Hear me out. This thought process requires a bit of knowledge of physics/chemistry.
On the martian poles, there are vast quantities of frozes CO2. This frozen CO2 exerts a certain “vapor pressure” - in other words, a certain partial pressure of gaseous CO2.
Now, if we convert this CO2 into O2 by removing the carbon out of it, the concentration of O2 in the atmosphere increases. And therefore, the concentration (and partial pressure) of CO2 decreases.
But since the frozen CO2 on the poles causes a certain partial pressure of CO2, a bit of the frozen CO2 will go into gaseous phase to refill the CO2 partial pressure.
So, by converting CO2 into O2, the concentration of O2 increases, but the concentration of CO2 stays approximately the same. As such, the total pressure (and density) of the atmosphere increases. This would happen if large-scale biological photosynthesis/growth took place.
Well yeah, then underground in lava tubes. But then the moon would be much easier for building habitats to live in.
There is a sort of paradox. To do any of this in any scale would be much more likely with automation. And automation, like robots being able to build robots and then factories and anything else is coming especially with the recent advances in AI and computer vision etc. And then such megaprojects won’t be unthinkeable any more. But then it would probably also be easier to build a mega space habitats mining the moon. Without automation, it might never be worth it to actually colonize there so it’s better to wait a few more decades.
So, the major issue with settling moon is resource availability: water (!), carbon, fertile soil, and energy.
On the moon you have none of that. Maybe, with a lot of luck, you find water somewhere. Then you need carbon, energy during the long moon nights, and soil that isn’t razor sharp particles.
On Mars, you have all of them: low concentrations of water in the atmosphere, carbon from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, soil that isn’t razor sharp (thanks to erosion), and the nights are short enough that you can make it through them.
True, and you have more gravity. On the other hand you have perchlorides. Obviously you need water but I thought they did find some already near the south pole on the moon? (EDIT: Yes but apparently little and not very concentrated). I didn’t know there was so little carbon though.
Do you know anything about engineering? This is a much harder problem to solve than you’re making it out to be.
Edit: Just to be clear, I’m not making fun of you, or trying to belittle you. I’m an engineer myself, so I’m asking bcz automation, and design are really hard problems, even when we’ve already solved a problem.
I dabble a little (3D printers, composites). I’m thinking more about 30-100 years for actually living on moon or mars like a real self sufficient colony instead of missions.
I do believe mechanical engineering can be represented in a way that is accessible to AI. It doesn’t need general knowledge or sentience. Not just the generative stuff we have now in CAD, but more like the AI that can generate images. Ways to generate infinitely complex “nonsense” machines isn’t hard, but AI can then learn of how to work more intuitive.
At some point we’ll have an AI that can design, supervise manufacture / CNC and robots to assemble and then control all the machines we need for this. Of course the design would have lots of human input at start. But robotics are improving and deep AI is able to do remarkable things already. Eventually we would feed all the existing CAD designs and function and physical laws and material science into an AI as a lot of data and then suddenly you can bootstrap an entire industrial society fully automated. But every step and progress towards that goal would make it that much cheaper and easier to do.
Of course that’s sci-fi but so is the idea of living on mars :)