Re: Turning Phobos and Deimos into colonies

On Nov 20, 5:25 am, Cowd <hardcow...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Orbital habitats are easier to construct and support, and if done
properly, a hell of a lot more pleasant, than planetary ones. As for
terraforming, it's an order of magnitude less practical than orbital
settlement. Considered practically, it seems reasonable that orbital
colonies around Mars will in the short and medium term support many
more people than Mars proper. Phobos and Deimos seem perfect for the
job.

How many people could you support with O'Neill Islands made from
Phobos and/or Deimos? How much of the necessary resources is present
in the rocks, and how much would have to be imported? Any further
considerations regarding such a venture?

Well the O'Neil Islands could proably support 100,000 plus people, but
weather you could ever make them is another thing altogher. Its likely
that they never will be made simiply because of the expense in
building them. However Phobos and Deimos would play an important role
in making any kind of mining operations on mars to work well. Now here
is the one big problem with mars ever being a big colony and that is
simiply the gravity is one third of earths, basicly humans would not
be able to live there more than 6 to 9 months max realy more like 3
months and of course the same could be said about Phobos and Deimos.
So the role Phobos and Deimos might play would to be stock pile sights
for your refined ore form mars then a big cargo ship could pick them
up from the moons and bring new people to mine and take the others
back to earth.
Now lets change the technogly a bit here. Lets say you could make 1G
gravity on mars and Phobos and Deimos with some kind of force field or
something but only in small areas like a room. Now colonies on mars
and Phobos and Deimos would spring up but would still be small about
1000 people per mine on mars. Phobos and Deimos would get bigger ones
of maybe 5000 plus becuase of the mines dropping there refined ore
there. Now companies at this point might consider trying to building a
O'Neil Islands because they want more miners there. This is likely to
be as far as a mars colony is likely to ever go in my view.
However if we say that you could genetically change people how wanted
to live in space and mars to where low gravity was not a problem. Then
the whole outcome could be very different and mars could one day
become a great colony and maybe one day a green planet. But if that
was the cases why build O'Neill Islands at all.
.

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