Sunday March 6th, 2011

[Disclaimer: fantasy ahead]

China is run by leaders who are engineers and scientists who became political leaders. China is also the second largest economy in the world. Now there’s one thing engineers really like and that is big projects.

One day these leaders will show the world that China can pull of the greatest stunt in the history of mankind. In fact, it would be the largest and boldest undertaking in our solar system.

Historically China has not taken part in discovering new continents. The historical emperors were too occupied getting and keeping their vast empire under control. Not much has changed since.

I bet China is going make up for this. It's going to discover and colonize a new world instead of a continent. It's going to create a second China. A China with room for billions of people. This new place will be Mars.

Why would China do this? Because they can, because they have the means, and because it's plain cool to bring the Chinese culture to another planet and start all over over on a pristine planet.

This project will cost approximately 50 billion per year during the first 10 years (in comparison: China spent $98 billion on defense in 2009). The project will continue to cost this amount for at least 30 years. Now 1500 billion is a lot of money but it’s the same amount the US spends in less than three years on defense alone and the entire Apollo project cost roughly $170 billion in 2005 dollars.

For this money China would first build a smart way to deliver heavy payloads to space. Not using big rockets, but by using thousands of robot airplanes slowly circling the planet, getting higher and higher over the course of several days. Rockets are big and dangerous. Slowly gliding into space is zen, and you only need a small rocket for the final push into low earth orbit. Robots are not in a rush anyway and they don't need sleep.

Astronauts will assemble China's first space station (robots and socket wrenches still don't agree very well). The purpose of this station is not to make dull circles around Earth. One day massive boosters will fire and the space station will become a cargo ship and set sail for Mars. No humans will be on board this first trip. Again, they take the slow lane, making use of the Moon and Venus to gain speed enabling the station to save on propellant needed for slowing down at the end of the journey.

When the cargo ship arrives at Mars, it will dock with Phobos, the largest of Mars' two moons. Hundreds of container-like modules will be dropped onto the surface of Mars using parachutes and reverse thrusters. Robot trucks inside those containers will collect other containers and haul them to a single spot on a flat plane. Only 5% of the containers need to be retrieved, more is nice but not necessary (humans can always retrieve the redundant, hard to find containers in later years). The collected containers contain food, water and materials for humans to survive for five years. Among the stuff sent to Mars are small nuclear reactors, solar panels, factories-in-a-box, greenhouses (to grow vegetables) and tons of mining and farming equipment and construction tools.

Once everything is up and running, and at least two of the nuclear reactors are properly working and robots have assessed that the life support systems are in good order, the next step will be taken.

The next step involves getting a hundred people to Mars. Not just five, one hundred. And they will not be able to go back.

This team will get to Mars using a second space craft, similar to the first one but with tons of extra insulation (mostly just water) to protect them from solar flares during the trip.

Besides this passenger space craft, the thousands of robot planes that were used in the construction of the two stations will accompany the passengers on their journey to Mars. Along the way to Mars, one relay station after the other will unhook from the caravan and take up a strategic position between Earth and Mars. These stations can act as signal boosters, to improve communications between Mars and Earth, and act as safe havens storing food, water, energy and spare equipment for when new waves of humans are starting to travel to Mars.

The first hundred Chinese who land on Mars will construct living quarters, set up the factories and be mostly involved with mining and farming over the course of 5-10 years.

Only when iron ore and other resources like water have been found in large enough quantities, green light will be given to send the next hundred. Over the course of 20-30 years hundreds of thousands Chinese will land on Mars.

After 50 years the third phase will kick in: the new Martians will have developed space craft able to get back to Earth. A steady supply of rare metals and other natural resources will be shipped back to Earth, creating the first interplanetary trade route.

Whether the settlers are able to terraform Mars is unknown. It requires immense amounts of energy to warm the entire atmosphere and pump oxygen into it. But new scientific breakthroughs might make this not necessary, creating self-replicating glass structures to build huge domes over canyons and craters. It's much easier to terraform a small patch of land than an entire planet.

China will show the world (that other world, called Earth) that it is capable of discovering and colonizing a new frontier, surpassing the West by several orders of magnitude in difficulty and investment compared to what Columbus and Vespucy did.

It will be a special day when the first web server is fired up on Mars, and Earthlings will be able to go to http://marsdaily.mars to read about the latest news from the new frontier.