You guys talk about a lot of things like they're magic. Having a garden, for example. Having a garden requires either soil that has been well-prepared by many years of soil evolution, or a metric ass-load of chemical fertilizers. Chemical fertilizers require a pretty hefty industrial infrastructure. You planning on building fertilizer plants on Mars? Just getting a portion of Mars to the level that you could do sustainable farming would require decades of supply lines. Hydroponics is no answer, because you still need plenty of chemical fertilizers--even more than dirt farming.

And how about replacement parts? Lubricants? Coolants? You planning on building chemical manufacture plants on Mars for all of this? What resources does Mars have that you could use to synthesize lubricants? What process would you use? How much money would developing that infrastructure cost?

Now, yes, Mars has evidence of plenty of the kind of volcanic activity required to be able to find the various ores and minerals you would need. But the facilities to process these are enormous. We have them on Earth, built up over centuries of the industrial revolution. But to start from scratch on Mars will require enormous expenditure, and frankly there isn't an economy on the planet right now that could support such an expenditure. Worse, it would be a long-term massive expenditure, and what happens to the project, and the people trapped on Mars, when it becomes obvious that it is unsustainable?

Building a Mars colony isn't like building a Starcraft base. You can't just magically turn vespene gas into 30 weight oil to lube your engine. The processing infrastructure that even shit like that requires is enormous and complex. Plus, the titanic influx of essentially free and easy fossil fuel energy has instilled within us the mistaken assumption that growth is unlimited, and that the stars are within our reach. The truth is, the free ride is just about over and finding sustainable resource sources simply to keep our own planet going is going to become orders of magnitude more complex. Trying to keep our planet going AND build a new one from scratch on the same horribly limited resource budget is just not going to work.

on the other hand, you make it sound like it's going to have to support a city's worth of people from the start.

the resources to support a small colony(4-20 people for the first decade or so) is quite small, and is completely within reason to do so. mars has similar ore resources to earth, the entire infrastructure for power, food, air, and water well be uniquely tailored to mars, it's highly likly that a mars colony well be using some very experimental tools/ideas to create oxygen, water and food. it's really not unreasonable that we couldn't get a small colony going that is capable of sustaining itself. nothing has to be built to industrial scale for quite some time.

the very first priority is going to be to get the colony to self-sustaining capability, no one is going into this without that understanding(or so i'd hope anyways).

remember that necessity is the mother of invention, who knows what radical new technology's may evolve to solve these problems.

But do you really understand what it takes for a colony to be self-sustaining? On Mars, that means high technology. Very high technology. Not the kind of high technology that can be fully sustained by 4 to 20 people. Because, again, I refer you to the many and complex manufacturing processes required to produce the plastics, fuels, lubricants, rare earth materials, and so on that technology hinges upon. I'd imagine that Mars, with its temperatures and gritty dust and hostile conditions, is relatively rough on materials, so any equipment that requires heavy or constant usage (life support equipment, for example) is going to need regular heavy maintenance, lubrication and replacement. Producing all of that requires an industrial complex. Saying we need to build a self-sustaining colony is one thing, but it would be damned difficult to build a small, fully self-sufficient high-tech colony even here on Earth, much less on Mars.

Gonna use methane gas to lube your engine?

Hydrogenating CO2 to produce synthetic oil and fuel? Current plants use natural gas, coal or other biomass.

Seriously, in today's economic climate, can you honestly think of anybody that would be willing or even able to foot this kind of bill?

I think what FLeBlanc is trying to say that to make up a running colony, you have to TAKE a lot of machinery to Mars, not something that can be taken there in 1-2-3 Mars trips.

I think what FLeBlanc is trying to say that to make up a running colony, you have to TAKE a lot of machinery to Mars, not something that can be taken there in 1-2-3 Mars trips.

Take machines that make more machines.

Ah, yes, replicators. Forgot all about those things. Nevermind, everyone, the problems are solved. Let's get this thing going.

Gonna use methane gas to lube your engine?

No. I'll use the methane as feedstock to make heavier hydrocarbons which I CAN use as lube. Also, what "engines" are you referring to? I don't know of anyone who wants to try to get an internal combustion engine working on Mars.

Hydrogenating CO2 to produce synthetic oil and fuel? Current plants use natural gas, coal or other biomass.

So... methane?

Seriously, in today's economic climate, can you honestly think of anybody that would be willing or even able to foot this kind of bill?

Elon Musk? The man has outright stated that he wants to retire and die on Mars.

Did you even read the process linked? See, the process doesn't run on natural gas or coal; it runs on hydrogen and CO2, hydrating the CO2 to form various petrochemicals, including methane. It's a hydrogenization process, after all. The plants that operate on methane have to separate the hydrogen and CO2 from the methane, which requires a high-temperature/high-pressure process called steam reforming (thus introducing another requirement for high-temp/high-pressure materials into your supply chain). So, again, technically it would be possible to build this infrastructure on Mars. But, again, the cost...

Also, everything requires lubrication. As szecs state, dry lubrication can be used in a lot of application, but still somebody has to manufacture the lubricants, be they dry or wet. (I understand space technology commonly uses hexagonal boron nitride. Read the process for producing it. Yet another expensive, high-temperature process requiring expensive equipment. And lubrication is just one of many areas critical to this project requiring complex materials.

And Elon Musk doesn't have enough money for this big project. He might have enough money to die on Mars, that's always a possibility. But enough money to build a self-sustaining, productive, high-tech colony? Nope. Not even close.

I think what FLeBlanc is trying to say that to make up a running colony, you have to TAKE a lot of machinery to Mars, not something that can be taken there in 1-2-3 Mars trips.

Take machines that make more machines.

Ah, yes, replicators. Forgot all about those things. Nevermind, everyone, the problems are solved. Let's get this thing going.

C'mon... everyone knows all you need to take to Mars is a MakerBot Replicator.

So, again, technically it would be possible to build this infrastructure on Mars. But, again, the cost...