For all very real SpaceX achievements there's certain Musk fatigue if you haven't noticed. He's done enormous job to sour people on the idea of becoming multiplanetary species.
TLDR in this hypothetical, it's just Xi on an 100 story podium, no one else is even in the building. Unless we eventually credit someone for portable fusion, i.e. 60% of global oil used in transport that can't be displaced at utility scale energy solutions, and one credits Xi for MIC2025/PRCEV/battery then no one will ever even dethrone Xi.
Ehhhh, I'd say he's not in some league of his own. Xi is also industrializing with fossil fuels and China became the planet's largest producer of CO2 under his leadership and he's been outsourcing dirty industries abroad, particularly to Africa. I'd give more credit to people lower-down the totem pole in China, who are leading the charge for clean energy such as Wang Chuanfu, but he's very explicitly following in Elon's footsteps.
It's also a little wild to discount pollution already produced in previously unseen amounts while crediting to them hypothetical future reductions. Last year China had it's highest CO2 emission ever, and even with solar it's possible that their CO2 output will increase.
> possible that their CO2 output will increase.
Immaterial if CO2 increases, only useful geopolitical metric is historic per capita emission relative to development level and PRC is low for country blasting through capex heavy capital accumulation phase, i.e. PRC setting standard for low relative per capita emission development. Xi 2012-2026 did ~30% global emissions, ~10-15% global historic for ~20% of population. As long as PRC stays under 20% global historic and maintains above 50th percentile development (use whatever proxy indicator, per capital income PPP etc), they are under emitting / developing efficiently relative to energy use. AKA PRC developing more for less unit of emission. The alternative is not developing which frankly stupid argument/position. For reference US/Europe ~45% historic emission for 10% of global pop. On balance PRC currently grossly under emitting vs historic developmental baseline.
The plan definitely does not call for inaction towards other issues.
Volkswagen has a market cap of 40B, why do they need to government subsidies to build a new car?
If you truly care about wide-scale EV adoption above all else, why not advocate for opening up western markets to Chinese EVs? The availability of a 10k EV would do far more for adoption than giving taxpayer money to billion dollar megacorps.
The "rocket CO2 doesn't matter" argument is based on the fact that nobody has reusable rockets right now, so the fuel expenditure is bounded by the cost of the rocket. Elon Musk wants to switch that equation on its head. Meaning e.g. $100 million launch costs no longer means $10 million fuel costs and $90 million rocket costs, it now means 5x $10 million rocket costs and 5x $10 million fuel costs, i.e. 5x more fuel used with the same budget and that fuel is going to emit CO2.
One Starship launch produces 3500 tons. Now repeat this to 1000 Earth to Mars launches. That includes at least 10 tanker launches per ship. Meaning at least 10000 launches per year. That equates to 35 million tons of CO2 for something that has no direct benefit to earth.
If he scaled down his Mars colony ambitions to 10 Earth to Mars launches per year people might turn a blind eye to it.
To your second: there are calamities for which a second self-sufficient planet would be necessary. A large asteroid impact would utterly wreck the global industrial base which is highly dependent on international trade and specialization of resource extraction and manufacturing in different regions of the world, having an independent backup on a different planet is one of the few ways to hedge against this. You could argue that every country on earth be fully self-sufficient and then maybe they could survive but that seems like a much bigger task since you'd be building multiple completely independent civilizations instead of just one. Guarding against another global pandemic is another and being out of range of nuclear weapons and their fallout is a third.
> A large asteroid impact would utterly wreck the global industrial base which is highly dependent on international trade and specialization of resource extraction and manufacturing in different regions of the world
That's economic collapse not extinction level collapse, space based mining might help with that but it's not the kind of event that actually makes a self sufficient
> Guarding against another global pandemic is another
This kind of presumes a very low level of travel and trade between Earth and Elsewhere which is extremely unlikely per problem 1 and the fact they'll need some economic reason to exist, at the very least they'll have to make money to buy the necessary items from Earth they cannot produce locally.
> being out of range of nuclear weapons and their fallout is a third.
This goes back to the actual thing I was talking about even a heavily bombed out Earth is hundreds of times easier to survive on than Mars or any given asteroid. Hence any tech that makes those places survivable make even the most damaged Earth also survivable.
Global economic collapse due to an asteroid or nuclear war might not cause human extinction but it would mean a very large regression in our technological capacity. That could endure for hundreds if not thousands of years. Maybe we would never fully recover, people argue that point based on all of the easy to access resources having already been exploited though I have more faith in humanity's ingenuity. The role of a Mars colony in this scenario isn't to send iron ore to Earth, it's to maintain high technology and continue moving forward.
The risk of a pandemic becoming interplanetary is much lower than the risk of international spread. Travel between Earth and Mars is necessarily constrained by their orbits with a window opening only every 26 months. Most travel would likely be uncrewed cargo and when people do make the trip there would be strict quarantine measures taken (this is already done with current crewed launches to orbit and there is established history of immigration being subject to quarantine). Most importantly, the trip to Mars takes much longer than the incubation period of any disease likely to cause a pandemic so the disease will have run its course by the time the ship reaches Mars and they can decide what to do at that point (at the extreme they may resupply it and send it back but that's probably not necessary in most cases).
My concern is the incentives and economics that make it possible for them to exist, principally (relatively) cheap launch and transit costs, preclude it ever being economical to invest the resources required to ship say modern chip lithography equipment out to the new colonies rather than them continuing to buy them from Earth. Or the alternative, they get treated like pre-revolution US colonies and are intentionally kept dependent by restrictions on imports and tech exports in order to provide a market for the mother civ to sell into. And this time instead of being in a verdant land full of resources the colonies are on baren rocks dependent on the mother country for critical life support supplies so the capture and dependency are magnified and much stronger.
I don't really see the point in arguing against it. If a private company and private individuals want to try to colonize Mars then what does it have to do with anyone else? You can't cling on to their legs and scream "don't go!" It all just seems to be in the same vein as that famous headline saying man will never fly.
Yes it wouldn't be the first step on establishing them but it is the kind of things it would need to be truly self sufficient. Chips are in practically every thing today already, it's a critical supply component to do anything other than simply surviving.
Relatedly there are questions about why the whole project seems to assume that it's much more important to preserve the human species, like a celebrated breed of dog, than to protect the lifespans (ideally, healthy lifespans) and welfare of individual human beings, questions which unfortunately can also probably be answered with reference to Musk personally: https://youtu.be/-VfYjPzj1Xw?t=18 .
There's also the wrinkle that if it's viable to send settlers and adequate resupply to Mars, then it's probably much easier and more straightforward to send a few nuclear warheads on their own one-way trip, so the whole premise that a Martian colony wouldn't be struck in a full-scale nuclear war on Earth seems shaky. Now a Martian colony dug in deep under the surface might be relatively safe, but that brings up again the question of whether it wouldn't just be better to build a far-flung network of underground settlements on Earth and/or have submarines loitering in the Antarctic Ocean in shifts.
It's silly to me that some crabs are working on trying to leave the nice bucket (me, where all the crabs are) for some shoddy bucket far far away. All because they don't want to fix the bucket they have at hand.