zlacker

>>mindra+(OP)
Related" "A City on Mars" (2024) [1] A useful book on why self-sustaining settlements on Luna, Mars, or earth orbit are pretty much hopeless. Remote bases that take a lot of supply, maybe, with great difficulty. The environment is just too hostile and doesn't have essential resources for self-sustaining settlements. The authors go into how Antarctic bases work and how Biosphere II didn't.

The worst real estate on Earth is better than the best real estate on Mars or Luna.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/City-Mars-settle-thought-through/dp/1...

>>Animat+vw1
I'm as critical as OP on data centers in space, but "A City on Mars" was a really badly researched book, full of errors, that completely misrepresented the would-be Mars settler position. I wouldn't take seriously anyone quoting it unless they've also read, at minimum, "The Case for Mars" as well.

>>adastr+m02
Possibly even better would be Zubrin's recent book The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet, which goes into quite a bit of detail on how we could build a self-sustaining settlement.

>>Dennis+ZF2
Though it lacks in the headlines, my preference is to send the robots first to bootstrap local production. Unless we really screw up the worst case would be some extra garbage to clean up for future missions, and the best case is any sort of increase in local production capacity.