My only question, where does the LiOn come from?

Sub-saharan Africa.

You see running from the legal system of two countries, both of his choosing, over him F*ing a sleeping girl to work around her refusal to consent to his preferred form of sex, to be "a sacrifice he's made, willingly or not, in standing up to powerful interests"?

Which takes extra hardware and power, the two of which would be heavier than the O2 needed for a single person. It'd also raise your development cost.

KISS.

A person can be hopped up out of their gourd and still manage to use the restroom. It happens every day on this planet already.

We're talking a mix of drugs that make a person happy, content, and sleepy, which won't kill them in under half a year. There's no shortage of possibilities.

I did not say "in a coma". I said "drugged out of their gourd". This does not imply "comatose". No catheter.

  If they were comatose, their consumables would be even less.

Nukes, solar, wind, wave means what? Those are energy generation technologies, not desalination technologies. $0.50/m is actually a rather cheap rate for water desalination, most is more expensive at current power prices.

Wake me up when "nukes, solar, wind, wave" means "desalination water costs only a couple cents per cubic meter".

You know, this gets me thinking... what's really the minimum necessary for a person to stand a chance of making it to the surface of Mars alive? Let's say:

1) 150 days transit
2) Passenger remains drugged out of their gourd during the whole voyage so that they don't go crazy in the ridiculously small amount of space they're allocated, nor burn more than a minimal amount of consumables.
3) No extra radiation shielding; craft keeps its thickest end toward the sun and puts its consumables around the passenger but otherwise does nothing special
4) Landing hardware done as an exact duplicate of MSL, no re-engineering. MSL used a 4 tonne spacecraft to deliver a 900kg payload to the surface. An incredibly cramped capsule may fit that payload profile.
5) No attempt to get back or even survive for any significant length of time. Passenger has to be someone who wants to die on Mars.

Normal O2 consumption is 0,9kg/day; let's say 0,7 due to #2. Consumption of pure fat for say 1500 calories per day is 166g; let's say 300. I don't have numbers on CO2 scrubbers, let's put it at the same as O2. Let's say 3 liters (3kg) water consumption per day, 2kg recovered from the air via a chiller, 1kg lost to excretion, so 1kg total per day. Let's say 1kg other consumables per day. No complex recycling systems or anything that could seriously inflate your costs. We're at the ballpark of 3.7kg per day, so 555kg for the journey there, which doesn't need to be landed. Give them 600kg for some margin and a little time alive. These figures probably wouldn't size your spacecraft out of an affordable launch vehicles.

So yeah, if you really wanted to, I bet you could have a moderate chance of delivering a suicidal human alive but very ill to the surface of Mars to live for a short period of time for only a couple billion dollars in development + launch costs.

Who wants to sign up? ;)

Biosphere 2 was pretty flawed but it actually did something. Even had some educational value.

This is just a scam. I think the only unknown is whether the founders believe it to be a scam or whether they're truly convinced by their own BS.

What about the prelatic, mesoperiodic, catechetic and eupotamic values of the US GDP? Should we remove them too?

Aquifers do not fill up with a single rainfall.

And farmers are used to buying water for 1-2 orders of magnitude cheaper than that, so what's your point?

In the US farmers buy/pump water by the "acre foot". When you're using such large measurements to describe the amount of water purchased/pumped, you know that the consumption is going to be vast. And if you're paying for that consumption with almonds, you know it's going to be cheap.

Lots of sunlight with little cloudcover, long growing seasons, and tons of water available from rivers and aquifers.

That is, until you deplete them.

While this may cause short-term fluctuations, the long-term picture will be fine. A higher price on almonds will make other global regions start growing them more. The price will come back down in 5 years or so. And that's if the water issue caused an abrupt change, more realistic is a gradual shift.

Growing water-intensive crops in the desert is a stupid, stupid thing that people have been doing way too much because there was little cost associated with depleting aquifers. Payback time for that short-term thinking is rapidly approaching to many different regions.

As for bees, well, sort of. CCD isn't a threat to the species, as one can mass-breed queens, and a new hive can be readily produced just with a queen and a handful of workers. CCD brought the average winter hive loss rate in the US from about 15% to about 30%. But honeybees themselves wouldn't be threatened even if the loss rate was 90% (not to mention that they're not even native to the US). It's just a question of how expensive it becomes to keep them; it's a cost to beekeepers.

On the other hand, pollination services are a major *profit* to beekeepers. If they lose that, then they're losing money. So even if the significant reduction in pollination services increased winter survival rates, it's still going to be a big loss to beekeepers. Which means fewer beekeepers, which means fewer hives.

On the other hand, that's probably good for local pollinators who compete with honeybees for resources...

(as a completely unrelated side note, I've been pondering a lot about how one could fight a lot of the honeybee pests and diseases that affect hives, and handle management better... I'm awfully tempted to some day try to make an electrical tomography brood frame controlled by a couple multiplexers and monitored by a raspberry pi running EIDORS or other tomography software to see what's developing, where, what's walking around on the comb, what's developing malformed, whats clearly a pest, etc, and potentially run significant current through infested cells to kill / sterilize them... you probably couldn't catch mites but hive beetles, bacterial brood infections, etc should be catchable.. the big question, apart from how easy it'd be to interpret the data, is how much of an effect the monitoring (and potentially sterilization) would have on the hive, bees can sense electric fields)

Hey, if you like consuming massive amounts of energy to produce water that costs about $0.50/m, that's your call. But water that expensive won't support water-intensive agriculture anyway, so....

This plan seems to forget that it takes time to grow these crops. It takes 3 years for your first crop of almonds and 8 before the tree is delivering anything like commercial quantities.

You think California's water crises are just going to disappear in a decade? This is a long-term problem. The long timeframes on crop switchovers for certain types of crops is just more reason one needs to take immediate action.

There are lots and lots of ways to lower the water usage of both the general population and water intensive applications such as farming.

And all of them will be properly handled if there's a fair market pricing for water.

Using RO membrane treatment plants the water is purer then what falls from the sky

Are you talking RO of salty or fresh water? Even RO of freshwater can be pretty expensive; RO of saltwater is in most places cost prohibitive (not to mention a massive energy consumer). Though there are some interesting alternative technologies which may provide for affordable desalination in the future.