I mostly just wanted to link to this article:
Building a Mars Colony? You’ll Need a Team of Astronaut ‘MacGyvers’
None of these general thoughts should come as a surprise. Survival on Earth has almost always implied stepping down from whatever level of technology has failed to a level that still works. It’s one of the most fundamental principles, and a reason that the line between “survivalism” and interest in various forms of primitive technology is so blurred.
In fact, that’s going to become a real and crucial question for colonists on any other planet. What level of technology is sustainable in physical isolation or near-isolation, without the huge, complex, multi-level infrastructure we now take for granted? You simply cannot sustain a colony long-term on what can physically be taken to Mars or beyond, and yet the minimum technology needed to survive on Mars (short of terraforming) is much higher than it is to survive on the planet where we evolved. If the curves meet, if the level of long-term sustainable technology dips below that minimum, you die.
Also, of course, in the entire history of our species all successful pioneers have needed to be generalists, with a broad range of knowledge and able to do many things well and a great many at least adequately. With a full understanding of why that is, it’s really no surprise to find that scientists are beginning to think that the need for versatility is what defined and created our species in the first place, possibly driven by a period of fluctuating climate change in Africa, forcing all life to adapt over and over again or die. We are by nature generalists, that’s how our species has succeeded, and will succeed again when faced with limited resources and the need for innovation.
We may be nature’s experiment in extreme versatility. Seems to work pretty well for us as a species so far.
Perhaps less obvious is that our technology will have to be generalist as well. Any general-purpose tool is much more likely to be worth its weight than any specialized tool, but it also applies, even more crucially applies to high tech. For survival’s sake, the systems will have to be extremely modular with as many versatile interchangeable parts as possible. Just as an example, imagine trying to sustain a habitat that runs on a hundred Raspberry Pi and Arduino processors (hopefully on some 3.3 volt logic variant of the latter) versus one that runson a hundred different, specialized proprietary processor boards, each designed and hard-wired for a particular task, and that your life depends on it. Good luck with that latter.
Specialization is for insects… if anyone. The life of insects doesn’t look like much fun.
– Robert the Wombat