Dvaraka Initiative - building and sustaining a settlement of a population of 1000

[mokun]

This paper on the Dvaraka Initiative that has to do with enabling human permanent settlement of Mars.

The goal of this initiative is to plan for and sustain a 1000-person colony.

This paper laid out nearly all major steps such as charing out the governance and organizational framework of such an endeavor, criteria for selecting the site of the settlement, pre-training of the settlers, architectural layout of the colony, estimating life support and utility needs, operational cost, and economic viability, etc..

They presented their idea back in 2019 here in the Mars Society conference.

Feel free to discuss any concepts from this initiative that we could potentially incorporate into mars-sim.

[mokun]

@bevans2000

I feel like one of our goals should be incrementally making small, crucial and transitional steps toward large scale simulation of managing many 1000-people settlements.

Reading up on this initiative gave me some more insights in possibly developing an architectural layout tool for a settlement.

Currently, we don't have one. While the Alpha Base (24-person) layout was old, the Hub Base (48-person) layout was newer but have too many random assumptions.

Shall we start discussing more ideas and establishing models to account for how we may evaluate the effective and efficiency of running a large settlement (> 50 people) ?

[bevans2000]

Yes keen to get a larger Settlement.

[mokun]

So I'm creating new settlement templates now that are somewhat based on this initiative.

Along with that, I'll create some utility buildings.

[mokun]

@bevans2000

Figure 8 above shows one complete living suite for a couple. It has a separate bathroom/shower on the left most while the bed is on the right most.

This configuration would have made the first generation of settlers envy of having that luxury of space.

So for completeness sake, it's about time we also account for the time it takes for rise and shine, shower and laundry in a sol since we're doing micro-simulation of the daily activities of the settlers.

Any space agencies would not hesitate to incorporate the time for personal hygiene in crew's schedule. So I'll add a new task for these types of activities and revise 'LivingAccommodation` class.

Also, in case of robots, we'll need to add in the downtime for preventative maintenance, upgrade and repairs as well.