Building a large permanent colony on Mars presents significant challenges for whomever is responsible for administering it.

In part 2 of this post, we discussed some of the challenges involved in supplying the colony with water. You can also read the introduction here.

Air

Humanity has some experience with (relatively) closed, space-based systems that reuse air. For a detailed discussion of how the International Space Station maintains its air supply, see here.

There are several component factors involved in supplying a Mars colony with air: the initial supply, which is likely imported in one or more forms which we’ll discuss in more detail below; new and ongoing resupply; filtration methods; and locally produced air.
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Building a large permanent colony on Mars presents some interesting challenges for whomever is responsible for administering it. The first part of this post covers the basic rationale for creating a handbook (or really a large and broad resource) that will help future space colony administrators in their jobs.

Resources

One of the key decisions that will need to be made (on a regular and on-going basis) will be whether to source particular resources locally, or whether to import them from Earth (at significant cost).

In all likelihood, the decision will really be “what percentage of this resource to import”, rather than a binary consideration.

The key to bear in mind with regards to local resourcing is that we are building a large colony with many people, and as a result the processes are going to be at an industrial scale, involving large numbers of people in both construction and ongoing operations, and with the added complication of everything requiring a pressurized atmosphere for people to breathe. Continue reading →

When Elon Musk announced that he wanted to plant a colony of 80,000 people on Mars in his lifetime, a few thoughts went through my head in (roughly) this order:

• That’s an awfully long supply chain if things go wrong
• Somebody is going to be responsible for administering the whole thing
• That has to be the toughest job in history
• They’ll need to be solar-class experts in many areas, or able to learn them in a hurry
• There ought to be a handbook for this sort of thing

Obviously, it would more closely resemble a library, rather than a “For Dummies” type book.

Equally obviously, there would be a large team responsible, with many kinds of experts engaged in their own particular specialties.

Somebody would ultimately be responsible though.

Call them the CEO. Or the First Mayor of Mars. That person will need to have at least some understanding of each of the different subject areas of their team. Continue reading →

The following series of ideas occurred to me while holding a loose thread on my jacket, and trying to decide whether to try breaking it on the spot, or to wait until I had a pair of scissors handy.

The manufacturing of clothing is still largely a low tech industry (unlike the making of the fabric itself), where rooms of poorly paid workers cut and sew together garments (I’ve linked to some articles below, some of which have great photos showing what a modern sweatshop looks like). Continue reading →

I’ve been fascinated for a few years now with cheap 3D printers like the RepRap and MakerBot Replicator. One of the issues with these printers is that they can only create relatively small items. I believe that a relatively small change to how they are constructed could help with that. Continue reading →

The usual disclaimers apply: I can’t tell whether this thought is original, the technology isn’t quite there yet, and I’ve only done a partial economic analysis.

In the near future, many people are likely to have 3d printers in their homes. These printers will likely only be used on occasion. The installation of software similar to the SETI@home project could allow these printers to be utilized during downtime for mass production of small products, in exchange for payment to the printer’s owners.

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Lots of speculation that Facebook is going to try (again) to build a mobile phone. I understand why they feel this is necessary – they’re already losing ad revenue due to people accessing the site via mobile apps – but as many others have commented, this is unlikely to work (and could cost them billions of dollars in the process).

Here’s a simple alternate plan for how they could win mobile revenue, and create a mobile platform, without building any hardware:

1. Extend their existing mobile app so that it allows users to run existing Facebook applications from within it.

2. Create new tools to allow app developers to take advantage of this capability. Creating mobile apps is still a lot of hard work, and walled gardens like iOS make it hard for developers, so a clean, cross-browser-compatible, Facebook app-based mobile platform could really help developers. Plus if its cleanly integrated into the mobile app, there’s no reason why users who are already utilizing it won’t adopt it as well.

3. Build out their existing ad network to target these new capabilities.

The above would be a lot of hard work, but IMHO it would have a much better chance of success, and would cost a fraction of what they would spend buying up hardware companies. Plus it plays well to their existing strength in platform development.

Update: Actually, I can think of one strategic reason why Facebook would want to get into the phone business, although I’m not certain that it is sufficient. If such a phone contained near field payment technology, then Facebook Credits could be used at the “final mile”. Such an approach would probably imply the purchase of a company like Square.

This is the third and final part of the series. If you haven’t read the other parts, you can find them here and here. The following is a heavily edited version of an internal document that I wrote a number of years ago to try to standardize internal web development. Continue reading →

If you haven’t read part one, this is a highly edited version of an internal document, on the topic of creating a company standard for html, css and javascript work, with some of the (justified) language toned down.

Part 1 of the post may be found here.

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Again with the CEO? Seriously Yahoo!?

Whenever I’ve spoke with former Yahoo! employees in the past few years, the overriding theme seems to be anger and disappointment. One does not feel emotional in this way about a company that cannot achieve; it is the mismanagement, lost opportunities and loss of direction of a team that used to consider itself a world-leader that results in such a temperament.

The question remains though, regardless of what happens in the near-term with their current CEO. Can (or should) Yahoo! be turned around, or should it be torn apart and sold for scrap? Continue reading →