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Comment by sillysaurusx | Hacker News Reader

"It's gonna be cramped, dangerous, difficult, very hard work. You might die." -- Elon's sales pitch for Mars, in his own words.

I wonder if any billionaire (or their children) will be doing the early work. It's an interesting game of "Who values their life the least?" knowing that their sacrifice will make for a better future.

Of course, it's not a foregone conclusion that there will be a disaster. But over the course of 200 years of constant space travel, it seems incredibly unlikely that there won't be some kind of disaster. The question is, how will we react?

I hope we don't give up. And I hope billionaires risk their children alongside the working class.

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Why do we need to fly 3 months to some inhospitable planet that is in worse condition than Earth would be (even after nuclear wars and global warming) to make progress?

I suppose there's an idea we could apply everything done on Mars to Earth, but like... seriously, what we just took all the prep for mars and just put it in the middle of the Empty Quarter, the Saraha, Antarctica?

People barely want to live in the arctic circle, yet believe that our salvation comes in Mars? I would love to see all the energy put into space exploration to simply be put in rehabilitating existing land.

It’s helpful to remember it’s not a zero sum game. We can do all of that too. The tech for Mars would make it that much easier.

No one wants to live in those places because currently they have a choice. But if our planet becomes irradiated, or hit by a meteor, or suffers a sun burst — all very realistic concerns — then those choices become more limited. And it’s good to have options.

The ISS is literally the most expensive physical structure we have ever built, and it's like 5 floating schoolbuses.

Now I'm for walking and chewing bubblegum. But if you believe in opportunity costs and care about navigating that, it feels like the same problem.

Our planet becoming irradiated is actually not a huge problem! It would still be easier to live on Earth than on Mars! An irradiated radioactive hellscape of Earth would still be more survivable than Mars.

(my more nuanced take is that we have so many basic hospitability problems that need solving, and Mars have all of those times 100, so it would be very good if most of those PhDs could focus on those hospitability problems more than the logistics of shooting a bunch of stuff into space for long term transit)

"it would be very good if all those PhDs could focus on those hospitability problems"

We have like a million PHds telling us what to do about climate change for 50 years, and nobody is listening

"The ISS is literally the most expensive physical structure we have ever built"

And it's 100x cheaper than the Iraq war or 2008 crisis, both entirely preventable manmade disasters. Or to put it into different perspwctive: ISS costs as much as cleanup of 3 oil spills, and we've had quite a few.

The ISS was also the first of its kind, not built with cost effectiveness in mind even a little bit, and complicated by being built by so many different parties. A station or other space hab built by a highly vertically integrated company trying to keep costs down is almost certainly going to be much, much less expensive and more capable.

The ISS was built largely with hundreds of space shuttle and Soyuz launches over two decades hence why it's so expensive. Starship will be able to put an entire ISS worth of stuff into orbit in a single launch for 1/50th of the cost.

It's not a zero sum game. The space industry employs a lot of people.

Some of the stuff they put into orbit are satellites that literally save lives.

Starship can't lift 462 tons to orbit in one launch and that isn't taking into account the volume needed. It would take more than 1 to get an ISS equivalent on orbit.

Ok, so like 5-10. ISS took 40 assembly flights, with 36 being expensive space shuttle flights ($54k/kg).

The pressurized volume of Starship is larger than the pressurized volume of the ISS. I think that was what was intended to be conveyed.

Exactly what I was thinking in my head when I wrote that. Although I really should have written it out properly. To be fair mass is probably way more important.

Definitely not in a single launch, since ISS weighs around 500 tons. And I think designs for space stations in starship era would be different(more heavy, but orders of magnitude cheaper to produce), so something like ISS in a starship era might weigh 1.5-2x more(VERY rough estimate), but nonetheless be much cheaper.

Starship itself has ~1000 cubic meters of payload volume, and ISS has ~900 cubic meters of pressurized volume. It's not too much of a stretch to expect >500 cubic meters of pressurized volume in a crew-capable Starship, in which case two Starships would provide a broadly similar amount of pressurized volume in orbit.

Humans are not automatons who you can just point at a different problem than the one they are interested in and expect them to make progress in a similar way.

A Mars colony is an exciting problem for smart people to work on that can inspire them. You can't put a dollar value on that.

> The ISS is literally the most expensive physical structure we have ever built, and it's like 5 floating schoolbuses.

Most of that cost was in the cost of launching it (and the inflation in the price of the modules knowing that they are "priceless" and "can't fail" and "we can only build one copy of it"). Further it's all engineered to very fine margins. The more you get your margins down the more cost these things take. One-offs of anything tend to be expensive. One-offs of very tight margin things are even more expensive. There's nothing in the ISS that is especially exotic. It's copper wiring and aluminum pressure vessels.

Nobody wants to go to Earth these days. It’s too crowded.

There is loads of people who want to travel to mars for an expedition to look for life, study it's geology and see what it looks like at all - however you are right that living consitions would be crap.

I have always maintained that a settlement on the moon makes a lot more sence - fortly you have much better access to space for industry, secondly, help can reach you withing days at any time or you could be in earth hospital withing days if you need surgery.

Starship is literally also slated for missions to the moon. If those go well someone probably will pay to build a moon base.

That being said, there are a number of reasons why Mars is preferable to the Moon if your goal is a totally self-sustaining colony.

We have enough land on earth already. Land is not actually the solution to any problem on earth. But Mars is the solution to a potentially big problem on earth.

And the technology to manufacture fuel from solar and nuclear energy, building advanced life support system, advancing the state of rocket technology, allowing much more use of sat technology, massively advancing science planetary/biology/(and more), controlled high efficiency farming, human health science, mobile hospitals and so on, will all be developed and have many applications. Even things like battery technology for this use case will have interesting question to ask and can have impact on batteries on earth.

So if it was literally just the backup to life, it wouldn't be worth it, but its not done in a vacuum.

And its inspiring. A whole generation of engineers all around the world were inspired. And the moon landing did bring humanity together to an extent, many people even in the Soviet Union talked about 'we' landed on the moon.

Seems to me to be worthwhile to push at the very least to a small settlement, and from there you can see if its makes sense to continue.

Let's say someone argued instead that we should figure out a way to establish a human settlement inside of a volcano, or at the bottom of the deep ocean. Couldn't you make all the arguments you just made in favor of doing that as well? What makes Mars any different? Why is this specific Quixotic activity more valid than the ones I just mentioned?

Who do you know that is fired up about building a base in a volcano?

But gonna have to disagree with GC here and say that I think a self-sustaining Mars base is worth it entirely for having a backup of intelligent life, which the deep ocean base doesn't deliver.

How does Mars help if the sun explodes?

It doesn't, but different planet is a step better than nothing at all. New solar system can come next ;)

Mars is different because it has a lot of resources, a lot of empty land, it has easier access to space than Earth due to the reduced gravity, and space is really big. Maybe in the long run we'll be able to house more people in the asteroid belt than we do on Earth now. If it happens it'll be pretty far in the future, but it might happen eventually. Mars is a very convenient waystation to make that possible.

Because Mars could be self sustainable. It has water and the temperatures in the right areas are not that hostile. Mars soil can be used for agriculture. There is sun light.

From Mars its effective to launch to Orbit. Its easy to transport and move around on Mars, Supersonic electric flight is very doable for example.

Low density makes super fast trains very doable as well, massive movement of resources on Mars is orders of magnitude easier on Mars then even in deep water.

So, I think it's worth it for people to go to Mars for exploration, and to build a base somewhere up in space or the moon.

I think we should figure out how to exploit resources in space: asteroid mining, space-based solar power, etc. Even if it's all woefully unprofitable and inefficient at first.

And I think we should figure out how to eventually get another self-sufficient lump of humanity off this rock, but that seems like it could be 150+ years out.

But there's no reason, other than the exploration of Mars itself, to go down the gravity well to Mars.

> I would love to see all the energy put into space exploration to simply be put in rehabilitating existing land.

It's not like these are really the same resources.

The basic idea is to not have all your eggs in one basket. We are one asteroid strike away from losing all human life on earth. Having 2 habited planets spreads the risk. Obviously having those planets in different solar systems would be even better, but we don’t have the technology for that, yet.

> The basic idea is to not have all your eggs in one basket.

A moon base is the precursor to a base on Mars and having humans get anywhere near Mars in the next 50 years (if they return or not) is a PR stunt.

Planning for mars is making the moon shot significantly better. Starship can basically replace the whole complicated and expensive orbiter lander situation with a fast, cheap, reusable craft with a fantastic payload capacity. That craft is being designed and built with Mars in mind. It’s also going to be fantastically useful for other things.

You're presenting a false dichotomy. Our options aren't only (a) live only on Earth, and (b) live on Earth and Mars and potentially other planets. There is, for example, (c) live in man-made structures orbiting the sun at a distance of 1AU, which is debatedly much more sensible than trying to live on Mars.

Hmm. With Starship's lifting capacity, that might become a side project. Maybe they could even sling something to become part of the orbital station and continue to Mars

How many tons would you need to get out of the gravity well before you had enough orbital manufacturing capacity to begin building that sort of thing? I mean, I love the dream, but I don't know how you can make it a reality.

In the video Elon makes an estimate of a million tons to Mars (if I remember correctly) in order to establish an entirely self-sufficient colony there. Building orbital manufacturing would be a different kind of problem, but in some respects it's kind of similar. I suspect it'll make sense to establish a foothold on Mars first (which has a lot of necessary resources and less gravity means you can transition from the planet to orbit much more cheaply) and then maybe use Phobos and/or Deimos as manufacturing hubs for space-based hardware like habitats. Or maybe it makes sense in the short term (before Mars has the necessary infrastructure for big projects) to do manufacturing on the moon.

That's true, but there is no fuel source out in space. Outside of Earth orbit, eg Lagrange points, you need fuel deliveries.

On Mars they can make methane with the Sabatier process.

So you have:

- LEO/MEO - vulnerable to asteroid impact ejecta

- GEO/moon/L-points - avoid ejecta, but need regular refueling. If Earth is toast, there goes resupply

- Mars - close enough to the sun for solar, able to conceivably bootstrap in a few centuries

Actually there is fuel in space - water and sunlight.

You can split water into hydrogen and oxygen using electricity from sunlight.

In long term, most likely both Hydrolox and Methalox will be in use.

I think the parent comment meant to say there is no propellant in space.

There are comets in space, so there is water and water can be made into propellant.

Ceres also seems to have a lot of water: https://astronomy.com/news/2020/08/ceres-an-ocean-world-in-t...

Solar sails can get you to anywhere in the Solar system. Not very fast, but essentially free. So a swarm of drone ships with solar sails can transport an almost infinite amount of propellant to your refueling bases from mining sites.

It is much easier to get protected from radiation on mars, than in the outer space. Nobody knows for certain how would childbirth look like in zero g and it's just the one of many problems. Mars is much more hospitable than pure vacuum.

By building underground structures?

Technically, every structure encapsulating space makes that space "underground" - the distinction between natural rocks or poured concrete as a ceiling is negligible when it comes to radiation protection. Whenever we set up a sunshade, we are protecting ourselves from harmful radiation.

Putting more material between you and radiation by burying into the ground is a good idea, especially when your concrete-pouring capabilities are limited.

Better rockets and better spacecraft serve all space exploration and colonization efforts.

Mars is difficult of course, but it does have resources. You can get water, oxygen, rocket fuel, various ores, etc. It's also not a vacuum, and there are places where the temperature profile is vaguely similar to Earth.

None of that is true in space, unless you're thinking of something I'm not, but like another poster has said, none of this is zero sum. The technology developed to try to settle on mars can be devoted to building large, habitable objects in space if people think that's a better plan. We should also have a moon base, etc. etc.

> live in man-made structures orbiting the sun at a distance of 1AU, which is debatedly much more sensible than trying to live on Mars.

The resources still need to come from somewhere. Either we mine them on Mars, asteroids, or the moon. Mining is a lot easier when you have gravity you can push against to apply force. Rather than move the resources off-body though, its easier and cheaper to use them directly in-situ.

> much more sensible than trying to live on Mars

It's more sensible if you plan to keep a bunch of people there with constant supply from Earth. Elon wants to build a *self-sustaining* city on Mars. There isn't any other choice of location, be it man-made, or in the solar system:

- that has enough resources, atmosphere, gravity, water to allow a non-trivial population to survive without help from Earth

- that is hospitable to life

I suggest you watch his previous presentation where he talks exactly on why Mars is the destination, and not somewhere else.

Yes, we are talking about permanent, Earth-independent settlement in space. I didn't mean to imply that the settlements in the man-made structures would be Earth-dependent.

Atmosphere is possible in man-made structures.

Gravity can be simulated in man-made structures.

I don't believe water is particularly scarce, and it is reusable except for when it's used to create fuel.

With the Sun + plants a lot can be done.

Mars, on the other hand, has low gravity and is far away from the Sun.

Your proposed alternative would also benefit from something like Starship.

Of course, we can (and should, eventually) do both.

> We are one asteroid strike away from losing all human life on earth.

We're one asteroid strike from losing all human life in the solar system even if you had a bunch of people living on Mars. It would take a very long time to get even a single Mars colony self sufficient. Without resources of Earth supporting the colony it would die out the first time the air conditioner broke.

Putting people on Mars isn't putting our eggs in a second basket. It's putting an egg in a wet napkin on a mouse trap positioned under a precariously balanced boulder.

Musk says basically this in his presentation. Very very hard.

You have to start building the basket at some point. If you never start working on the colony you'll always have an excuse ("it'll take a long time!", "it'll be too expensive!", "the technology doesn't exist" and so on).

The technology to be self-sustaining won't exist without demand for it, and starting to setup a colony creates a lot of demand.

By that logic we will never leave Earth. Let’s say it takes 200 years to get a fully self sufficient colony on Mars. If we start now, it could be self-sufficient by around 2222. But, according to your logic, we shouldn’t start since the colony won’t be immediately self-sufficient. Instead we should wait until… until when? Assuming it will always take 200 years to make the colony self-sufficient, do we wait until 2222 to start so that it is self-sufficient by 2422?

A 200 year timeline is likely far too short. There's nowhere on the planet a human (or any multicellular Earth life) can survive without an active life support system. Every square meter of living and farming space needs to be enclosed with powered life support. There's no lubricants, easily accessed water, or even raw materials for heavy industry.

Even if Starship was ready to go tomorrow zero percent of any of the infrastructure needed to keep humans alive on Mars exists. The infrastructure needed to let some Martians be self sufficient only exists in artist renderings.

Getting a hundred tons of crap to Mars is the easiest part of the problem. Building a reliable toilet that won't clog and kill everyone or an air filter that never breaks is hard. Having enough food and medical supplies to keep people alive after a crop fails is hard. Building a factory that doesn't need a huge supply of oil-based lubricants is hard. Crowing crops in shitty soil is hard. Shit just building a big sealed structure is hard.

I don't find any claims of colonizing Mars believable because there's only lip service paid to boring infrastructure. Infrastructure can't just be patched in later.

So… give up and don’t even bother trying, because failure is probable but not certain. Got it.

That's not what I said. I do not find any claims of "colonization" believable because there's absolutely zero interest in solving or even realistically addressing the Hard Problems involved. There's little interest in solving the easier but boring problems.

If the toilets on a Starship get clogged [0] the crew can't wear diapers for a year and a half on their way to Mars. In space a clogged toilet has the fun side effect of aerosolizing feces that the crew will then breathe in, likely killing them.

Big talk about colonizing Mars is just talk without any actual movement on important infrastructure. A big rocket is only the first tiny step on a very very long road and itself is not really all that useful.

If you want to make pithy statements about not trying, direct your energy towards everyone fantasizing about Mars colonies with zero intent to tackle any of the Hard Problems involved.

[0] https://futurism.com/the-byte/spacex-tourist-toilet-alarm

Gonna be interesting to see how many people actually pony up to really take part in that kind of vision.

Are there any economic incentives for colonizing Mars? Asteroid mining makes sense and bases on and around the Moon make some kind of economic sense at least. I don't know how Mars fits into that picture in the 50-100 year "medium" term picture.

Economic incentives include government-funded basic science, mining, tourism, real-estate speculation (i.e. claim a bunch of land while it's cheap), entertainment (sports and movies/TV shows), the ability to do things in a presumably lax regulatory environment that might not be allowed on Earth, and long-term care for those who have disabilities that would require a wheelchair in full gravity but not on Mars, and the establishment of Mars as a more convenient source of food/fuel/raw materials for any human presence in the belt or outer solar system.

A lot of that assumes an already functioning economy on Mars. We're not going to be sending anyone other than the richest people up to Mars in their old age. And for stuff like food and hydroponics you could have that on the Moon which is the natural waystation to the Asteroids. The Asteroids are going to be where all the mining is. Entertainment also assumes an already existing economy. Space tourism is the only thing that seems viable in the short term.

About all I can see is producing methane for rockets in Asteroids and being in a much shallower gravity well than Earth. That assumes having an economy established in the Asteroid belt already though, and the cost of sustaining a colony on Mars is going to be its own kind of high overhead. It may be expensive to ship fuel off of Earth, but the people to support the refinement process already exist.

At some point there will be a flip where a Mars economy becomes self-sustaining, but so far I'm not seeing it during my lifetime. My guess is that we're going to be tethered to the Earth for a lot longer.

(Basic science is also great but that's the kind of things that governments support and its not self-sustaining any more than Antarctica is -- which I suspect is closer to the model for Mars in the next 50 years).

The ability to make methane on Mars is pretty huge, though. If you're mining the asteroid belt and need to refuel your ships, it's a lot easier to ferry fuel from Mars to the belt than haul it all the way from Earth. And methane/oxygen production is likely to be one of the first things we get going on Mars because we'll want our rockets to be able to make return trips back to Earth and we really don't want to haul the extra fuel and oxygen we need all that way.

Most of the economic incentives I suggest don't really start paying off until you have at least some decent infrastructure and a population of semi-permanent residents, though. It might not happen in our lifetimes, but you never know. Once the technology exists, it's just a matter of whether someone has deep enough pockets to make human settlement of Mars a reality. Once someone has a foothold, it gets easier for others to expand on that.

Again though lifting methane off of Earth is expensive, but ships from the Asteroid belt will naturally be coming back to Earth, so refueling around the Earth or Moon doesn't go out of the way. Mars is a detour, and you have to sink the costs to sustain the colony which offsets the smaller gravity well.

I figure that any large-scale asteroid mining operation is likely to employ a fairly complicated supply chain that doesn't ship everything to or from Earth.

Earth would probably continue to manufacture high-value, complex machines like rocket engines and computers and robots. Earth would receive high-value minerals from the asteroid belt like gold or platinum or silver. Maybe nickel or copper. Iron wouldn't be worth it unless shipping costs were really low, aluminum would probably be the same. On the other hand, iron and aluminum might be worth enough on Mars to be worth shipping there. It'd be cheaper than shipping from Earth, anyways. And hauling rocket fuel/oxygen all the way from Earth really doesn't make sense if you can get it on Mars.

Basically, you'd have ships going back and forth between Earth and the belt delivering equipment and bringing back high-value metals, and you'd have another set of ships going back and forth between Mars and the belt hauling fuel and oxygen and maybe bringing back low value metals to be used on Mars. If there are people living in the belt, the ships can bring them whatever else is easier to make on Mars than in space. Maybe food.

It's kind of a weird thought, but I would suggest that a lot of the output of industrial infrastructure in space is going to be used in space rather than returned to Earth. What's the point (you might ask) if it doesn't come back to Earth? Well, people on Earth might for various reasons want to expand their foothold in space, and then once it reaches a certain critical mass those footholds in space become their own thing. Like Europeans coming to America and eventually rebuilding more-or-less what they left behind, but with some differences.

From a species POV sure, from an individual POV living on Mars would be miserable..

Now that I think about it, we would get real good at settling desert and polar regions with the experience and data coming back from an established Mars colony. We could also learn more about more efficient habitation? Think of all the tech we have developed just for LEO (you know, like those listicles show) and imagine how much knowledge we would convert to use in helping everyday peoples' lives?

I completely agree with this line of reasoning, which is why I called the fixation with Mars Quixotic elsewhere in the thread. I was discussing this with some friends. Why not just pick some other totally inhospitable environment and try to live there instead? I mentioned inside a volcano lower in the thread. It seems to me you'd get all the same side-benefits of technological development.

Because if an asteroid destroys earth, your volcano base ain't gonna save life as we know it.

Because any such project is going to require herculean effort on the part of many humans, and many humans are interested in colonizing Mars but not so many are interested in colonizing volcanoes.

Your question is basically: why do people care about this thing I don't care about and instead care about this thing that neither I nor they care about.

I guess you’ve never read about Xenu. Some people believe volcanoes are pretty important.

And DC-9s if I remember correctly

> Because if an asteroid destroys earth, your volcano base ain't gonna save life as we know it

If an asteroid destroys earth, your Mars base won't save life as we know it either. There's a lot of handwaving in this thread on the technologies required to bridge the gap between Starship existing and self-sustaining life on Mars. Paradoxically, self-sustaining space manufacture/Mars colony will obviate the need for frequent heavy-lift rocket launches.

How is that paradoxical? Bootstrapping a self-sustaining colony on Mars will require getting a massive amount of payload to the red planet. Once bootstrapped, yes that will no longer be required.

Nobody is arguing that Starship is sufficient, just that it is necessary.

> Nobody is arguing that Starship is sufficient, just that it is necessary.

No, it's the yet-to-be-invented tech that is necessary. Your unstated prior is that this non-existent tech will in turn require heavy-lift capacity, and there is no evidence for that. Maybe we can bootstrap space manufacturing off 2 Arianne 5 launches, or 50 starship launches, nobody knows because it's all make-believe atm.

What Starship is good for, is frequent supply runs to a dependant Mars base, with today's technology - but that's nor what people are saying because that's not sexy.

But the utopian end goal is to make Mars hospitable. For Musk a Mars city is not the end goal but the first step. For example one could make a magnetic shield in L1 Mars Orbit. There was a speculative Nasa study (Wikipedia):

> If constructed, the shield may allow the planet to restore its atmosphere. Simulations indicate that within years, the planet would be able to achieve half the atmospheric pressure of Earth. Without solar winds stripping away at the planet, frozen carbon dioxide at the ice caps on either pole would begin to sublimate (change from a solid into a gas) and warm the equator. Ice caps would begin to melt to form an ocean. T

Of course there is much difficulty and unkown unknowns. Maybe this is truly impossible. Maybe this will take a million years. Maybe Mars soil is too toxic for plant growth.

But the upshoot of terraforming Mars is so fantastical, that it is at least worth dreaming about.

> Why do we need to fly 3 months to some inhospitable planet that is in worse condition than Earth would be (even after nuclear wars and global warming) to make progress?

Why do we need to pick?

Also the Earth has limited resources and even of the resources we have, people are already attacking the idea of mining on Earth more and more, even when it's for things like stopping global warming by creating EVs. At some point it's going to be considered downright evil to dig into the ground to pull resources out of it with how things are going. The only alternative will be to pull it out of space.

The answer is that one solution will fail quickly and will not do as much to pump stock value. The other one will pump your stock shares to the moon, as the market will inflate your companies valuations, by pricing in for the next 50 years, your plans to become the new Mars emperor.

Most people don't want to live in Antarctica etc because what's the point? There's the research, for which people do live there. For everyone else, it's at worst a few days away from comfort, with very little to be gained or lost.

A good comparison would be for settling the Americas. Although they obviously weren't as inhospitable as Mars, it was still a months long trip that was often one way to a destination with none of the comforts of their previous homes. Yet people came and worked to build. There was plenty of land and plenty of resources in the old world, yet we chose to go through the challenges of settling the new world. Should they also have waited to solve all their problems at home and utilize all their resources and land before looking outwards?

It's the same with Mars, plenty of people get bright-eyed at the idea of going to Mars and helping build a colony because it's a challenging task that would give meaning to many of us. No matter how often you say that Earth is more hospitable, the fact stands that if we do succeed at setting up a self-sustaining colony on Mars, we'll be more secure than just on Earth. Those are way higher stakes than living in Antarctica/the Sahara etc.

Hell, SpaceX essentially gets its pick of top engineering talent because of inspiring people towards the goal of Mars. Is that not already evidence that people are interested in going? It isn't like they're making significantly more money taking on the large workloads expected at the company. There are plenty more cushy jobs available at ULA, Blue Origin etc and plenty of technical challenges at all the space startups. Yet SpaceX gets its pick to the point that their technological lead over everyone else is only increasing.

> I would love to see all the energy put into space exploration to simply be put in rehabilitating existing land.

Quote from my past posts [1] on this point:

> It's impossible to predict what tech can come out of such efforts that will be of use here on Earth in the future. The amount of money going to space exploration is peanuts so I think it's well justified if it has even a trace of potential to improve future of humanity and that has been true historically - e.g. satellites (GPS, weather, etc), medicine (MRI), and whole bunch of NASA spinoffs and more.

> I think SpaceX to date has received less than 10 billion (say 20 to be safe) in total for everything! That's 20 years of research, development, coming up with never done before re-usable rockets, etc.

> People spent nearly half a trillion dollars (not billion) on cosmetic products in a single year! You want to point fingers, point at something you can actually locate. Money spent on space is negligible to the point that it doesn't even warrant justifying spending it.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29189753

> Why do we need to fly 3 months to some inhospitable planet that is in worse condition than Earth would be (even after nuclear wars and global warming) to make progress?

In the late 1500s, why set sail across an ocean for weeks that no-one has ever successfully crossed (that we know of).

Someone would want to do it, and then want to do it regularly, and regularly means commercializing it, which means reduced cost and innovation. Better ships crossed the Atlantic, trade started and so on. Europe (and the world) is richer after the "discovery" of America and Australia, for example.

There are so many 'unknown unknowns' that until we settle on Mars we just... don't know: some mineral on Mars that might be useful for... capturing CO2 somehow? Lower gravity to grow novel crystalline structures that do... something. Basic life? Who knows?

Mars exploration excites me and many others.

> is richer after the "discovery" of America and Australia, for example.

And then there was ethnic cleansing of native population.

True, and even if everyone were a moral saint the pox would been devastating. But this was not a garden eden, but a very brutal tribal world with frequent ethnic cleansing and enslavements. Hundred thousands of native auxiliaries marched with Cortez to get rid of their Aztec overlords.

Anyway, this won't be an issue for Mars.

Pioneering spirit, without the colonialism.

It really is the question - why do you live? What is the purpose of anyone life?

There does not seem to be any purpose to anything in the universe. But we can choose what we want to do.

So the answer: Because we want to, because it is exciting, because it inspires, because we can.

Because this is what life is about.

The movie Avatar made in box office $2.9B. This is exactly the same amount of money as SpaceX asked for an actual moon landing of $2.9B.

Have you asked people who watched Avatar what is the purpose of watching Avatar?

Instead of making a fiction about going to a moon, we can actually go to the moon.

Let me introduce you to the idea of freedom. You are free to not go. Me too; I have no intention to ever go to Mars. But if some people want to go to Mars, why should I question their pursuit of happiness?

Somewhere around a thousand Americans [1] lose their lives in the construction industry each year. It's not a novel thing for people to die building the future, but Mars would definitely bring some novel methods.

[1] https://midwestepi.org/2017/05/08/construction-fatalities-co...

Mars in the first years (probably for decades) will likely be way worse.

Workers will spend all 24 hours of every day in risky circumstances, and the quality of aid will be worse. For example, even if there is a MRI machine, will there be surgeons? A small population simply cannot support a wide range of medical specialists.

People on the ISS have similar issues and it doesn't seem such a problem.

If the need arises, they can get back on earth in two days time or so. I also think/guess their major health risks are of the “you die immediately” kind, not of the “it helps a lot of you get to a hospital within x minutes” kind.

> For example, even if there is a MRI machine, will there be surgeons?

100% yes, there will be surgeon(s). Likely cotasked with other roles (medical studies etc?) until the population would get significantly larger. Antarctic missions have performed surgery (and everyone gets their appendix removed before going on an overwinter).

Elon plans to retire on Mars. He plans to die there. “Hopefully not on impact”

I expect he’ll share some of the risk (though not the super early super high risk) because the settlement will be risky for the first hundred+ years.

It's not just their sacrifice. They're also sacrificing their children, who had no say in the matter, to have a substantially worse life than they would have had had they stayed on Earth.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that is unprecedented in the history of immigration but it does seem pretty uncommon.

By that rationale, any time people have moved any time since humans came into existence they have potentially sacrificed their children who have no say in the matter. Any move could be to a worse situation.

It’s not a one way trip if you want to leave. They’ve said in previous presentations they plan to bring the ships back for multiple flights, and so there’s an option to return if you want it.

How do the politics of a Mars colony work? Say Elon controls the sole means of supplying the colony from Earth - do the colonists effectively become hostages? What if they mutiny? Will the supplies stop coming? Is this murder? Many questions.

Based on this comment alone, I can tell you would enjoy "The moon is a harsh mistress" by Robert Heinlein. Recommended if you haven't read it already!

Or the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, which is a fabulous sci-fi take on this matter. Can't recommend it enough if you're an avid reader.

That's next on my list now. Thank you!

The quality of life on Mars poses the greatest risk to SpaceX's plan to create a self-sustaining city there.

I'm sure there will be plenty of people who will go to Mars because it is a fantastic adventure.

However, i doubt that many will want to stay there for more than 26 months. If too many pioneers choose to return to Earth, the project fails. You need a fairly large number of settlers to create something self-sustaining.

> "Who values their life the least?" knowing that their sacrifice will make for a better future.

I think the pioneers will go there for a sense of adventure, not for a monetary reward or out of some sense of "sacrifice for the future". There will be enough people who want to go that you can select a great crew from that group, and there is no reason to send people who don't want to or have to be convinced with money.

There are plenty of people out there willing to take the risk. They won’t be the poor being forced into it, they’ll all be perfectly aware and willing.

Why do you hope billionaires risk their children?

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