As I'm sure most readers of this blog know, Elon Musk wants to build a Mars colony. I am sceptical that he will succeed, although I applaud his ambition and his technical prowess.
SF author, Charlie Stross, has been thinking about this and what it would take to succeed. He's written a long blog post about it, with the assumption that by 2060 there will be a functional colony of about 500,000 people.
Let's suppose that Musk's Mars colony plan is as viable as his other businesses: there are ups and downs and lots of ducking and weaving but he actually gets there in the end. All the "... and then a miracle happens ..." bits in the plan (don't mention closed-circuit life support! Don't mention legal frameworks!) actually come together, and by 2060 there is a human colony on Mars. Not just an Antarctic-style research base, but an actual city with a population on the order of 500,000 people, plus outlying mining, resource extraction, fuel synthesis, and photovoltaic power farms (not to mention indoor intensive agriculture to grow food).
Most of the city is tunnelled underground, using the rock overhead as radiation shielding. The radiation level to which citizens are exposed is nevertheless higher than in any comparable city on Earth: it's just the way Mars is. Workers in the outlying installations may be much closer to the surface than city-dwellers, and indeed most such plants are staffed on strict rotation by workers who are exposed to near-surface radiation levels for no more than three months in any consecutive Martian year.
Obvious aspects: cities are easier to heat and protect against radiation and provide with air and water, so housing is dense—think Singapore or Hong Kong density. High energy activities (eg. fuel and chemical synthesis, metal refining) and work with toxic substances are carried out sufficiently distant from the dense habitat that there's no risk of explosion damage. Musk's tunnel boring fetish turns out to be pretty useful when it comes to building a narrow-gauge mass transit system to move workers to/from these outlying sites, so there's a subway linking the city to most of its far-flung human-operated work sites.
After more development of the scenario, he then asks what would happen if a covid-type disease outbreak happened in the colony, and asks readers to comment. It should be an interesting discussion.
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