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Patrick's avatar

Good arguments. About the gravity issue: It is possible to construct rotating habitats on planetary surfaces, probably more easily than in free space—because humans are absolutely awesome at building things in a gravity environment. Compare videos of Apollo moonwalkers vs ISS EVAs. There is an obvious difference. Humans have been building large rotating doodads, including massive bridge spans and human-carrying centrifuges, for a long time. And, the “floor” of a rotating habitat in a gravity field is first-year calculus.

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Brett Paul Bellmore's avatar

Nice point about the atmosphere; it's indeed true that humans could live comfortably at 1/5th Earth normal as long as the atmosphere was almost entirely Oxygen. And the stability of this wouldn't be materially altered by the absence of a buffer gas. About the only real problem this would present is cooking: You'd need a pressure cooker to get anything cooked past rare!

Mars' surface is super-oxidized, thus all those perchorates. But I suspect you'd still have to isolate an awful lot of reduced silicon, iron, and aluminum. The iron, I suppose, would be the real problem.

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