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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Do we actually know how to build a self-sustaining colony? Last I heard, we still had fundamental science and engineering questions to be solved even if we suddenly had an unlimited budget.

    Things that come to mind include building a sustainable closed ecosystem, figuring out a long-term power source (is there uranium on Mars? Nuclear reactors run for a long time, but we can’t rely on fresh fuel rods being shipped from Earth), and planning for enough industrial base that things like mining the necessary uranium, digging tunnels, housing construction, etc aren’t colony-ending problems.







  • Hmm, that makes me think we could adopt a tiered pricing system for things like water. The first 100 gallons are priced at 10 cents each, then usage beyond that goes up to 50 cents each?

    You could tweak the rates & threshold to make more sense – I don’t know water rates off the top of my head, and that probably varies by orders of magnitude across the entire U.S. Also, I have no idea what water usage rates look like for different types of properties. A sports stadium, an office building, an aluminum processing plant, and a SFH with a rain garden will all have really different water usage details.

    All this is kind of hinting at a broader “environmental impact” measure. That gets super complicated, though.