Ask HN: Why doesn’t SpaceX make a simulator game to help build a city on Mars?

Maybe they will one day. We're very far off from even landing a person on Mars, let alone starting to build a city.

Elon can't get Starship into space, never mind 40 million miles away. The astronauts will require a machine to create oxygen. There is also a problem of radiation. If adequate shielding is not provided, the astronauts will die of cancer. The energy requirements for maintaining room temperature on Mars will also be huge. These problems are all solvable. Not by gamers.

Martian Minecraft would be a lot of fun, but I doubt it'd be a great way to plan for a city. Then again, "serious games" are a real thing.

Worlds aren't game engines

(a reference to the title of the paper "the world is not a theorem" https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00284)

I like the idea. This could be a VR simulator.

Hypothetical question: Would this game be realistic enough to get some understanding of the psychological and physical risks? e.g. Player has a mental breakdown and damages a pod. Everyone in that pod not in a space suit suffocates and their account is deleted. To that end will players be vetted for psychological aptitude to take the mission seriously? Assuming they get past that barrier will there be somewhat random events that test the players ability to adapt, improvise and overcome mortal risks, testing their knowledge of science, space technology and all other facets of living on a hostile planet?

Would there be a training mode and a realistic mode described above?

Why don’t you?

It’s a nice idea; perhaps something along the lines of a mix between Kerbal Space Program, SimCity, and Satisfactory. There’s a big problem for making this a practical step towards Martian colony planning, though; making a simulation game accurately reflect the real world is hard! If you’ve played any of the three games I mentioned, and have even general knowledge of the fields they simulate (rocketry and space travel, civic engineering and economic management, and manufacturing, respectively) you’ll see immediately that they misrepresent reality to a huge degree, and that as a result good ideas in the game don’t at all translate to reality. (Arguably, KSP reflects its subject matter best, but it’s still limited enough that discussion of the game often involves talking about “very Kerbal” designs that would be outright absurd as real aerospace engineering.)

Even if you can map out the elements of a Martian colony’s technological, social and economic underpinnings, having a game reflect those elements realistically is likely to take a heavy toll on its quality as a good game- simply because the world is very complex. There’s only a limited amount of complexity even the nerdiest gamer wants to deal with. If you doubt me, try playing some of the older Paragon Studios games- and even then, e.g. Victoria 2 was a downright impressionistic take on 19th century geopolitics. An accurate rendition of a 21st Martian colony would be far worse. Your player base would be limited to extremely wonky enthusiasts, and those people are likely already writing papers on the subject regardless.

Regardless of all the above I like the idea and have thought song similar lines myself in the past. But I can see why it doesn’t stand out to Musk as an important use of his time. He seems to feel someone else will come along to solve the actual colonization problem, as long as he just provides the rockets.

I think they'd be better off spending their efforts on actually getting to Mars

Sounds like a brilliant idea. Let's make a game which simulates the universe and all aspects of the Martian climate and then people can experiment and restart their worlds as they see fit.

Like Minecraft but real life. I wonder why this hasn't been done already.

I think games like NASA's Moonbase Alpha demonstrate why attempts like this aren't all that valuable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonbase_Alpha_(video_game)

Have a look at the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nis2t9EubBs

Then have a look at how seriously people took it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv6RbEOlqRo

I mean, i guess people can approach games like EVE Online seriously, in part due to the financial investment that they may have into them, but otherwise they're likely to just mess around for entertainment value.

On a different note, if you have such complete knowledge of all the constraints to be able to make a simulation the results of which would be useful, why not just run a neural network to simulate more outcomes than players for this game of yours would? Why depend on the game being interesting and successful when you can just automate the players away?

Because "a city on Mars" is both just a pipe dream and convenient marketing for SpaceX. Throwing money at it would be like throwing money in a pit and lighting it on fire, unless of course, the game could be seen as a sales funnel for SpaceX investors or PR.

Mars is incapable of ever holding an atmosphere that humans could live in, the surface is highly irradiated and liquid water can't exist on it, and the soil and rocks are full of highly toxic perchlorates.

Assuming those facts weren't the case, a video game could never model the insane amount of variables a real "city on Mars" would need to factor in for success.

I'm think this is hugely simplifying the task at hand.

Approaches like this may work for urban planning and such things here on earth, where we DO know all the parameters and tech available and it's a creative problem to find a well balanced configuration. Simulating those known parameters and letting people play with it can then lead to valuable insight.

However the "city on Mars" problem is not such a "how should the streets be layed out" type of problem, but an issue of even inventing the tech to pull it off. So we do not even have a framework we could put in a game.

in short: If we had the knowledge required to create a simulation that would satisfy the requirements, we wouldn't need that simulation at all as this knowledge in itself is what we are still missing for "how to city on mars"

Video game require a model of the virtual world they simulate. We don't have a good model of Mars so the game will be off. Even things as the mineral distriution will have huge impact on city design. The game will not yield that much insight.

Doesn't make sense to study in simulation something that we hardly understand in actuality, unless we were to study colonization techniques for a huge range of parameters. At that point, it's not a fun game.

Also I have to point out that I don't know if SpaceX is going to build a city. I do think their mission is to build lift and launch capacity, but not to actually build cities.

The best way to help build a city on Mars, or the Moon, or anywhere else with a solid surface at the appropriate temperature range, is to figure out how to build a von Neuman probe that we can send a few of to the target, then have them build copies of themselves that extract resources from the environment and build redundant copies of an environment suitable for humans to inhabit, near enough to each other to ensure an evacuation or transit between them was practical.

Funding research along these lines wouldn't be the quickest, or most headline grabbing way to get things done, but it would be efficient in terms of launch costs and risk of human lives.

This could be done in stages. The first of which is to build something that works here, on earth, in anyone's back yard. It just has to collect resources and refine them sufficiently to make it possible to build another one.

A great blog post describing the story of how Maxis never intended the Sim games like sim city to be realistic because it’s impossible to model that complexity, but were driven to try https://obscuritory.com/sim/when-simcity-got-serious/

Mars colonization is a dangerous and not very fun activity. Surviving mars is trying to be a fun game at the expense of sacrificing realism and yet even that game can be frustrating.

There are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. I believe Mars colonisation is today 95% unknown unknowns, so there is no way we get any valuable insight from a simulation that misses 95% of the point.

E.g. a moon landing simulation in 1969 (with todays software and hardware) would not have taught us that moon dust is very sticky due to electrostatic charges, and that it heavily impact operations on lunar surface. Any simulation game that did not take that into account would be heavily biased and misrepresent reality.

It would not be a fun game if your goal is to make even somewhat realistic simulations. Unless maybe if you are betting it all on self replicating autonomous machinery then you can come up with somethibg close to factorio.

Elon Musk is not a fool and everybody in the space community knows that he is not really working on a colony on Mars.

Then why does he say so? The NASA has understood after Apollo that huge budgets require large political support, hence huge public opinion support.

Going to the Moon has cost 4% of the US budget during 15 years or so.

The world space community knows that humans do badly in space in general ; Mars is no better because of cosmic rays. A colony on Mars would have to be underground. In fact, the whole space community knows that robots are much more efficient and far, far less costly.

The International Space Station has a shallow bottom line in terms of Science, beyond the effects of lack of gravity on humans. I discussed of these effects with the official physician of an European astronaut: it's quite worse than publicly acknowledged. It's not a secret, it's just that journalists don't really do their job on the issue. They would not need to "investigate" in a Watergate way but just to circumvent the press departments of NASA and/or ESA in Europe.

The public opinion wants the dream. The NASA has heavily invested in filming and sharing the expeditions. And they are great at it.

In Europe, Thomas Pesquet is the incarnation of ESA: good-looking, super bright, truly a nice guy by nature, communicative enthusiasm... We all like him. But it would be fun if a journalist calculated the science / communication ratio of his time aboard the ISS. Something like 20% maybe and only because he needs to have something to talk about. Otherwise a robot could have conducted the experiments. Except for the experiments on his own body but... what for, since there is no scientific nor technical rationality for humans in space anymore?

But sending humans instead of robots implies a tenfold budget. So the dream of humans in space / on Mars / on the Moon is vital to maintain a large space industry.

The proof of this is... SpaceX. They do better than NASA and ESA for a fraction of the cost.

But SpaceX has an issue here: NASA, ESA and other space agencies are... its clients. SpaceX wants deep-pocketed clients. So SpaceX must participate in fuelling the dream of humans in space.

The ISS is old now and we have seen it all. The movie "Gravity" was great but also the coffin of space stations orbiting Earth. It's a bit like car races: for most people, me included, we only watch... if there is an impressive accident, on YouTube. On TV, following a car race is just a bore. Another live feed from the ISS? Well... who cares? Thomas Pesquet did super well the last five years, exploiting the ISS to its maximum. To fuel the dream.

So, what's next? The storytelling around robots on Mars surface was a great success. Rosetta and the comet was super exciting too. But we are used to it now... However NASA made a brilliant stunt of the tiny helicopter on Mars: first fly on another planet. I loved it. The Webb telescope... well super interesting for Science and technology guys like us here but for the public opinion... It's just OK. Children don't care for example and it tells a lot. And it's only a 10 billion-dollar project. The ISS amounts to 140 billions.

So what's next for maintaining the over-large space industry? A base on the Moon. That's realistic. And SpaceX rockets will enable it.

But Elon Musk can not been seen as a mogul so influential that a inhabited base on the Moon is budgeted. If he was on TV all the time selling us a Moon base - which is what he really wants - he would be stealing the dream sold by his own clients.

The NASA wants to be again the center of attention like during Apollo. And to get the hundreds of billions it needs. SpaceX? Just an efficient commodity provider in the dream, transportation.

But Elon Musk wants his share of attention too. He can't focus his communication on the Moon base? Let's invent a colony on Mars!

Everybody is happy: it promotes the humans in space, Musk is the dr...

Factorio but its mars? Haha. Factorio on earth is hard already.