Making Human Settlement of Space a Reality
It seems like a failure of imagination to me that the main plan is to start off sending lots of people to Mars. People are heavy, they need heavy life support, they're fragile & they require complex infrastructure to survive. If any of that support infrastructure breaks or there's an interruption in resupply missions the people die. Probably they fight to see who dies first and waste valuable resources.<p>Yes people are very versatile but almost everything useful is going to be sent from earth for decades. If the plan for building human supporting infrastructure is well thought out we shouldn't need much versatility.<p>Why not send as few humans as you can possibly get away with and as much semi-autonomous & remote operated machinery as possible. Get some of the 7 billion people on earth to design it, drive it & continually improve how autonomous it is (I imagine lag to mars will be a bitch).<p>This seems a far faster way to build a self sustaining mars backup civ. Bonus in that at some point this leads to self replicating self directed robots at which point send them to the asteroid belt & everyone can retire.<p>To that end anyone want to make a remote operated maker space? Buy some cheap land or warehouse. Ship in raw materials and see if we can build a robot factory by remote. Price of admission is sending a remote operated vehicle guess we can wire it up and broadcast it to the web. Hopefully that can fund someone to replace batteries when they inevitably run flat.