 session of the 2021 Open Simulator Community Conference. In this session we are pleased to introduce the presentation Learning to Live on Mars. Our speaker is Mike Laurie and Mike was editor of the Neil Stevenson Quicksilver MetaWeb Wiki in which he helped flesh out the virtual world of the novel Snow Crash and other works by Stevenson. A military veteran Mike was a member of the Extropy Institute which pioneered early VR concepts. After joining Second Life in 2006, he built one of the largest estates on the grid, developed the first virtual stock exchanges, and was a frequent guest on the popular treat TV show and Metanomics. He then capitalized the first commercial Open Sim grid, Central Grid, and members of his team were part of the original LiveSL group that built the tools that made OpenSim possible. Mike currently serves as chairman of the Exhibits Committee of the International Space Flight Museum. It has facilities in both SL and OS grid of kitely.com. I want to give you some housekeeping. Please check out the website conference.opensimulator.org for more about this specific speaker but all speakers and a full schedule of the rest of the events for this conference. This session is being live streamed and recorded so if you have questions or comments during the session you may send tweets at OpenSimCC with the hashtag OSCC21. All right welcome everyone and let's begin the session. Mike I'm going to turn it over to you. All right great thank you. Mary Krampus. All right so with that out of the way, thanks everybody for coming. So yeah we've been talking about a project that we've been doing for the ISM here in OpenSim for the been working on the past few years and we're going to be opening it up to being able to be used by the public for training in in early 2022. So for those familiar with the International Space Flight Museum we started in 2006 in Second Life and we have two regions still in Second Life. You may have visited our rocket ring there that's been featured in a number of media articles. We had featured full scale exhibits of all the world's rockets and so a few years ago we decided to open up here in OpenSim because we could get a lot more bang for our buck in terms of land and space and so forth because our two regions in Second Life are getting kind of cramped. We still operate them alongside the National Space Society and ISM is now a Texas-based 501C your donations are welcome and we are in Kitely now we've expanded to an eight by eight region where the normal museum exhibits that replicate what we have in Second Life are now in a four by four section of that eight by eight and we started to develop training simulator spaces for teaching people about colonizing different places in the solar system. So the first example of this that we've been without nearing fruition is our Mars base and the idea is that it's not just something for people to come and take a look at and see the pretty exhibits and so forth. Our plan is to implement scripted devices throughout the entire exhibit that are fully interactive so let me start with the slides here so we've got when you first arrive you wind up at our landing spot and we have a fully operable SpaceX Starship rocket the one on the left there is capable of ferrying people from our Mars base sim back to our area of the sim to our museum and back and forth from our SpaceX launch tower there in the main museum and it'll spend some time in quote-unquote orbit where you can enjoy zero gravity and so forth and we'll get a little information about that but the big focus is in our Mars base and the training stuff and this is something that I'm trying we're trying to take to a whole new level that isn't really seen much in open sim or Second Life so what we're going to be doing is implementing some features with our scripted devices that really take things to a whole new level so it's not just trying to make a facility that's got a realistic appearance and maybe have some things that you can operate every scientific technological device that's in here is going to be fully interactive not just to be able to operate it but it's going to have failure modes so things will break down from time to time and you'll be able to troubleshoot them and then repair them and everything will be fully documented so that people who want to train here can study the documentation like a textbook you know basically pre-train and use as a reference material for doing their interactive training work and that'll also allow them to record their performance in these functions in terms of time and and missteps and things like that so when this is fully implemented we'll have a fully operable curriculum so that people will be able to sign up on our website to become what's called analog astronauts to enter this training and when they complete the whole program they'll get a certificate from us certifying that they've completed this program as a virtual analog astronaut so you may have heard the term analog astronaut before it's something that's used by the Mara society and other organizations around the world that have facilities that allow people to who who basically show that they have the training to enter these sort of programs and they'll go to places like the Arctic and Utah desert and other remote facilities that have been built to resemble what a an early Mars based on Mars excuse me an early base on Mars would look like and the way they operate there is they live inside these modules most of the time as just like they would be doing if they were living on Mars and when they exit the modules they you know wear a spacesuit so doing like geological surveying and scientific work anything outside they work in their spacesuits they'd use equipment that's been designed for for astronauts and for use on plants so it's a very realistic training experience they log all their scientific data so it's it's a very intense program that usually lasts between three to six months depending upon the program and but it's those programs there's limited availability of slots there's only so many facilities around the world to be able to do those sort of things and we're going to be seeing a lot more opportunities for people to colonize particularly Mars in the coming years because if you've been paying attention to the media Elon Musk and SpaceX are intending to help move as much as as many as a million people from earth to Mars in this century and so that's a lot of moving that also means a lot of training yeah that's my dog in the background and so we need to make training more accessible to more people and as well as have sort of a pipeline where people can do their virtual training online particularly when we have situations like you know we've all been dealing with with coven everything where everybody does everything remote now um and so this will help people decide if that's this is something really for them they even if they decide against moving to Mars they'll have learned a lot about what this is all about and they understand both the feasibility and the difficulties and the amount of work that goes into these sort of things and so setting up programs like this will help to pipeline people into more intensive in-person training they'll prepare people for an actual colonization migration that will happen uh sometime you know late 2020s up into the 2030s is one thing should be getting started with SpaceX and so you know who knows who else uh what other companies or countries may be getting into the game so um let's see some other things we've got here so um when you arrive in our region you'll wind up at our landing point right next to the rocket landing pads um you are immediately asked to put on a spacesuit because you're in a vacuum and you're gonna die unless of course you're a droid like myself um and so we've got the free spacesuits so people can slap those on and they have two choices they can either get into the Mars vehicle there to the left and trundle over to a airlock to go straight into the base or if let's say their ship has had some issues with onboard illnesses then when people arrive they'll go to the right into the doorway to the right and that's a goes down underground to some modules that they'll be quarantined in for a certain amount of time until they're demonstrated to be free of any illnesses that we don't want spreading to the population and so once you get into the base then we've got a number of things to look at so a big important thing with living on Mars is energy so we've got several forms of energy this is a what's called an mp200 nuclear reactor so it's a very simple reactor has basically five moving parts a control rod for the reactor core and four sterling generators and each generator has one moving part it only takes it only needs maintenance every six years very rugged very durable and then it'll generate 200 kilowatts of energy as a base loan for the base and one of the big things that's important is rockets need to get back to earth to bring more people here and one of the things that makes this sort of program very economically feasible is what's called the sabbatier process we need to instead of hauling all the fuel we need to get back to earth with from earth which is what earlier mars exploration projects had expected and why they were so expensive using what we call in situ resource utilization or isru we use the resources that are on mars to make the things we need to live on mars so in this case this little chemical plant we see right here takes carbon dioxide out of the martian atmosphere we take water from ice that's being found to be rather plentiful on mars even if it's underground and so we put the water in the pink tank we put the co2 in the yellow tank we split the water into liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen so that gives us liquid oxygen as an oxidizer for the rocket engines the liquid hydrogen and the carbon dioxide go into a induction coil based uh catalytic reactor that's got a bed of of platinum pedals pebbles in it and the induction coil heats it all up and it turns those gases into methane and water and so then it goes through a condenser and the first the water gets condensed out of that and winds up back in the h2o tank and then the remaining gas is methane and that goes through another condenser it goes into that red tank which says ch4 which is methane so now we wind up with liquid methane liquid oxygen we refuel our rocket send it home to get more people more cargo and more equipment and so that's how we make this an economical thing and so you see in the background we've got some windmills up on the rim of the crater there and so some people may say well mars really doesn't have much atmosphere how can you use windmills well the fact is that uh even though mars atmosphere is only six millibars of pressure now earth sea level is a thousand millibars so that seems rather thin but a carbon dioxide is about 30 denser than oxygen and nitrogen and secondly the average wind speeds on mars range from 60 to 120 kilometers per hour so when you calculate all those factors in uh wind power on mars is almost as useful as it is here on earth cows for mars right but they require a lot of food that you got to grow as well okay so next thing we got is so you arrive here and you can see this another style of of windmills here on the right of this image and these are helical windmills that are lower power but they're easier to maintain and so we wind up at the base here so this front module we see is sort of a three-decker module that's based on the original mars direct designs that dr robert zubrin zubrin designed back in the 1990s and so that'll be the first module that gets erected on mars and so the first team lives in there and then they start setting up large 3d printing machines that will use mars resources to create martian concrete they'll be gathering iron and nickel asteroids that have fallen on mars for billions of years to create martian steel they'll be gathering silicon to create martian glass and with these types of materials they'll be building all the other modules that we need there on mars and so while they're living in this first module that will be covered in what's called reguleth which is just martian dirt to provide radiation protection because the martian atmosphere is thin and so then we can start building more modules that you see behind there now this is one of the pieces of equipment that we use for gathering martian resources these are called rasor machines and so they're basically robots that have these drums on the front and back that rotate and they scoop up martian dirt into those drums when they fill up they rotate upward over the bin they turn in the reverse direction dump all the soil in the bin when the bin's full the robot goes and they delivers all that stuff to a refinery that separates it all and delivers the refined materials to 3d printers and so there's lots of opportunities for learning to maintain things here we've got a garage here for the mars rover vehicles and here we've got also solar power now solar is kind of useful on mars it's slightly less intense sunlight on mars than on earth because mars is over 40 further away but again the atmosphere is thinner at least when there's no dust storm so you can gather a lot of solar power so once we start building modules from local materials we need the next big thing is we need to have sustainability to keep people alive more than just water and air of course we need food so this is a combined living and agricultural module with a geodesic dome on top using a model called the universal habitat that was pioneered by NASA engineer Greg Allison Greg was a past president of the L5 society and he's got he's got his green greg's channel on youtube if you're into sustainable agriculture and permaculture this is a larger agricultural module where we've tunneled deep into the ground and built a four-story agricultural modules where we can bring in sunlight and illumination that's powered by electricity and grow rather intense levels of agriculture both vine material species on the walls and down the columns but in the fields area you see in the brown areas of the floors there that's all soil and so we'll have everything from lettuce and corn to pears and strawberries and all kinds of stuff in between and if you look down at the very bottom there's a little cistern there so underneath the the bottom floor there is a basement that's filled with water and so gathering water in this mars base is going to be like if you've ever read the novel dune how the people on iraqus uh collect water underground we're going to be doing the same thing on mars because even though there's a good amount of water on mars there's certainly not as much as there is on earth and it's all underground and frozen so we collect the water we melt it we filter clean it and so forth we distill it and we store it in our facilities here for long duration use as well as recycling once we have a nice good sized martian base going then we're going to start building more because they one of the reasons for doing multiple bases is is that there are different types of minerals in different areas of bars and so to be able to travel between those two places particularly transporting cargo you can waste a lot of energy flying it there or traveling on the surface and exposing whoever's trans transporting it to radiation or we will be using tunnel boring machines to build hyper loops on mars now you may wonder why hyper loops well if you've ever looked at all the companies that elon musk invests in he's basically looking at core technologies that are needed on mars and he's figuring out how to get markets on earth to capitalize their development by creating markets for them here so he created tesla cars because there's no oil on mars so you need electric cars on mars he created solar city because again there's no oil on mars space acts obviously to get there he created the boring company to develop tunnel boring machines and so on and so forth so when you understand that whole idea that you start seeing how he's got a rather holistic view of development so that's basically the whole presentation so far and so here I am on my hyperloop train at riding around in a we've got a nice two kilometer loop underground that you can ride on and it will break down from time to time and you'll have to fix that so that's that any questions hey mike I wanted to ask you so how do you get for these builds I mean how are you getting how to recreate these specific rockets and things that you're putting in here I do a lot of research online with you know what's going on with with for instance with the rock with SpaceX rockets I'm keeping tabs on their designs their dimensions yeah I can tell you exactly how the raptor rocket engine works so on and so forth so I delve deeply into a lot of that stuff online if you're into this sort of thing I actually recommend a couple different youtube channels there's what about it is a great space youtube channel there's space eccentric which is another great one that focuses on SpaceX and then there's everyday astronaut which Tim Dodd runs and is actually quite educational for on a lot of different topics so if you're into that sort of thing check those channels out they're really excellent awesome any other questions before we let Mike disappear into space all right well Mike thank you so much for sharing your time and information with this I think a lot of people are going to be heading your way great we're always open for volunteers particularly if you're in descripting we want to accelerate this process and so and and we are offering money for people that want to do scripting for us so give me your ring all right so as a reminder to our audience you're going to want to check out conference.open simulator.org to see what is coming up on the conference schedule you won't want to miss our next session which will begin at 2 30 p.m it's entitled animash is coming animash is coming get excited also we encourage you to visit the oscc 21 poster expo in the oscc expo 3 region and to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hypergrid resources you can go to oscc expo 2 region and you can see sponsor and crowd fonder booths are located throughout all of the oscc expo regions so feel free to open your map and jump around and enjoy yourselves I want to thank you again thanks again to our speakers and to the audience for coming and we'll see you again here at 2 30