Will Elondia Be Like Fordlandia?

Let's see... Both are colonies in hostile places

Last week I wrote about Henry Ford’s dream city in the Amazon, and how it worked out (spoiler: not well). This week we’ll take a look at Elon Musk’s plans for a Mars colony, and see if Fordlandia has any relevance.

Most of the issues with Mars colonization are unique to Mars, and Fordlandia didn’t face them: the gravity in the Amazon is the same as in Dearborn, for one thing, and the air is still breathable. There’s no life-threatening radiation in the Amazon, either. So we’ll skip over those. Rather, we’ll take a broader look at the problems at Fordlandia that maybe the sci-fi bros haven’t thought of as much, starting with the obvious ones and going from there.

My friend Christopher suggested a good name for the Mars colony: Elondia. We’ll go with that.

Risks

Many of the Mars colonization problems also occurred in Fordlandia.

Getting There

Although everyone focuses, rightly, on the basic problem of “how do we get there and survive?” for Mars, that also applied to Fordlandia. Not nearly as much, though: it took weeks of crushing boredom on the Amazon and Tapajós rivers, and big ships could not make it for half the year because the Tapajós was too low. It’s enormously worse getting to Mars, though, as everyone knows.

Going to Mars, though, has bigger health risks: radiation in space, first of all, and being in zero gravity for a long time.

Staying Healthy

Both Mars and the Amazon are extremely problematic for health. For the Amazon, you had mosquitos and malaria, other biting insects, tropical diseases, and poisonous snakes. The extreme humidity and heat brought on risks, too.

For Elondia, no one knows what 39% gravity will do to the human body. We know a little about the effects of zero-g from the International Space Station astronauts, but absolutely nothing about Martian gravity.

Both Fordlandia and Elondia have extreme isolation problems. In the Amazon, you couldn’t get anywhere without a multi-day journey. On Mars, of course, you’ll have to be inside all the time with the same people and no privacy, unless you’re out in a spacesuit. Once the time window for going back is closed, it’ll be 26 months until it opens up again, if there even is a window. And anyway, the initial volunteers for Mars One were told explicitly that it’s a one-way trip.

Oops, We Forgot

Fordlandia had many, many unscheduled trips to the Home Depot, as it were. They’d cable back to Dearborn or Belém, and weeks later their goods would arrive. No such luck on Mars.

As Christopher said:

Need a screw to fix that leaky door that threatens to depressurize your rat tunnel? Well, you’d better figure it out yourself, because the next supply run is years away. What happens if someone has a medical emergency or even a toothache? Just forget about getting any help and break out the emergency medical kit.

Of course, they’ll have 3-D printers up there. Assuming they have all the raw materials the printers need.

Building the Settlement

You might think setting up a colony in the jungle is way easier than building one on Mars, but actually Fordlandia was fairly difficult to build, too.

The trees needed to be cut down, and once they were down, something had to be done with them. Burning was the only practical solution, and that had deleterious effects on the soil. The heavy equipment was packed at the bottom of the cargo ship. There was no dock capable of holding so much weight. There was no warehouse to store all the stuff, so it sat out in the weather. Workers got sick, plus there were bitten by snakes.

For Elondia, we assume they’ll have thought through the known knowns. There will be robot missions first, and there will also presumably be small crews that arrive and do a lot of the prep work. Those crews will stay for a few weeks and find out some of the problems of living on Mars. You hope that by the time they’re ready to send people to live there, that work will be done.

The known unknowns include: how can you land people and heavy equipment on Mars without killing the people and/or breaking the cargo? Bouncing it with giant balls

is not going to work.

So you have to dig holes in the mountain and install all the life-support equipment necessary for humans: we’ll just hope they’ll plan all that out. Remember that if even one essential piece of equipment is not thought of, it’ll be 26 months before they can get another.

The unknown unknowns are… well, we don’t know those. Since no one’s ever done this before, we can’t possible know what will happen. Maybe the mountain will shift or collapse, or get obliterated by a volcano. We just don’t know and can’t know.

Profit

Fordlandia was supposed to grow lots of latex. It failed dismally at that. Some latex was finally produced, almost 10 years after it was founded, but it was pretty much a pure loss. No one with a commercial interest in rubber, e.g. Harvey Firestone, was interested in taking it over, and the final sale price to Brazil was pathetically small.

Elondia has no prospects of ever returning any money. Its goal is to make humanity a multi-planet civilization. The Wikipedia article mentions easier access to asteroids in the Asteroid Belt, but by the time that ever materializes, Earth- or Moon-based asteroid mining will be up and running.

Fordlandia was finally shut down when a new generation, Henry Ford’s grandson, took over Ford. Since Elondia will be several orders of magnitude more expensive, when Elon Musk finally dies (he’s 53 now) that could be the end of it, but most likely the end will come much sooner. More on that later.

Management Problems

I laid out in the last article all the problems that Fordlandia had with their managers. Some were incompetent, some alienated their workers, and some just couldn’t handle the jungle. It was feasible for Dearborn to recall the manager and send down someone else.

In Elondia, of course, that won’t be possible. Someone’s going to be in charge and make the final decisions, and if he or she can’t handle it, then only a mutiny will solve the problem.

People Problems

The Fordlandia workers rioted twice, the second time destroying the entire plantation and driving off all the white people. They hated the paternalism, the enforced healthy diet, the housing, the brutal work they had to do, and they especially hated their managers.

There’s no reason to think that Elondia’s population would be any more docile, and their living conditions will be hundreds of times worse. But they won’t be able to just go down the river back to civilization like Fordlandia’s employees. Their alternative will be quiet quitting, catatonia, or suicide.

The only really viable model for people on Mars is not the one that Mars One is using. It’s the military, where the chain of command is clear, everyone is sworn to obey orders, and they know it’s only temporary. I’ll get into some other models in the Conclusions.

Recreation

In Fordlandia, workers could frequent the satellite villages and boats that provided liquor, prostitution, gambling, and other diversions. Ford provided “healthy, Middle American recreation” like social dancing and golf, but apparently that didn’t satisfy everyone.

In Elondia, none of that will apply, unless there’s a red-light district somewhere in the mountain. I did see some planning document that suggested the workers would engage in creative, artistic pursuits. Yep, that’ll work.

Assuming that liquor and drugs will be strictly proscribed on the flights to Mars, Elondia citizens will have to resort to making their own, like prisoners with Pruno. The “prison” analogy is an apt one, actually. Elondia would be a cross between a Four Seasons Hotel that you can’t leave and a prison work farm.

Dead People

After a year, Fordlandia had 90 people in its cemetery. Presumably Elondia will have some plan for disposing of bodies: probably cremation. Burying them in the Martian regolith would mummify them very quickly, as Christopher explains.

Conclusions

After reading all that, you might think I’m a space skeptic; one of those people who say, “We should spend the money here on Earth instead!” No, nothing like that at all. We should go to Mars. I love space exploration. I grew up on science fiction, although I gave it up in my twenties, unlike most of the people pushing Elondia.

It’s just that the idea of “people moving there to live and never coming back” is ridiculous.

• “We need to become a multi-planet species.” Why do we? There are surely other conscious civilizations in this vast universe. Every species goes extinct sooner or later.

• “We may really need special, bio-engineered organisms more suited to life on other planets!” OK, that’s some hand-waving there. Who is working on that?

• “An extinction event, like an asteroid or nuclear war or climate change, could end life on Earth!” A planet-ending event, like an asteroid, could hit Mars, too. In fact, since it lacks an atmosphere and is closer to the Asteroid Belt, it’s probably more likely. And Mars faces its own cataclysmic possibilities, like a disaster arising out of terraforming, which no one can possibly predict.

• “The sun will eventually expand and end all life on Earth!” It’ll end life on Mars, too. The chance of mankind ever expanding to other solar systems is about zero. The speed of light, you know.

How to do Mars, for Real

Now let’s look at some models that might work for choosing people to go to Mars and stay, just for a week or two. We’ll forget about the “living there and never coming back” fantasy.

Submarine Crews

People who’ve lived and worked on a submarine are already experienced with living in a very confined space and getting along with people whom they don’t like.

They’ve also accepted that there’s a Captain and his or her word is law. If they’re going to be in a very confined space for the trip to Mars and staying there, they’ll need that.

Antarctica Research Stations

I was actually at this talk, although I can’t see myself in the audience:

Pablo wasn’t only at the McMurdo station, which does have reasonable connectivity to the rest of the world. He was at the South Pole, which doesn’t. You can read more about it here. As I recall, Pablo said that the walls in the building are so thin that you can someone fart through the building.

The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station is one model for a Mars colony. The key thing is: those people can go back. They get regular plane flights for six months out of the year. Neither of those would be true on Mars.

International Space Station

You can read more than you ever wanted to know about the ISS in the Wikipedia article. Actually, it’s worth skimming that, just to see the practical problems of a lengthy space mission, both technical and human. Among them:

As of 2010, the total cost was US$150 billion.

Multiple that by 10, at least, for Mars, and translate to 2030’s dollars.

Despite all the problems, the ISS has at least shown that a multinational program can be pulled off. Amid all the talk about “end of life for the ISS,” it seems like a project everyone could get behind is:

• The International Moon Station

• The International Mars Station

Unlike the ISS, it seems quite possible that some private organization will get to the Moon or Mars before NASA or ESA. However, eventually, the costs of maintaining a station there will get too big for the founder or his successors, as Fordlandia did.

That’s fine; they’ll get it done faster than any government ever could, and then sell or lease it to the International Mars Station. So that’s the best outcome: a permanent base, but no permanent residents.