Centuries ago, Sir Isaac Newton said of his many discoveries that, if he saw further, he was only “sitting on the shoulders of giants.” In the 21st century, space companies and nations may soon have a similar feeling creeping into their backbone as they transplant the bloody edge of an entire scientific system to sow the first human cities on Mars. .
This titanic effort will involve such advanced scientific fields that some have not yet matured. “There are some critical technologies that are still unresolved. One of them is tunneling – one of the most important factors – you have to have the right tunneling solutions,” said ABIBOO founder and head of the architecture team Alfredo Munoz in a view interview with Interesting Engineering.
And inside these tunnels, ABIBOO intends to install huge buildings connected in larger “macroconstructions” through bored network tunnels in front of the Martian rocks. But before digging begins, technology must be up to date with the theory, ideal locations must be researched, we must transport construction equipment and equipment, and produce sustainable materials from the Martian environment. In short, we need to build cities.
On Mars.
Building sustainable cities on Mars
“We need to be able to transfer initial assets – Elon Musk, SpaceX and other entities will be critical, because the city of Nüwa is just the beginning of a larger-scale operation,” Munoz said. But before the 250,000 inhabitants can move, the initial team of space engineers will have a colossal challenge. “We only have a window of opportunity every two years, and to get the city to a critical mass, we’re going to need high exponential growth until we have transportation technology.”
The first city on Mars will be called Nüwa and involves tunnels with a diameter of 10.8 ft (10.8 m) – “even with current technology it could be solved”. For decades, the most challenging issue of designing a colony on Mars has involved moving enough material to another planet. While a substantial amount of fuel and money could be saved by launching a mission to establish the planet Mars from the Moon, it is not very feasible to move enough material even for a few city blocks, about 54.6 million km (34 million miles), at least, to the Red Planet.
Crucial to the Nüwa City project is its fundamental design, “to be built and operated with few resources brought from Earth. We have to produce materials on Mars – that’s why we have five different cities – the total amount of resources cannot be obtained in one location. “On Earth, sustainability means not wasting energy or resources when you can achieve the same or similar goal locally without polluting the environment.” Why do we want to bring materials from Bali to New York when we can produce in New York? ” Munoz asked rhetorically, “not only not to damage the environment – but also to do little with little.”
The trick is to build the city on Mars “without damaging the water we will use in an economical, scalable way,” Munoz said. “It’s not just about the environment, it’s about using it wisely,” Munoz said.
Oxygen, water, carbon dioxide and a lot of steel
However, for any city to thrive (on Mars or Earth), you need a lot of water and carbon dioxide (CO2). “Steel is the most widely used material for the city’s civil construction. Another critical element on a critical path for Nüwa is the transformation and manufacture of oxygen,” Munoz continued. Although there have been many proposals to generate oxygen with vegetation, for Munoz and ABIBOO, this is not enough to support a human city. “Based on the life support systems we have analyzed, [vegetation-generated oxygen] he will not be alone enough. “NASA’s perseverance will conduct experiments to test several methods of obtaining oxygen on Mars. ABIBOO’s basic scientists were thinking about transporting used air and breathable air – […] it’s almost the same idea as a refrigerator. “
“Most of the hard work in civil engineering would be done by robotics,” but “it would not be possible for people to do it.” [all] “I can supervise robotics,” Munoz said. While building on the rock side with robots on Mars is not a new idea, ABIBOO’s plan for what to install in tunnels is. Macrobuildings is essentially a term we created – a really big building made up of modules, in which each module is a building for itself. “A kind of giant LEGO blocks with central heating.
“Macrobuildings” designed to undo every challenge on Mars
Each macroconstruction will be 800 m wide, 200 m high and 150 m deep – about the width of Central Park in New York. “Each macroconstruction consists of 12 modular buildings – each of which is made of 3D tunnels that correlate into tunnels,” Munoz explained. But this is not a plan to repeat the aesthetics of the cookie cutter in gentrified neighborhoods. “Each module is different from the other”, using 12 different models to change the pattern and create a unique architecture.
Functionally, the megoconstructions will incorporate workplace and residential modules – mixed, but conceptually so, with some more residential and others more commercial. “Each macroconstruction is different from the others”, which makes a “huge diversity, because none is the same as another”. The arrangement of the modules is not set, because the tunnels will connect in various relationships, requesting a unique solution for each macroconstruction.
The decision to build on the rocks is an educated one, because on Mars, problems abound. Flooded by solar radiation, rocks can provide a natural shield at higher radiation levels than anywhere on Earth. Another problem is air pressure (or lack thereof). “[I]In contrast to the problems on Earth where buildings fall, on Mars, buildings can explode due to pressure. Humans and animals need a little more than 0.7 times the atmospheric pressure “from the Earth at sea level.” We have 80% atmospheric pressure inside buildings “and in a Martian atmosphere, if you continuously inflate a balloon towards this internal pressure” at some point it will explode. “This would end badly for any city on Mars.
“The bigger the building, the higher the pressure – the more structure we need for the building, as well as the grounding,” because if a building contains air with more pressure than the outside atmosphere, in the the latter will rise high in the Martian sky. This means that the manufacturing chemicals will have to happen inside the thick silos to avoid an explosion in the pressure differential. Other problems on Mars include less gravity and loss of heat in the external environment. By building underground, “you solve many of these problems,” Munoz said.
Nüwa could become the most advanced city ever built
However, growing up in an underground cave is not ideal for emotional well-being and will probably not motivate most people to move to Mars. “So we reversed it by 90 degrees. Everything is underground, and since we have access to the other side of the rock, we can get into the rock and bring direct light, while fully protecting people from some of the challenges. ” Food vegetation can be grown above the city, on a table for a “huge concentration of energy for plants. People are not allowed to enter and the plants do not need much pressure.”
However, in the last decade there have been other proposals to build cities on the rocks of Mars. A concept from the 2016 Mars City Design competition took a cue from the ancient city of Petra in the Jordanian desert. But the ABIBOO proposal does this one step further. “It is not uncommon to offer a solution on Mars that supports every realistic solution in the fields of life support systems, planetary geology, astrophysics, space engineering, biology, artists, architects, astrobiology, mining experts, psychology, space law “and many more. SONet, a multidisciplinary team focused on sustainable settlements in other worlds, has provided such scientific expertise. In Nüwa and other future Martian cities, ABIBOO aims to use architecture as a means of building a creative identity, mixing science and art, “so that we can create a more emotional connection with where we live.”
At the end of March, ABIBOO estimated that construction of the city of Nüwa could begin by 2054. But until we can put astronauts on the surface of Mars, it is difficult to predict when things can move forward with certainty. “All critical pathways begin in the laboratory – [it] it sounds realistic to say we could start in 2054, but it depends on these other parts. If one of them is late, then everyone is, “Munoz explained. For example, if SpaceX CEO Elon Musk decides to delay plans for Mars, then ABIBOO could change strategies.” We have to rely on the analysis of previous astronauts on Mars – we can’t develop Nüwa until we find the right location. “But once construction begins, the most technologically advanced human city can have a change of address, in one sense only: from Earth to Mars.