointed with the lack of progress in closed loop systems to date. There was Biosphere 2, a great ambitious start. Then a few years ago there was Kamen's Slingshot (outcome unknown). That and the ISS toilet doesn't work properly. It's an un-sexy topic and there hasn't been much progress.
I see houses are heading towards zero energy from the grid, but a magic box which would reliably and cheaply convert black/gray water to high quality drinking water and turn poop and organics into energy bricks to eliminate sewage plants and septic tanks seems like a technology we should have invented a long time ago.
Off topic, I enjoyed 'A Colder War' and was curious about your thoughts on Gene Wolfe.