Regarding our discussion on resource self-sufficiency of a Mars colony. Would it ever be possible (from a resource perspective that is..) A NASA report on availability of resources.
A self-sufficiency trade study described in Boston (1996) identifies the mission duration at which the development of local life support resources becomes advantageous. Within 30 days, without recycling, or with the equivalent leakage, it becomes advantageous to derive oxygen from local resources. The time constants for water and food are about 6 months and 3 years, respectively.
"The forecasts were the product of a series of "summer studies" led by NASA's Ames Research Centre and Stanford University, at which top academics, scientists, and engineers gathered to imagine how future space colonies could look. Artists gave life to the blueprints, producing a stunning series of images that look like a cross between CGI real-estate models (complete with would-be residents smugly sipping wine) and the fantastical worlds of Isaac Asimov."
This pattern of interactions matches how humans share information on social networking sites like Facebook, says the study's lead author, biologist Noa Pinter-Wollman. Most Facebook users are connected to a relatively small number of friends. A handful of users, however, have thousands of friends and act as information hubs.
computer simulations of the ants' social networks showed that information flows fastest when a small number of individuals act as information hubs. Fast-flowing information allows ant colonies to respond faster to threats such as predators and weather hazards, Pinter-Wollman says.
These well-connected ants might have an advantage in responding to threats, but they are also more vulnerable to infectious diseases, which can spread quickly through the colony.
"As in a colony of ants, "there's no centralized leader per se," Rubenstein says." Thought of ant colony document permanently on Dario's desk. Some relevance?
Research in active-matter systems is a growing field in biology. It consists in using theoretical statistical physics in living systems such as molecule colonies to deduce macroscopic properties. The aim and hope is to understand how cells divide, take shape and move on these systems.
Being a crossing field between physics and biology "The pot of gold is at the interface but you have to push both fields to their limits." one can read
Maybe we should discuss about this active matter one of these days?
"These are the hallmarks of systems that physicists call active matter, which have become a major subject of research in the past few years. Examples abound in the natural world - among them the leaderless but coherent flocking of birds and the flowing, structure-forming cytoskeletons of cells. They are increasingly being made in the laboratory: investigators have synthesized active matter using both biological building blocks such as microtubules, and synthetic components including micrometre-scale, light-sensitive plastic 'swimmers' that form structures when someone turns on a lamp. Production of peer-reviewed papers with 'active matter' in the title or abstract has increased from less than 10 per year a decade ago to almost 70 last year, and several international workshops have been held on the topic in the past year."
Sure they are very useful! It will be even better if they manage to fit the data to modeled circulation of the lunar magma ocean that was formed posterior to the "Theia" body collision with Earth. The collision was the cause of the magma ocean in the first place.
The question now is how this circulation pattern of the lava-moon "froze" in time upon phase transition to solid. Because, what crystallizes last in sequence, is more rich in "incompatible" with the crystal structure, elements, we might combine data+models to predict their location.
Those incompatible tracers are mainly radioactively decaying elements that produce heat
(google publications about lunar KREEP elements (potassium (K), rare earth elements(REE), and phosphorus(P)).
By knowing where the KREEP is:
- we know where to dig for them mining
(if they are useful for something, eg. Phosphorus for plants to be grown on the Moon)
- we avoid planning to build the future human colony on top of radioactives, of course.
The hope is that the Moon, due to lack of plate tectonics, has preserved this "signature of the freezing sequence".
Let's see.
At SRI International in Silicon Valley, researchers have developed perhaps the most impressive microbot army yet: the MicroFactory. It's an ant colony made robotic, with half-millimeter machines zipping around to construct truly impressive structures.