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Also when we see a benefit to humans being on another planet, then spend a few missions before sending the mass of robots, prefab materials and equipment so there's habitats ready or nearly ready so we're not confined to whatever we have on one spaceship

Ok great, you’re definitely right, let’s not do it.

What now? Will Elon stop? If Elon doesn’t stop, does that make you right?

I'm not saying it's impossible to send people to Mars and even bring them back. I'm saying there is no point whatsoever right now, at least no material or scientific purpose.

Of course, building a "city" on Mars is well beyond our capabilities, so that will either not be attempted at all, or it will fail. Maybe by 2124, but more likely 2524.

> I'm saying there is no point whatsoever right now, at least no material or scientific purpose.

"No point" here means "no reasonable goal". In this case reasonability is subjective - somebody sees obvious reasons why Mars colony could be useful for humanity, somebody doesn't. Pro arguments are science, learning how to live off another planet, certain insurance against planet-wide cataclysms, general progress in space engineering. There are contra arguments as well, but which are more important is also subjective - we don't have hard data or commonly accepted facts which would solve this arguments one way or another, so, to some, it's natural to investigate the matter further...

It's difficult to imagine any cataclysm that would result in the Earth being less habitable (even for us squishy humans) than Mars already is.

It's really a matter of imagination :) . I learned about the existence of the Institute of the Problems of Asteroid Hazards long time ago, which suggested to me it's not a black-and-white type of question.

It's not even just about habitability. There are many remote places on Earth that we consider a waste of time and effort to inhabit, which are themselves 100X more habitable than Mars. There's a reason we don't have large, thriving settlements on inland Greenland, deep in the Sahara Desert, and Antarctica, even though they are way more habitable than Mars. There's no reason to inhabit them.

If people think like this, it won't happen even by 2524.

Elon's job is to massively accelerate that timeline.

If elon decides to make humans fly and move objects with their will power. Will you defend it the same way?

Cuz probability of both are closer to each other that to probability of them being achievable.

Getting to mars would require a technological leap. Planes -> rockets kind of leap.

Currently we have yet to be able to get back to the moon.

Creating self sustained colony on earth would require some kind of technological miracle.

And it will not be enough to use few nukes to malt ice caps on mars.

We will probably perform a human mission and return samples before a robot goes and picks up the Perseverance samples.

We’ve been mars-capable since Apollo. It’s a matter of will, which is a political function of cost, which is falling rapidly.

> We’ve been mars-capable since Apollo.

serious citation needed!

you cant make shit up. Apollo and saturn5 were nowhere near getting humans to mars. Not even close.

It got us to moon with bare minimum. A weekend trip vs 6 months trip.

The scale up of needed resources is mind boggling. At every step. I mean pick any step and explain how Apollo could achieve it.

If you used multiple Saturn V rockets to launch and dock a multipart craft we could maybe have made it at least to orbit around Mars but landing would be a massively different story.

You can read up on Mars Direct for more info.

The gist of it is that the Saturn V has enough delta v to get to Mars, on the count of Mars having an atmosphere, which can be used for aerobraking.

Given the capability of reaching Mars with a Saturn V, the rest of the plan revolved around using Apollo hardware, with some modification, for both transport and habitats(re-use of empty stages featured prominently).

Ultimately even if we had hit some roadblock with martian soil or what have you, in an alternate timeline we could have at least sent uncrewed test flights to Mars and back.

That is debatable at best, a crewed flight to mars is 8 months, crew of 3

You have roughly 40t at best for a craft that needs to land there.

quick google. astronauts need around 1.7kg of food per day, x3 crew, x(8x30) days is:

thats 1200 kg of food - one way - just to get there food.

And then you are doing to do what exactly?

> the rest of the plan revolved around using Apollo hardware, with some modification, for both transport and habitats(re-use of empty stages featured prominently).

This is basically handwaving problems away, massive problems.

The best I can agree is that a crewed fly-by could have been possible. But landing on mars would mean death sooner or later.

The Mars Direct plan is featured heavily in the book "The Case For Mars".

It's over 400 pages and contains some of the details you seem to be curious about.

Yeah, but it's in your text/comment. The logical thing is that it makes 0 sense. Columbus to not take the real circumference makes 0 sense. Let's go to Mars, start a civilization there. It'll be a lot of change for us humans. And only if you live somewhere you can really solve problems. Maybe it's a good plan against a nuclear war, whatever.

Columbus was just wrong, he was not motivated by some higher goal.

And no, it's not a good plan against a nuclear war, Mars is far far far less hospitable than the Earth would be if we launched all of the nuclear weapons we have today. It's far more radioactive, dusty, cold, toxic, and everything.

The tech we developed for Mars can become useful for the Earth of tomorrow, once World War III finishes.

Let's first build a self-sustaining mega-city in the Sahara desert, or in the Antarctic, and then we can use what we learn doing this to start thinking about a colony on Mars. Building new self-sustaining mega-cities on Earth has obvious direct advantages, and it is a reasonable first step and case study for doing so on another planet.