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Will water on Mars be mined or harvested? (self.space)

submitted 3 weeks ago by nikaaa to c/space

8 comments fedilink hide all child comments

If you mine something, you can't mine it again. It's gone from the ground.

If you harvest something, then wait a certain amount of time (a year, for example), you can harvest it again.

Is Water on Mars a renewable resource?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

No, Mars lost 99.999% of all of it's water. The part that remained is stored frozen inside. As soon as you take it out, it will be gone forever.

You can try and use and recycle it as much as you can, but once you lose it, it's lost.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Which shouldn't be that much of a problem, because everyone is going to be sealed in a closed environment anyway. There will be losses, but it's not like we'd be venting water vapor into the atmosphere.

If we can terraform enough to sustain an atmosphere to hold water vapor, we'd probably also be able to produce enough liquid water somehow, since they're both in the same region of science fiction right now. Maybe there's enough hydrogen and oxygen in the geology somewhere. If not, maybe we could produce them from nuclear reactions. But that would be very energy-consuming, so like I said, science fiction.