My prediction is different from that. If humans make it to Mars and start setting up more than just a basic base then I predict that Mars is going to be a plastic planet for the forseeable future. -->Given enough energy<-- and that water and carbon dioxide make it easier to gather hydrogen, carbon and oxygen than other elements makes it very attractive to produce as much as possible from plastics.

Agreed. If colonized using the SpaceX Starship plan, there are going to be massive factories producing methane. Making those factories slightly larger to produce feedstock for plastic will probably be a lot cheaper than growing bamboo.

Part of the articles point is that for furniture getting plastic in the right shape would be hard. Sure you can use a 3D printer but furniture is massive. You can make a mold… but with what?

Heat welding plastic sheets should be a lot easier to work with than wicker. Wicker is very labor intensive unless there's something I'm missing.

On earth we just make a mold when we want to make something out of plastic, but on mars it would make sense to have one mold for some kind of plastic sheet (perforated?) that we can thermoform by hand with a heat gun, heat weld together, etc.

Or just cast something like large LEGO.

This article is perfect use case for AI generated graphics: small, presumably personal blog for which commissioning an artist for illustrations would not make sense both from time and financial perspective.

and what would be the use of commissioning an artist at a larger publication?

altruism?

Quality, presumably. If the publication is typeset in print, graphics can be a hugely important part of the visual presentation of an article. A well resourced publication will be able to hire an artist to create graphics which playfully engage with the subject matter - joke cartoons like in the New Yorker, for example, or something more abstract but meaningful for a more thinky piece.

Wicker furniture was also the weight saving solution used on the 1920s/30s British airship R101: https://www.airshipsonline.com/airships/interior/R101Interio...

Of course that was before aluminium was cheap and widely available. I'm going to say that aluminium or plastic seems like a more likely choice for future Mars missions, at least until they work out how to grow bamboo locally.

The article is specifically about what they could make there.

Water may be recoverable, but what about phosphorus? And why wicker instead of processed plant waste from the food being grown? Quite a bit of agricultural waste should be produced. It would make sense to use that instead of growing reeds.

Yea fibrous plant waste could be a great alternative for small products. I'm imagining something similar to the Agave Fiber straws you occasionally see. They hold up super well in water and seem like they have a higher tensile strength than their plastic alternatives.

I wonder if the lower gravity on Mars would have an effect on bamboo's growth. Maybe it will grow faster, or higher?

The gravity on Mars is roughly 1/3 G.

Edit: I also wonder if there's a potential process for turning bamboo into PLA.

My guess would be higher and weaker.

Luckily humans will weigh less as well. So it might balance out.

likely much less wind too, which would have the same effect

You aren't going to be sitting outside without a space suit on.

Is the thought that Mars has no useful ores of any kind or that mining it would be too difficult/expensive/dangerous? It mentions the regolith but I'm asking about raw materials under the surface.

Yeah, the installed base of manufacturing capabilities on earth is quite staggering. It would take an enormous number of launches to get enough materials to mars for it to become self-sustaining at any scale. Just look at someplace like Guam or Antarctica. The difficulties are staggering despite the far more accessible transport medium of ships at an air-water interface. Guam takes millions of tons a year to sustain. Antarctic camps need less because smaller, but also far less capable of self-sustainment.

I wouldn't call the difficulties on Guam or Antartica staggering. It's expensive but damn near everything there is a known-known or close to it.

Mars isn't that easy but a lot of the problems evaporate if you can assume that we will spend lavishly to supply whoever goes there.

We could support a Mars research colony at current levels of technology if there was political will to spend the money. But there isn't so the long slow march of technological progress will have to bring the price down to something we can justify.

I think they're talking about the "small research outpost" stage, rather than the "economic colony" stage of space exploration.

As a FDM printer owner, it does use quite a bit of energy. My ender 3 uses 0.125kWh[0] with 200C extrusion (PLA) and 60C bed, but making a durable children spork can take hours.

my personnal guess: by plastic mass, FDM is probably way less efficient energy wise than injection molding for the same mass of plastic, since meltic plastic a tiny volume at a time must have more losses than having a big amount heated at once.

0: https://3dsolved.com/ender-3-power-consumption/

I've got the same printer - it's great, but clearly not optimized for power consumption. The hot end could be insulated so the only loss of heat is via the melted filament - as it is, I think most of the energy that goes into the hot end is lost directly to the air. Then the heated bed is great for ease of use, but it's pretty wasteful. If power was at a premium, I'm pretty sure we'd go for other solutions to keeping the print stuck down. My making both these changes, I'd guess it would be fairly easy to reduce the power consumption by a factor of ten or so. In the end, it ought to be possible for printing to take negligible power compared to making the bioplastic filament in the first place.

You don't need a heated bed. Just some glue stick or hairspray on the build plate

>by plastic mass, FDM is probably way less efficient energy wise than injection molding for the same mass of plastic

How does it compare when you consider the energy required to manufacture small-run injection molds?

Clearly at a certain scale there must be a crossover point, and it's probably greater than 1 unit.

I don’t think humans will ever populate mars so why don’t we just shoot a seed of bacteria and simple organisms into the surface and give something time to develop millions of years down the line?

Getting from simple organisms to a habitable biosphere took like a billion years on earth. So if that would even works the results would likely be 1-2 billion years from now. For comparison, the Homo genus (let alone sapiens) is only 2 million years old!

In other words, that would take longer than humanity can conceivably plan for.

Not to mention that if there is some kind of as yet undiscovered microbial life on Mars, doing this would risk never finding out about it.

Ok fine but if humanity is ever on the brink of extinction and this question is no longer important then we should have something ready to shoot a seed and ensure at least some form of life will expand beyond Earth. Maybe we could shoot out to several planets. I’m sure this is the premise of some sci-fi story.

I had thought that iron would be the material of choice, especially early enough that elemental iron in the form of meteorites is readily available. All it requires is heat, meaning electricity.

I think you vastly underestimate both the energy requirements and logistics of heavy industry. This is not something you'll see deployed on Mars for a long time.

actually, I’m glad that article “artist renditions” of extraterrestrial concepts have been replaced by image AI, immediately

Grow bamboo there.

You may have skimmed, but the article discusses reed/bamboo in the second paragraph, and in the list below it.