01-21-2020, 10:12 AM | #1 |
Join Date: May 2010
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Sci-Fi World-building: Mars the farm planet?
Premise: Your sci-fi setting has powerful, efficient "torch drives" (like the Epstein Drive from The Expanse), which make getting into orbit from a planet's surface cheap.
Premise: In your sci-fi setting, Mars is being terraformed. Never mind the original motive for this—maybe in the 22nd century China came under the sway of a dictator who was obsessed with the idea for no rational reason. However, the terraforming project is a centuries-long affair. Currently, the atmosphere is reasonably thick and the surface is reasonably warm, but where the atmosphere has way too little oxygen and way too much CO2 for unassisted humans. I've seen both of these premises independently in fiction, but taken together they seem to support a surprising conclusion: Mars could be a major exporter of agricultural products, most obviously food but also potentially lumber, biofuels, and so on. This doesn't require Mars to produce nearly as much food as Earth. Producing food on Mars just needs to be easier than getting human colonists to move there. And Mars producing say 5% of Earth's food is plenty in terms of justifying the existence of a decent-sized civilian space fleet. Thoughts? Are there any big scientific problems with this setup once you accept the One Big Lie of torch drives? |
01-21-2020, 10:37 AM | #2 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
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Re: Sci-Fi World-building: Mars the farm planet?
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Next is probably hydrogen. Mars may be deficient in this and you'll need to import it.
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Fred Brackin |
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01-21-2020, 10:41 AM | #3 |
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
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Re: Sci-Fi World-building: Mars the farm planet?
Water. You'll need to crash a few ice meteors into the planet. (Yeah, there's water, but there doesn't seem to be very much).
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01-21-2020, 11:31 AM | #4 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Sci-Fi World-building: Mars the farm planet?
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If I were going to drop comets or other icy bodies onto Mars, I'd aim for terrain that was going to become large bodies of water anyway. The maps in GURPS Mars will suggest some options.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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01-21-2020, 11:33 AM | #5 |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Sci-Fi World-building: Mars the farm planet?
Seems like a classic case of comparative advantage. If Martian agricultural products cost twice as much as Terran, but Martian manufactures cost ten times as much, Mars can get rich shipping food to Earth.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
01-21-2020, 11:47 AM | #6 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Sci-Fi World-building: Mars the farm planet?
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What might be a market for Martian foodstuffs is whatever human presence exists in the asteroids or elsewhere in space. Even with a torch drive, it's still going to be cheaper to launch from Mars than Earth, after all. Also, if there was a luxury cachet attached to Martian food, the double-cost might then be tolerable. The cachet could be something real (Martian grown grapes turn out to make awesome wine, or Martian-grown coffee turns out to have unique flavor), or purely hype, as long as people were willing to pay for it.
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01-21-2020, 11:50 AM | #7 | |
Join Date: Feb 2007
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Re: Sci-Fi World-building: Mars the farm planet?
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But it's entirely possible that Mars actually has quite a lot of water. We won't know until we go and have a thorough look.
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01-21-2020, 12:08 PM | #8 |
Hero of Democracy
Join Date: Mar 2012
Location: far from the ocean
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Re: Sci-Fi World-building: Mars the farm planet?
Martian seasons are longer than earth's, and that's going to matter for at least some of your crops. You can genetically engineer around, this, and you can probably breed around this, but it takes time and is something you have to do.
You'll want to decide how "Wet" this terraformed mars is. You could have covered half of mars with oceans, or the whole thing could be slowly working towards an entire planet of Gobi desert.
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01-21-2020, 12:11 PM | #9 |
Join Date: Dec 2012
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Re: Sci-Fi World-building: Mars the farm planet?
One advantage to exporting anything from Mars is that the gravity is lower than Earths, so even with the super-cheap torch drives, liftoff from Mars will still be much cheaper than liftoff from Earth.
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Warning, I have the Distractible and Imaginative quirks in real life. "The more corrupt a government, the more it legislates." -- Tacitus Five Earths, All in a Row. Updated 12/17/2022: Apocrypha: Bridges out of Time, Part I has been posted. |
01-21-2020, 12:42 PM | #10 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Sci-Fi World-building: Mars the farm planet?
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On Earth, let us say, we can produce wheat or motors. So we can suppose that one average motor uses as much productive capacity as some weight of wheat. Then producing 10 motors means giving up 10 weights of wheat, and vice versa. On Mars, the same productive capacity produces 5 weights of wheat or 1 motor. So producing 10 motors means giving up 50 weights of wheat; producing 10 weights of wheat means giving up 2 motors. So it's a good deal for the Martians not to produce their own motors. If they cut down motor production by 1, they can grow 5 more weights of wheat, and ship 4 of them them to Earth. On Earth, those 4 weights of wheat swap even for 4 motors. If half of those go back to Mars, Mars has gotten 2 imported motors in place of the one it didn't manufacture; and Earth has manufactured 4 motors and ended up with 4 wheat AND two motors. The net outcome makes both planets better off. David Ricardo demonstrated this about two centuries ago, as a general result; it's one of the core theorems of classical economics, and one that remains valid. You don't need to be better at producing anything; you just need to be less worse at some things than at others to have a viable economic role.
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Bill Stoddard I don't think we're in Oz any more. |
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