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by somenameforme
481 days ago
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I assume you're basically trolling here, but as I mentioned, obviously the radioisotopes would be for emergency power generation - life support in the highly improbable case of all other power sources simultaneously failing, not as a driver for industrial level manufacturing. You're also far off on solar estimates, probably in part because that Wiki page hasn't been updated in well over a decade and solar tech has rather change in the interim. You're looking at ~590W/m2 solar irradiance at Mars' equator, so production of something like ~100W/m^2 with typical consumer panels and perhaps 150W/m^2 with high end panels. So that's in the ballpark of ~0.1 acres for a MWh of production. Hollywood, so far as Mars is concerned, is mostly based on the Martian which is a hard sci-fi and phenomenally well researched book. The mistakes it made, inadvertently and intentionally, only make Mars colonization even easier than demonstrated. For instance the raging dust storm of the movie (and book) does not exist (and was an intentional fib). Low atmospheric pressure means the most fierce dust storm would have all the force of a very light breeze. And similarly his adventures to extract water from the rocket fuel were completely unnecessary as it turns out the seemingly barren regolith is surprisingly moist at 2-11% water by mass, an unintentional mistake as this was only discovered after the book was published. |
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