Valley or Low world houses.
Wesley Bruce
Many people see Mars as a nice place to visit but you would not want to live there. Many can't even see the point of visiting. To win these peoples hearts and minds to the idea of a multi-planet civilisation we need to show them how Mars can be made habitable with technology they know and understand and with economics that they find believable.
Some have proposed a
worldhouse or para-terraforming. Richard L. S. Taylor outlined the
technology some years ago. A world house is where
you roof an area of mars, or another planet, with a roof a kilometre
or two high. The area enclosed is made earth like with cities and
farm and perhaps even wilderness. A world house is technically
possible even today but it is an enormous feat of engineering costing
billions of dollars.
There is a cheaper
more achievable option. We could roof a smaller area at a hight of 15
to 100 meters relatively cheaply. A low world house or valley house
is a normal feat of civil engineering on a par with normal urban or
suburban civil-engineering. Like a modern cities roads, drainage or
the reticulation of power, water, sewerage and communications.
Roofing an area is a doable land development task, that would be
operational at the private corporate level and not the government
megaproject level. It is therefore more likely to happen.
Such a
low roofed environment is also more easily explained to those that
see the problems first and don't grasp the opportunities. The
roofed area is on an urban scale but the city extends beyond it in a
controlled way. The roof in this case is 60 meters high. The edge is
anchored to a ledge on the hillsides and a berm with a concrete core
and top. Like a raised road or dam wall the edge walls are complex
works of engineering but ones we build regularly. The multiple
plastic sheets that form the roof are anchored with care with
concrete blocks and sealant.
The roof has vertical composite
supports every few hundred meters and rafters that can support a
light vehicle loaded with robots and replacement plastic. If the
upper plastic is to be replaced. Cables laid from rafter to rafter
allow the sheets to be drawn over the old sheet. Sealed in place and
then the old sheet removed from below.
There would be
several sheets bedded in the wall at two levels. The upper sheet is
called the canopy. It is designed to take the damage of the wind,
dust and UV. It is designed to be replaced regularly and is
unpressurized. This upper layer is designed to support small robots
and soft "snowshoed" astronauts. The robots clean and check
the canopy. They may patch small holes and may even be able to strip
off a few micrometers of dust or UV damaged plastic and lay down a
new smooth layer in its place. The astronauts would be used for major
repairs, emergency retrieval of a disabled robot, etc.
The lower sheet is the
envelope. It is pressurised and ideally it should also be able to at
least support the cleaning and patch robots. It is pushed up against
the rafters by the internal atmospheric pressure and is locked in
place against the rafters lower edge. Vibration, Curvature and
pressure sensors are used to detect leaks and stretching.
A roof of less than
100 meters allows us another option. A fire engine like vehicle with
a telescoping boom capable of reaching the envelope with a bed sized
adhesive patch. This would patch a small hole in minutes. Additional
poles could be assembled to lock the patch in place freeing the truck
to race to the next hole if there is more than one. With a higher
roof this becomes much more challenging; very fast airborne patches
would be required. We are experienced with the use of emergency
services and have learned to trust fire services. On the earth the
danger of things like fire and automotive accident are handled each
day without panic. The danger of a micrometeorite hits on Mars can be
coped with and thus reduced in a similar way.
The buildings under
the roof would be pressurised and alarms would get everyone in side
in an emergency and seal the buildings. Airlocks added to such
structures would allow trained emergency workers to pick up
stragglers and support the patch teams. Both teams would be in
protective suits. Livestock barns and other facilities such as farm
pump houses would also be pressurisable to protect the farmers and
fauna. Some species would be lost but not people or key live stock. A
pressure breach would produce a rapid drop in pressure but the volume
under a 60 meter roof is 0.06 cubic km or 60000000 cubic meters of
air per square kilometre. It would take several dozen minutes to vent
through a 10 cm hole.
A second expedient
sealing technique would be set of hydrogen/ helium balloons tethered
in each area. If a pressure breach occurs the resulting wind triggers
the balloons release. It is drawn by the wind to the hole but can't
pass through. Adhesive patches activated by pressure and wind effects
seal the balloon over the breach creating a temporary patch. Balloons
stuck to the "sky" due to accidental activation will be a minor
inconvenience. The image says more than I can say in words.
The accompanying picture
shows several buildings. They are;
* Top left on the hill.
Communication towers. Local positioning systems (GPS without the
satellites.)
* Left in the hill. Mines and storage tunnels; some
pressurised. Back in second hill an early tunnelled complex. A base
during the construction of the cities roof.
* Left foreground. A
Mars vehicle construction building. For trucks, mining vehicles and
heavy equipment. This structure is earth covered for cosmic ray
protection.
* Next door is laboratory complex that is vehicle
access only. This provides quarantine protections allowing
experiments you don't what to do in the roofed area. I.e. Fruit fly
and lab rat work, testing toxic ore samples, working with dangerous
chemicals or making explosives for the miners.
* The larger
structure on the right of this is a reactor complex if required or a
large volume chemical processor and gas liquefier. Storage is
underground out side the dome.
* Centre left foreground is a
cluster of interconnecting structures that serve as the main base
entry and exit point. It includes vehicle and robot garages. Light
vehicle cleaning and maintenance. EVA training. General laboratories.
Etc.
* The small tower outside on the right is a back up command
centre and roof maintenance control. Inside the "dome" The low
buildings near the entry/exit structures would be training
facilities, robot assembly and perhaps a cafe for the workers in the
adjacent external buildings.
* The smaller towers are just
simple support structures with perhaps some lighting, emergency
sirens and communication relays.
* The fat blue towers are
accommodation and office space.
* The main mall is open air [no
rain] near the three fat towers serves as the main recreational and
commercial section o the city.
* There is extensive earth roofed
housing near the mall.(dotted lines). The earth on the roof is used
to block cosmic rays so that most indoor activities are radiation
free. Plants can be grown on these rooves; this maximises growing
space for plants even if it is only grass. All the larger buildings
are similarly roofed, even the towers.
* The yellow area above
the mall is incomplete housing.
* The rest is farming: crops,
orchids, gardens, coppiced trees, and fish ponds. Fine tuning the
life-support. A totally biological life support system is possible;
the ongoing work of Biosphere 2 has proved that. I prefer a hybrid
system. A set of distributed electrolysis cells feeding oxygen to the
atmosphere, hydrogen to the sabatier process which feeds methane to a
grid of pipes that link to storage. If the carbon and hydrogen is
needed the methane is burned to yield the CO2 and water back to the
ecosystem. If the Methane is not needed back in the atmosphere, it
can be made into plastics, Fullerine composites, graphites or diamond
composite. Some of the hydrogen is retrieved in these processes.
The colonisation of Mars must ultimately be reduced to a
simple problem of civil engineering. On achieving this the colony
will quickly become self sufficient assuming each finds a product or
service to sell to the others or to mother earth.
Another form of valley
house. The
roads under the canopy are brown, the houses are all earth roofed and
are the multi-coloured areas. In the fore ground just under the
canopy is an area of housing and equipment bays for inner canopy
maintenance.
In
this case the valley is deeper allowing a more natural sylvian
[forested] landscape. The roof is supported on Fullarine cables
anchored deep in the hills.
There is the option for a lake and
recreations such as hang gliding. Birds and other fauna are possible.
Repairs are by truck near the edges and airship inside the domes main
valley over the lake. A surface repair car wide enough to spread its
weight across three or more cables should be possible. This can
support another vehicle via magnetic fields below the canopy. A
magnetic repair vehicle slung under the canopy may also be an option
if the cables are steel or have a magnetised track under them. A set
of vacuum pumps, an inverted hovercraft skirt could create an
inverted hovercraft.
If all else fails and a set of cables to
three points just under the canopies edge can reach anywhere under
the canopy defined by the three points. Absailing anchor rings added
to the underside of the cables would be mandatory. Base jumping from
the inside of the canopy would be fun. Insane but fun.
More recent work: Gale crater. Its not the whole crater that's roofed just part.
Gale crater from another angle.
