✨ Nora Tindall  🪐

water in free space is in comets and planetary rings and ejecta from cryovolcanoes so if you want water, in the form of ice, you can just mine comets and planetary rings and vacuum up some cryovolcano gunk and then purify it

and conveniently, some other stuff in that ice will be things like methane, which you can use as fuel for your rockets if you want to burn it

basically what im saying here is, Elon Musk's plan to colonize Mars is absolutely stupid and a waste of resources in every possible way, because it's predicated on the idea that you should be landing on Mars, when landing on Mars doesnt buy you anything good

now to be fair, landing on earth is important for his cost goals, and thats absolutely valid as a motivation, but the goal of landing on mars is just stupid you have to think about going elsewhere or else you're barely solving the problem

so to circle back to the original question, if somehow technological civilization had arisen on mars instead of earth, it would've had a much easier time getting into and exploring space but that's about it. there's not much in mars's favor

oh yeah, a cool thing about staying exclusively in solar orbit rather than going down well is that you can set up transport systems to feed raw material from the asteroid belt down into low solar orbit, where you use high-intensity light from the sun to directly heat and refine

just use large solar concentrators to collect sunlight and melt the ore instead of generating electricity etc. you can do it in the belt too of course but inverse square means theyd have to be enormous. instead just move closer to the sun!

if you're smart, you move the whole asteroid, instead of mining it out there. slow the rock, let it slip into an elliptical orbit so it goes down towards the sun, then use high intensity sunlight to park it at a closer orbit where you can refine it using sunlight