Self-sustaining Mars colonization
Background
A 100 years in the future Mars has been colonized, new settlers and resources arrive from earth every 26 months (when the planetary orbit lines up best) by first taking the space elevator to Earth orbit then using a large one way ship to get to Mars, the ship designed to be one way, landing on mars and then stripped to be reused around the Martian colonies, a Mars space elevator is in the works which once completed would allow true two way travel between the Earth and Mars, or at least that was the plan before the blackout happened.
One day all communication with anything outside Mars stopped (Earth, the next colony ship that was in route to Mars & even the crew working on the Mars space elevator in Mars orbit), an event that among the Martian settlers came to be known as the blackout, no one knows what happened but for the purpose of this question it's safe to assume that every human being outside Mars is dead and every man-made machine outside Mars stopped working.
Tech level
The technology of the Mars colonies is near future (100 years) earth level, things such as food, water and air has been fully self sufficient even before the blackout with Mars based greeneries, fish farms, algae farms, and vat grown farms providing food, fuel (biofuel), bioplastics & a certain level of medicine (basically any form of medicine that can be grown), it also provides some building materials (wood & bamboo) while some other resources (stone, sand (for making glass) metal, water, earth elements) are mined on Mars, the only things that where depended on supply from Earth was things that are so advanced that they couldn't yet be produced on Mars like the more advanced parts of computers & cellphones, advanced medicines, advanced robotics, etc.
The colonies' electricity comes from multiple sources, solar panels (imported from Earth) provide some power but mostly it is either nuclear power or from burning local biofuel.
Mars in not terraformed, and the colonists live in a mixture of domed cities, caves, underground areas & above ground buildings made from local stone & metal.
Travel between areas of the same colonies never require stepping outside an unpressurized area (underground subways being most common form of transport with larger colonies and walking in tunnels in the smaller ones), travel between colonies is usually done with pressurized above ground vehicles and trains but some colonies which are close enough to each other also have underground transport from one another.
Mars society
While most Martian colonists are Earth born there is a small (but growing) number who are Martian born, giving birth on Mars has proven possible with about the same level of difficulty it is on Earth, it's entirely possible to give birth on Mars without any medical assistance but most still prefer to see a doctor (much the same as on Earth).
Mars is in fact an array of colonies connected to each other, each providing some resources to other colonies but no single colony is a the sole provider of any resource. There is some friendly competition among the different colonies in much the same way that some cities residents in the same country like to talk about other cities but when the blackout strikes they pull together to survive.
Martian colonists put a lot of emphasis on being as self reliant as possible even before the blackout, 3d printing and machine shops are a common occupation on Mars as well as other productive professions (there aren't a lot of advertisers on Mars, assume all colonist has useful skills or are young and still in school).
Assume the colonies is of the minimal size needed to survive long term, if your answer requires a minimum of 10,000 people to survive then that's the colonies size, if it's a million then a million it is.
The question
Can the colony as described above survive long term? for this question surviving means the most basic of needs being met, if they have water, air, food, a place to put their head for the night & the ability to give offspring who will get the same that's enough, even if any sort of luxury they used to have is gone in the process.
As time passes what resources they had from Earth will break down and if they required for survival will need to be replaced with a local made substitute, is there any piece of equipment or resource that couldn't possibly be made by the colonists that is required for the survival on Mars?
If the answer is no please provide with the exact reason why the colony can't survive, don't just say "they couldn't possibly reproduce anything needed without Earth help" but rather say something like "X requires the element Y which doesn't exist on Mars and can't be synthetically manufactured dooming everyone".
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/123661. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
I don't see any show stoppers.
100-200 years in the future, I will presume you have all the energy you need indefinitely, by solar or fusion. Although the sunlight is much reduced, all the materials you need to build solar panels are available; and the collection farms can be as vast as necessary (and there are no cloudy days!). They could be built, cleaned and maintained by non-intelligent robots; guided remotely by humans; energy farming could be one of the many jobs on Mars.
Also, to defeat another suggested fault, the Mars Rover has found nitrogen in the form of nitrates in the crust of Mars, released simply by heating of the sample. So nitrogen can be mined by automated machines powered by those solar gathering stations.
With sufficient energy and simple centrifugal mining, crust and rock could be crushed, heated to release gases (which we capture and separate), melted, spun at high G while cooling and separated into its constituent heavy parts; primarily silicon.
Automated chemistry should be advanced enough by then (100-200 years from now) to let us produce all the compounds we need. They can produce their own computer chips and electronics; most of that is automated and computer work, which by Moore's Law will be awesomely fast by then. For that same reason, computational chemistry will be so advanced, we should be able to recombine those elements produced from processing the crust as needed to produce any compounds we need.
One problem you might have is a limited genetic pool, you are creating a definite population bottleneck. The human race may have been through a period with less than 10,000 individuals; I don't know if you have even that many on Mars.
However, you could immediately, with their tech, harvest and preserve the DNA of every one of them, collecting cheek-swab samples from all, and both sperm and egg from adults, to remain frozen (pretty easy on Mars), in order to preserve whatever biodiversity you already have. Biological tech should have advanced by this point to actually allow cloning, if necessary, and we are already having some success with CRISPR to replace individual genes with other genes, that tech should be very routine (and even old-fashioned) in coming centuries.
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