Elon Musk invented The Boring Company while stuck in California traffic and decided he was going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging. Almost like the perfect cover story for developing a secret technology hidden in plain sight.
What if I told you that the real reason Elon Musk founded The Boring Company was to develop the next generation of tunnel boring machines to deploy on Mars. And it was okay to build your own underground Martian city.
Adequately this isn’t really an earth-shattering revelation or even a significant stretch of fiction, most people would probably assume that Elon was going to try to launch one of these boring machines into space, which makes sense. comes But still it remains a topic that doesn’t get much airtime in the form of serious discussion and it’s a shame because that’s what’s happening.
It’s really fun to imagine a futuristic connection between his writings here on Earth, down the streets of Las Vegas, to what could someday become the first human settlement on an extraterrestrial world, so let’s talk about boring tunnels on Mars. . Let’s start with the first reason why we want to tunnel to Mars because we’re all going to live under horrible science-fiction bubble domes.
Looks great in renderings but when it comes to practicality the giant dome is the worst idea ever, the reality of life on Mars would require significant protection from the elements, meaning radiation micro meteorites, atmospheric exposure and dust Thunderstorm, what happens the first time an 8 km high cloud of electrostatic dust rolls up to that huge dome that has to be cleaned up, radiation will be a major concern.
Long-term settlement on Mars is approximately 40 to 50 times more exposed to radiation from the Sun on the surface of Mars than on the surface of Earth, this is because Mars has no active molten core and is therefore less exposed to cosmic rays and solar radiation. Contact is short. radiation. Contact is short. wind. There is no magnetosphere to repel. Earth has a very dense atmosphere, so when meteorites collide at 72 kilometers per second, the intense heat of friction burns up the rock long before it reaches the ground and destroys it, if anything.
The atmospheric pressure on Mars is less than one percent of our pressure on Earth, so the meteorite is still traveling at close to 72 kilometers per second when it hits our dome which won’t end well. And exposure to this low-pressure environment is going to create an even bigger problem for the human body. If there is a crack or hole in the house, our blood will boil and our eyes will hurt.
Explode Total Recall found that going underground would be a great way to solve some of the biggest challenges the planet throws at us, and Elon Musk knows this all too well, answering questions at a conference in 2017 Here’s a clip.
How does the tunnel boring idea relate to his Mars colony plans Elon said I think getting good at tunneling can be really helpful in building underground habitats for Mars, with good radiation shielding you could build a whole city underground Can.
If you want people still want to go out from time to time, but you can build a tremendous amount underground on Mars with the right boring technology, I think there’s a lot of overlap in that area. A significant technological overlap would require a different optimization for the Mars boring machine versus the Earth-boring machine.
He said he expected there would be a lot of ice mining happening on Mars and a lot of mining activity in general that could be these boring machines. We are pretty sure that the surface of Mars is going to be rich in metals like copper, chromium, iron and nickel, which would be important for in-situ resources. RCS which means using what is available on the planet to support the colony mining water.
A large part of it is going to be, it is very likely that there is a large amount of ice on the surface of Mars, it is not going to be like in the whole movie remember where they imagine that the entire core of Mars is made of ice But that must be a lot to support a small colony, now here’s where to start connecting the dots on 2016, the year The Boring Company was conceived.
SpaceX released its first images for One. Interplanetary Transport System This would go on to become Starship, so we know that Elon was on top of landing on Mars in this particular year, the very first The Boring Company tunnel was built under the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne California and just recently Elon recently announced that he is working on a third version of his master plan that will present a unified vision of his three companies, Tesla SpaceX and The Boring Company.
A proof rock boring machine has a diameter of 8 metres, the cargo fairing on a SpaceX starship has a diameter of 9 metres, they would fit together like a glove as if this was done on purpose and opened one up. These animals on Mars will give us the ability to tunnel at a snail’s pace of 17 meters per hour, we will soon have an underground city, transit tunnels will be easier to dig under the surface of Mars, ultra-high speed hyperloop will allow.
system because to build a hyperloop on Earth we would have to create an artificial vacuum inside the tube to overcome air resistance, but the atmosphere on Mars is already in a vacuum, so a vehicle can do this by only allowing ambient pressure in the loop Can move at incredible speeds with almost zero resistance. We could also dig a giant circular tunnel with a mobile habitat that would be in constant motion like a centrifuge and that would create an artificial gravitational effect.
Simulating conditions on Earth Time spent inside the ECT centrifuge will help us mitigate the debilitating effects of Mars’ low gravity, of course there’s a big thorn in the side of that theory and that’s the weight so a Starship would weigh less Could reduce lifted 100 metric tons of cargo to the surface of Mars which is fantastic Some research shows that the weight of the Proofrock boring machine is going to be around 1200 metric tons.
So it doesn’t add up to the reality that it would take 12 spaceships to carry a boring machine which wouldn’t be impossible if Elon actually manages to build his fleet of 1000 starships, but it’s also not as streamlined as we Let’s imagine I love the principle, we have to keep it real and flesh out that idea a bit.
We don’t even need boring machines on Mars because it’s already full of natural tunnels, it’s kind of mind blowing but it turns out that the planet Mars has done a lot of hard work for us on the surface , is filled with rocks, called lava. Tubes, these are remnants of ancient times, when at some point in the last 4 billion years Mars was as volcanically active as Earth, our two planets probably actively melting each other.
The tallest known mountain in the Solar System is two and a half times the height of Everest, a remnant of a Martian volcano, but Mars is cooling much faster than Earth, so it may be smaller because it is further from the Sun. But the core of Mars solidified the magnetic field and the atmosphere was blown away by the solar wind but left behind are these vast tunnels cut into the surface rock by ancient lava flows.
We know these tubes exist on Mars because we have seen skylights in the roof of the tunnel in our satellite flybys. These are points where the roof of a lava tube leaves a perfectly round hole in the surface that opens into a hollow cavern below. Turns out we’ve seen tons of these skylights on Mars, they’re also on the Moon, and it tells us there’s already a network of tunnels waiting to be discovered on Mars due to the low gravity , these lava tubes will be much wider than those lava tubes.
They can be hundreds of meters across and kilometers in length, the ceilings of these tunnels can be up to 90 meters thick, providing ample shielding against radiation meteorites and anything else the Solar System might throw at us from inside these cave tunnels. Can The impact should have maintained a constant temperature of approximately negative 20 °C and thus we believe that the rock forming the outer surface of Mars would be non-porous in nature.
We should be able to make pressurized prostheses at some point. It’s going to be cold inside the caves but we can breathe outside the helmet and our eyes won’t pop out. And above all, there may very well be a place inside these tubes where we will find relics of past lives. Suppose Mars has probably all evidence been wiped from the surface or buried under dust storms of hundreds of millions of years.
But under the ground there may be preserved micro-organisms or even fossils of fish or reptiles or animals. Perhaps there was a civilization of some kind of mammal living on Mars when the planet started dying and they were there as a last ditch effort to survive. Going underground now we can find some weird stuff out there, I know what you must be wondering does this completely eliminate the boring company in space idea.
It would still be awesome and extremely useful, maybe we could use natural tubes as habitats and main arteries for tunneling machines on Mars. Our infrastructure and how we connect them with our sub-network of tunnels and hyperloops, taking all factors into account is probably the best case scenario for an underground hub of Mars with its own transit system.
Putting this together we use caves as homes and we treat the surface like a utility instead of using solar energy to build greenhouses and grow food. A place for exploration and adventure. Maybe call it the Coast. Think of it like a city on Earth. We live on land and we work on water.
Except that the land is a cave and the water is the surface of an alien world. It’s amazing that we live at a point in human history where we can even talk about these kinds of things in any real sense. That this thing is even remotely possible is amazing, so let’s explore our theories below on how we feel about Elon Musk’s vision for a self-sustaining human society on Mars and whether you think it will work.