The Martian Mindset: A Scarcity-Driven Engineering Paradigm
If you are on Mars, you can’t wait for deliveries. So how do you produce what you need to survive? Marc, Christiane, Cyprien and Katharina will explain how to embrace resource scarcity on Mars to develop a new paradigm of sustainable production.
ZARM Talk by Marc Avila, Christiane Heinicke, Cyprien Verseux and Katharina Brinkert
from ZARM, University of Bremen
• Date: 08 January 2026
• Time: 14:00
• Location: ZARM, room 1730
Scarcity of resources is rapidly becoming a key challenge for humankind. Accordingly, many research efforts worldwide are focused on achieving a more sustainable, efficient and automated production. In our Cluster, we take a radically new perspective, aiming at a long-term paradigm shift. We place ourselves on Mars, a potentially habitable but inhospitable world, without fossil fuels or extensive water resources and surrounded by a thin CO2 atmosphere. We embrace these extreme boundary conditions to develop the Martian Mindset as a new, scarcity-driven paradigm for the production of enough-to-use materials and parts.
Our reserach is guided by scarcity constraints in four dimensions—natural resources, electric power, human workforce, and information. We focus on the sourcing of materials, the processing to parts and the design of operating concepts through three main goals: (1) develop (bio-)electrochemical methods for the synthesis of raw materials from low-grade resources; (2) design and demonstrate low-energy process chains that use these raw materials as input to produce a variety of enough-to-use parts; and (3) devise concepts for production facilities jointly operated by human-robot teams and supported by digital representations of the processes and production.
