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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

What on Mars is worth $500 a pound (in bulk) on Earth (this is something like the silly low price proposed by Elon Musk for transport)?

People will probably pay a lot more than that for the first few thousand pounds of dust, but they certainly won't keep paying that just to have the same dust millions of others have. The vast resources of the Americas paid for the continuous trips back and forth and attracted settlers. What pays for going to Mars? What attracts (large numbers of) settlers to Mars?

I get that there are people attracted to the "freedom" they would have outside of the established political realms of Earth, but what a terrible airless bargain that is.

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It'd be really interesting to see the economic comparisons of both against each other.

I.e the cost per kg of payload shipping from America to Europe in 17th Century vs the cost per kg of payload shipping from Mars to the Earth in 21st Century.

I suspect the Mars in current day is much greater, but ships and crew back then were not cheap.

It's an interesting idea to try to compare, but I wonder if the world in the 1600s or even the 1700s is just too different from ours to find anything truly analogous.

To look at the human transportation side: This account (http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/passage.htm) by a German who traveled to the new world in the 1750s is harrowing enough, but the way the cost of passage is paid is horrifying, even heartbreaking: He writes of indentured servitude in the same language one would describe slavery (servants are "sold") and often parents would sell their children in the new world to pay for the voyage, not seeing them again for years, if ever.

We could try to bring this into modern terms by multiplying the US federal minimum wage ($7.25/hr * 40 hrs * 52 weeks) by the median indentured servitude (four years) and get $60,320 to take a human across the Atlantic in 1750, but might be painting an apple orange. Still, it gives us at least a very, very rough idea of what a trip to the new world cost then, and a good sense of just how vastly more expensive passage to Mars would cost in the foreseeable future.

The original exploration leading to the discovery of the Americas wasn't looking for any kind of resources, it was looking for a better route to transport spices from the East. Finding a continent in the way ruined that goal, but accidentally yielded all kinds of resources that we didn't even know we wanted.

Stuff like coconuts, tobacco, sweet corn, potatoes were unknown in the "old world", so the original explorers couldn't have known to look for them. Later on, it was also found that the new world contained significant silver, gold, oil, etc., even though that wasn't known at the time.

So working from historical precedent, there's good reason to expect that something unexpected would come out of it.

I think in that framing, we've been to Mars, we are past accidentally sailing there. We know it is a dusty barren rock.

I'm pretty sure you have coconuts backwards, as they're native throughout the Pacific and Indian Oceans and had been known by the West since before the time of Romans. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110624142037.h...

Of course there are active theories that coconuts may have migrated or been transported by swallows to Western Europe.

Also gold was known to be in the New World according to Columbus on his initial voyage.

>The convenience of the harbors in this island, and the excellence of the rivers, in volume and salubrity, surpass human belief, unless on should see them. In it the trees, pasture-lands and fruits different much from those of Juana. Besides, this Hispana abounds in various kinds of species, gold and metals. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/exploration/res...

Re: coconuts, I'll beg off on having copied that list from a web source without cross-checking.

Re: gold, sure, but they didn't have any inkling about Sutter's Mill, etc. It clearly existed in some amounts, but they had no idea they'd find vast untapped veins.

Let me interject .. lets not forget most significantly that it was the cotton trade which fueled the early industrial revolution in the United Kingdom and at that time many years of boom in the United States and elsewhere.

CPUs.

We already go to great extents to get vibration free silicon fabs. These buildings cost billions of dollars, and need amongst other things a very very good acoustic environment (which you get almost free on mars), and good environmental controls (which you need anyways on mars). You aren't going to find a better place than mars. Further, on mars, you don't have to worry about natural disasters destroying your billions of dollars building.

Fabs require huge amounts of liquid water.

You aren't going to find a worse place that Mars. How are you going to ship all that stuff to Mars? Also, IIRC there's tons of radiation.

Nobody moves their stuff underground or to the Arctics (or both), which are orders of magnitude cheaper than moving stuff to Mars.

The most convincing thing I've heard is "IP". Mars' competitive advantage will be an education and legal regime that is very good at producing engineer/inventors, a quasi religious social narrative to bind the colonies in a common mission, and an ever present existential threat to drive innovation. Basically, Israel in space.

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