Oh, my name is Ben Pearson the roadster  tracker and today I'd like to talk to you about the game Surviving Mars and more
Specifically about how realistic it is, but first, let me just talk a little bit about the gameplay. I
Really like this game this game lets you feel like you're building a real base on Mars
but having to take care of the types of things that a person building a base on Mars will have to take care of like
Making sure you have enough oxygen to make sure I've enough water enough food and all of the various things to get those parts
constructed together I
Think this game does a really good job
Balancing gameplay and realism as a whole. I think it's pretty realistic
The game itself has about 10 hours of really good solid. Play per run
but once you hit that mark and you finish your mystery and you finish a
Decent sized colony. There isn't a whole lot more to do there are wonders but they're really late-game and once you've built them
There's not a whole lot else to do and they take so many resources that can be even difficult to justify building them
Usually they're built as kind of a challenge just to finish off everything and then that's it
But let me talk about some of the realism and we'll start from the very early stages of the game
The first thing that lands on Mars is not humans, but it's robots
Robots, go and construct a base for the humans to live in it takes a couple of these missions
to get everything
Perfectly set up straight so that the robots are all nice and happy
this is actually pretty realistic of
the three major plans that I've seen to get humans to Mars being the SpaceX the Buzz Aldrin plan and
the direct Mars plan
two of these three specifically call for robots to be on the surface first the exception being the
Robert Zubrin direct Mars plan
but the other two the Buzz Aldrin plan on the SpaceX plan both rely on and the NASA plan isn't really formulated well enough to
Really make that kind of determination
still
Robots going in building at least the basic infrastructure makes all the sense in the world
They'll have the ability to refuel the Rockets and do other things that are required
Sounds like a really great plan
let's talk about refueling of rockets the
gameplay involves using water and
Presumably the air the carbon dioxide in Martian atmosphere
Using energy and turning it into rocket fuel
This is spot-on realistic all of the major plans to get to Mars that are relatively inexpensive
rely on some form of Institute resource utilization
using what's already there on the surface of Mars to make it easier to get back home and
This seems like a very ideal way to go about doing it. So this seems really good
The main thing that the robots do besides building the fuel supplies to return home is
Building power you need a fair bit of power and the robots to do that in the other game
What do they build will they build solar power and they build?
Wind power let's talk about the solar power first. Now the only thing in game they use as metals
This doesn't seem very realistic really solar power requires some fairly sophisticated
Electronics and that it doesn't really show up in the game
But there is another type of solar power. There's two main types of solar power
The first type is photovoltaics
Which is what most people think of when you have a big giant solar panel that generates electricity
Directly from the sunlight hitting it these work really good on earth
Primarily because they can be hit from any angle if you have a cloudy day like it is today
then
Even though you're not getting direct sunlight from the Sun
You're still relatively bright and the photovoltaics will work really well. Even if you're pointing them to the Sun they'll still work pretty well a
Concentrated solar array is another type this takes and reflects all of the energy and the Sun into one common point
It then we'll heat the whatever is in there either
water or
Perhaps some form of salt and use that to run a turbine
Just like you would for a cold
Heating the water to run a turbine or nuclear power or any other form of power that uses some kind of a mechanical turbine
This could very well
Potentially work and it works better on Mars because Mars doesn't really have very many clouds. There are a few
But they're not seem very often and the only real concern is when you have a big dust storm
The photo takes will work better than the concentrated solar array, but in game when you have a dust storm
they all turn themselves down and
Don't function at all, which makes a fair bit of sense
So this is entirely plausible that they are just using metal
polishing it really well and
Using some form of heated turbine to produce electricity. That's what my theory is. I'm gonna go with that
The wind power is more realistic and a lot of people realize now the atmosphere of Mars is very thin
It's about half a percent of the pressure. That is on earth
but a half a percent of pressure it comes out to be about
1% of the density because the Mars atmosphere is dancer and
That still isn't a lot 1% of wind power from Earth is pretty small
But the wind is higher it's 2 to 3 times higher. So if we go with 3 times higher
the energy in the wind is
factored as the
square of the power so 3 cubed is 9
So we have 9 to 10 percent of the energy that you can generate through wind power as you do on earth
now
We see in surviving mars. They have these kind of huge ridiculous. Looking solar power
They're actually probably not too far off. I'm not a super expert in wind power
but those wind turbines are set such that if the wind comes from any direction it will spin them and
They're also very large collecting surfaces. So between the two of those things, I think they would actually work pretty well
There's even some talk of putting something very similar on ships
All in all it seems like a pretty reasonable idea and I think that it's pretty good
now
They build things from resources there
I found one of the easiest things to build in game is concrete you put down the concrete
Extractor and it will dig up piles of the stuff and you can put them down on
Specially resource areas that have a lot of it
I'm not sure if this will be required personally. I think that
you will be able to find a lot of concrete on Mars, but you're gonna find it in the way that
the pouring company has worked if they have high pressure that compresses the soil and
dirt down so finely that it becomes really a brick and
This brick is very very strong because of this high high-pressure environment
That is Forge really becomes a rock for all intents and purposes. I
Think that's probably what they're going to do
Although they probably will do something and there should be some of the minerals that we find to make concrete like we do on earth
Down on Mars
It'll probably work and it's definitely going to be able to make a lot of use of the soil on Mars to build stuff
So we'll give that a a
mediocre grade maybe a C in realism
The metal deposits are perfectly realistic. You're gonna have areas of metal with particularly high
concentration the fact that they have the two different types of metals is
Reasonable it's it's a game and you can't make things too complex
So I'll give them full credit for simplifying it in a way that still gives a little peace of realism
What about the more complex resources? Well you have water now
Water in the game. What you do is you put a
water extractor near a spot where there's water and they seem to dig up some soil and
Somehow convert to water and then some ways soil
That makes a lot of sense and that's actually how it'll probably be done
real rocks
Contain a little bit of water
any rock will you take a handful of dirt and you heat it up and you will actually
Have a little bit of water that will come out of it. You might not be so
detectable, but if you weighed the dirt before and after heating it you would see that there's a difference in the weight and that's primarily
due to water
now there are some areas on Mars that are going to have higher concentrations of water and if you dig into one of those
Keep the water up, then you're gonna get the water extracted
You might have to do a little bit of filtering, but it should work pretty well
And then you'll have the super tried dirt that doesn't have any use which is a waste rock
It's exactly what you see in games so spot on I'll give them full credit for that
The machine parts are the next more complex thing that you build with time now
Machine parts require humans and we'll talk about the human habitation overall
But they're able to be used in a lot of the general manufacturing things
Anyway where you would need an engine or a turbine or Gears or something like that?
Now, of course, it's not realistic that one part would fit into anything, but I'll give them credit. There. It is a game
But these are gonna be fairly easy to make on Mars and night you see them pretty early on in most games
Next thing you have polymers polymers are made in game of rocket fuel and water and they could potentially use the air
They require the use of humans now, I don't know if that would be very realistic or not
Meaning the humans but as far as using rocket fuel and water and air
spot on the rocket fuel of choice
For Mars is probably going to either be methane
Ethylene or propane?
Why one of these three things? Well, they're relatively simple hydrocarbons and
Thus they can be made with the atmosphere of Mars pretty easily
they're all pretty efficient and
They'll be easy you could turn any one of these into plastics using the proper refining process
Although it's easier to do with ethylene and propane and is with methane
so it makes a lot of sense you would use rocket fuel and convert it into plastics which are polymers and
Polymers are used in that wide wide variety of things and I'll give them full credit
You could probably make and do a lot of the stuff with polymers is
Relatively easy to change one type of plastic to another type. So that makes perfect sense there
Now the third type is any kind of electronics
Most of the game surviving Mars is easier to take the rare metals that use to make electronics. Send them back to earth
And then have earth send the electronics back and you'll get a pretty high return on your investment
It's really only in the late game where you have a lot more humans than you have
jobs for them that it really becomes efficient to
manufacture these goods on Mars itself
That is also pretty realistic
electronics are difficult and
Mars is going to be a pretty remote area
It really makes a lot of sense to manufacture thousands of electronics the exact same design
When you do that then you get an economy of scale
It becomes cheap
But to just manufacture a few small bits of electronics and different forms doesn't really make a lot of sense
So it makes sense that these things would be shipped in from Earth and probably will be until Mars is relatively self-sufficient
So that's really good
Now let's talk about the human factor
itself on
surviving Mars
Humans live in some kind of a dome exclusively including from the very first mission
Yeah, that's somewhat realistic
I humans will live in something that probably looks something like a dome a
Dome is a really good shape to get the maximum volume
For a given amount of material and it will also hold the pressure
Equally if you had a square
then the edges of
Cube itself will have a higher pressure than the face of it
And this unequal pressure can lead into some instabilities and thus holes
but you spiracle shapes such as a dome will have
Relatively equal pressure in all directions and thus makes a fair bit of sense now
You can build buildings anywhere in the dome and it doesn't really matter
Of course in real life the center part of the dome you'll be able to have the taller buildings
You have the spires that happen there
so it's
time is sort of like that I guess but
You're not going to be able to build the same height of
Apartments on the edge of the dome as you will in the middle and they're probably going to use the entire volume
Still it's a game. I like the abstracted nature and it works pretty well
The one nitpick that I have is
the farms
You have farms that are built inside of the dome just like they were anything else and in reality?
You're probably going to build farms in a dome all by themselves
Why would you do that? Well?
The optimal
Carbon dioxide level for plants is higher than it is for humans for humans two to three percent
And you start to feel some negative effects
Whereas plants will actually grow much much better in that kind of environment
You're probably going to put the plants in an environment where it has a higher carbon dioxide than humans are comfortable with
The humans will be able to go in there do their work and still be ok
but they're not going to want to spend all of their time at those high levels of carbon dioxide and
Thus you'll probably want to have them in their own specialized area
they will produce oxygen which can be used for wherever else you might need it but
You probably want to have those
separated so
The fungal domes actually do this. Although the fungal domes watch you eat the oxygen
Whereas these plants will actually produce oxygen. They convert the carbon dioxide that comes naturally from Mars into oxygen
It's how we breathe here on earth and that will help
Although not be all of the life support from ours at least initially. I
Do like that they stay away from the terraforming trope that you often see
To terraform Mars. It could be done, but it's going to take a long long time and
With the relatively short lifespan of the colony that you have in that game. It's just not realistic. I
Did want to also talk about a couple of other things
first of all, you have the Moxie's that generate oxygen that the astronauts used to breathe a
Makes full sense. This actually is pretty realistic. You have a lot of carbon dioxide on Mars
You could take this carbon dioxide strip away the one of the oxygens
Combine them with another one you have carbon monoxide and you could just toss outside of your spacecraft and there you have oxygen
It's a component of rocket fuel. It should be relatively easy to manufacture there
There are a couple of the wonders too that are pretty neat
you have the mobile wonder where you dig a big hole down to the mantle or even deeper and
this generates a lot of heat and it also generates a lot of metal and
rich metal as well rare metals
This makes a lot of sense. And in fact, this would be a good way to get the heat needed to
Make Mars into a more habitable place
You probably have a number of these mole holes if we're really serious about terraforming Mars
It will also release some extra gases that will help to make the planet a little bit thicker atmosphere
And overall work pretty well
The other one I want to talk about is a space elevator
Now the space elevator is this very tiny string that goes all the way up to space
About a hundred thousand kilometers, depending on exactly how big of a counterweight you have
It'll be a touch to a small asteroid. That'll be at that level and
If all goes well, it'll just kind of float around. It'll stay very stationary
Now how will the way to work on Mars?
Well, first of all, they work best if you put them at the equator
There are some alternative schemes that you could have two of them that are balanced out at the same latitude
North and south and it would stay stable. Although I think the early ones will be right at the equator
Why because the trick be over point is a geosynchronous orbit. It just works better you
could build an elevator on Mars easier than you could on earth because Mars is a fair bit lighter and
That is pretty realistic with today's technology. We could probably
Manufacture this strain, although it would take an enormous amount of work
Now where it gets difficult is Mars has two moons
Phobos and Deimos, that would be in the path of
This space elevator line and you'd have to arrange the string in such a way that they wouldn't be in
The way and wouldn't cause any kind of damage
Could it be done?
Probably although I'm not an expert in this kind of technology, but it certainly would require a lot more work
Anyways, I
Want to hear from you guys what you think about?
Surviving Mars what you think the more realistic bits are and the less realistic bits are and let's have a conversation
It's a really great game. I think this goes up there with Kerbal space program in terms of its
ability to be realistic but still fun to play and
You can spend a lot of time doing some really neat stuff with it. I really think it's a great game
I really enjoyed it thoroughly
Thank you very much and let me know whatever comments you guys have or questions you have about space exploration
Until next time keep on tracking. Take care
