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Yes, it will be a money and resource sink. His estimates of the total costs to transport everything needed to create a self-sustaining colony is in the $200 billion range over a century.

However consider this. He's discussing replacing a good chunk of the airline industry. Per https://aviationbenefits.org/economic-growth/value-to-the-ec... the airline industry is worth around $600 billion per year. Suppose that he captures $100 billion of that. With about $10 billion profit per year.

He's just paid for the Mars colony 5 times over. And he WASN'T planning on colonizing Mars as a charity!

It only sounds crazy. The numbers actually can add up.

> Interplanetary space travel is going nowhere fast because there is no profit motive.

This is so very true. We can do it for Science, and for fun, but not much else.

What happens when earth goes to actual shit and rich people want out?

On Mars they'll be strongly dependent on Earth for resupplies in all realistic scemarios. If that doesn't exist, they die. If it does exist, they might as well just go down to Turks & Caicos instead, much cheaper and nicer.

How shitty would it have to be that rich people want to move to Mars? There is no abundance of food there, no abundance of entertainment and you can't even go outside without having to wear a space suit.

Common man. We're far, far, far more likely to build underwater cities than ones on Mars. Even orbital bases or floating Venus platforms would be better than Mars. Mars is a cold, mostly dry shitty existence.

Worst case scenario Earth still has 1g of gravity, a breathable atmosphere, a magnetic field keeping most radiation out, and a temperature that you can live in without dying in most places. It'll still be way more livable than Mars.

Making a colony on the Antarctic, in the middle of ocean, or underseas are all ways that allow you to "get out" that are much simpler to colonize on a large scale.

That's a theme in Elysium.

http://imdb.com/title/tt1535108/

There's enormous profit in space. Jeff Bezos is hell-bent on moving all of Earth's manufacturing off-world. That's what Blue Origin is - a business built to create a world where mining and manufacturing are done in space, so that all Earth can be more peaceful and full of life without so many pollutants.

For SpaceX, there are people who will spend $500k or $200k on a ticket to go to Mars. If SpaceX can get us there for less than that, there's profit there too. There are enough people for moving there alone to be a profitable venture.

Many billionaires on Earth are now spending their fortunes investing in ways to make profits in space. Don't bet against them.

I've heard time and again that the race to the moon yielded many of the technologies we take for granted today. I'm sure that statement should be critically examined, and perhaps those benefits quantified. But I believe all of that money spent has been recouped many times over.

First of all, I believe that [the dream of] just making a colony on Mars, per se, is obviously pointless, and actually wasteful. Per se, a small research station would be much better, and could be productive from a global utilitarian perspective.

However, things change when speaking of an economically self-sustaining base; and eventually a base theoretically capable of full-self sustenance (not dying in case there was a transport disruption or Earth itself suffered a disaster). This simplifies the funding discussion to start up costs and r.o.i.

In that case, humanitarian-utilitarian arguments such as expanding the Human civilization to other planets (Musk's call for making life multiplanetary), backing up life, etc. also start making a little more sense (if the colony isn't self-sustaining all of those points are moot).

Is that feasible? Certainly not today, but perhaps in 50 years?

I mean, a civilization doesn't actually need that much to sustain itself. The basic needs are (a) energy, and (b) materials. Obviously Mars receives Solar power (about 45% as much as Earth per m^2), and it has materials (all basic industrial elements are present in the crust).

The question is, can we start an industry on Mars that is efficient enough today such that the cost of producing and maintain infrastructure (solar panels, mining equipment) is lower than the output from the products? If your solar panel gives 10MJ during it's lifetime, you need to use at most 10MJ (used in mining and manufacturing) to produce it. That's an engineering analysis, and I'm it will be eventually feasible. It also improves with economies of scale.

The question is, can we start an industry on Mars that is efficient enough today such that the cost of producing and maintain infrastructure (solar panels, mining equipment) is lower than the output from the products?

This is in my opinion the wrong question, and the answer is unequivocally no. People will not go to mars to make their fortune, at least initially, they will go for research, for glory and because they can. In centuries to come the answer will be yes, but not on any reasonable timescale. People will move there anyway.

The question is, how many people will move there, and how are they going to pay for it? (if they are not billionaires, of which there are maybe ~2000 in the world)

I agree that maybe a handful might go there because they can. But very soon you need to start producing enough to at least keep yourself alive. So much that I believe we ought to start developing those technologies (which takes time) before other steps.

We can probably fabricate regolith-lookalikes on Earth and start doing basic chemical and industrial engineering for pretty cheap, much cheaper than the billions you need for a mission.

He’s not doing the mars bit to make money, though selling that dream to a generation probably will make him very rich because of owning all the spinoff enterprises (for example having a monopoly on sat launches).

Colonising mars will be a money sink in the way that colonising the new world was - many will die, some will get rich eventually, the original investors will lose everything.

> here on earth first

I think that's the core of the objections. At least mine, anyway.

Earth has too much baggage (humanity, politics) to suggest that it's self-evidently prudent to develop something on earth first.

Those won't be going away when we send humans to Mars.

If that stuff is really a problem, start a colony in Antarctica. It'd be much easier to achieve livable conditions there than Mars, and your life support won't be tens of millions of miles away.

This. If you can't support a colony in Antarctica, or in the middle of the ocean, or on Emi Kousi in the Sahara, you can't do well on Mars. Run those as a test.

Antarctica: breathable air, much warmer than Mars, more insolation, low light-speed lag, water.

Mid-ocean: much much warmer than Mars, high pressure, low light-speed lag, lots of water. No breathable atmosphere but some oxygen can be extracted.

Emi Koussi: hugely warmer than Mars, breathable atmosphere (at 10K feet), no significant water, low light-speed lag.

Build your domes in each of those locations, run them for ten years: then you have real data, plus emergency evac.

Cool, I'd never heard of Emi Koisi, I'll add that to the bucket list.

We do have colonies in Antartica and in the open ocean (surface).

But people don't want to live there for a long time. They won't want to live on Mars for a long time either.

The race to another planet might not be economical but a race to the asteroid belt will certainly be. All those resources..

But we get faster into Mars if we first develop post-scarcity economy here on earth first.

Name that fallacy?

> Getting into Mars is solvable technological problem.

Unfortunate typo there.