I suspect Kim Stanley Robinson has it mostly right. You import water to Mars to make it habitable for a few hundred thousand years, the first real Martians live in cheap domes first and then the lowlands a generation sooner than anyone expects, due to altitude adapted genes. And as the atmosphere thickens some of these people will move to Olympus Mons, which is still a pretty large territory, rather than reintegrate.

If we settle Mars, people from Ethiopia, Nepal, and Peru who go there looking for a new life will find they survive a little better. And what we know about those genes is that at least 2 of them use completely separate mechanisms that might compose. One deals with oxygen capacity and two deal with blood acidification in novel ways. When their kids start having kids, and the company towns on Mars (and that will absolutely happen now due to the likes of Bezos and Leon) start making life difficult for the “undocumented”, they may find that they’re harder to grasp by the air hose than they expected.

Kim Stanley Robinson has written and spoken about how unrealistic his Mars books are given the information we now have about Mars, specifically the perchlorates in the surface and the lack of nitrogen. They were written in the 90s, and his more recent books like Aurora and Ministry of the Future better represent his current view that Earth is precious, and we’d better commit to it.

Perchlorate will definitely increase the amount of water required per occupant, since at a minimum you’re talking washing EVA suits in the airlock and then treating that water to remove perchlorate, which is not easy.

I don’t recall changes in Aurora and haven’t read Ministry yet. Misplaced my copy in the house somewhere.

His Mars books were unrealistic given what we knew _when he wrote them_.

The airship defying physics to survive a storm is a deux ex machina that could easily be edited out without materially affecting the story. It’s a black spot on the rest of the series to be sure, but the story isn’t predicated on it at least.

Also (as I recall; it's been decades) there were solar powered fan heater things that used complicated equipment to do basically the same thing that just letting the sunlight hit the ground (or maybe some black plastic) would have. I recall there being a lot of things that just ignored basic thermodynamics.

Black bodies are tricky.

What they readily absorb when the heat source is present, they will just as readily radiate back into the void when the source is missing.

If you want to stay comfortable in a desert you wear white - keeps you cool in the day and warm at night.

Except "black body" here is a technical term, and doesn't really correlate with "an object that's black".

You could, for example, design something that absorbed well in the UV/visible/near infrared where sunlight energy peaks (sat, 250-1000nm) but has low emissive power in the far infrared of the ambient Martian surface temperature at or below the target temperature (say 2-100μm). Thus it would absorb a lot in the day but radiate far less in the night, all with no need for electronics, etc.

The wind powered heaters (as I recall) had a similar issue; if the wind wasn't harvested to run heaters, it would have dissipated through friction with the ground, generating exactly the same amount of heat.

Wind is caused by thermal gradients though, right? So you’re still moving heat from one place to another.

Random placement, and you’d be correct. Not random placement would be a grey area.

We can do both.