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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk Predicts People On Mars In 9 Years (cnn.com)
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says his company should be able to land humans on Mars in nine years from now. "If things go according to plan, we should be able to -- we should be able to -- launch people in 2024, with arrival in 2025," Musk said. "That's the game plan," he added. CNN Money reports: Musk said he's planning to share an architectural plan for the colonization of Mars at a conference in September. The tech conference audience was enthralled by Musk's comments. He told interviewers Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg that plotting travel throughout the Solar System, and "ultimately other star systems," provides the kind of inspiration that makes life worth living.
Nothing in what you just said suggests why you think the mission will certainly end in death. That's a bold prediction, and not one anyone can make.
For some stupid reason, many people seems to conflate "some risk of a bad thing happening" to "it's a certainty that the bad thing WILL happen and will happen to everyone every single time." It's how NASA's 3% cancer risk from space radiation from a Mars mission becomes "your organs will be boiled! and it's impossible because you'll die during the mission from space radiation." This is just dumb. Space radiation isn't even as bad as smoking, and except for well-characterized and easily mitigated problems with acute doses (the biggest risk is if you have electronics which can't withstand the radiation and so fail, but that's easily engineered away), you're not going to die during the mission at all.
The first Shuttle flight, for instance, had a, I don't know, 10% chance of failure. It worked, because if you have a 10% chance of something happening, that means that you also have a 90% chance of it not happening.
I predict that getting to the surface of Mars in 9 years is much more realistic technologically today than getting to the Moon in 1969 (just 7 years after JFK's 1962 Rice University moon speech) was.
And the first flight probably won't kill anyone.
AI is not chess playing programs or Go playing programs. Ridiculous.