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Life On Mars: Elon Musk Reveals Details of His Colonisation Vision
Elon Musk has put his Mars-colonization vision to paper, and you can read it for free. SpaceX's billionaire founder and CEO published the plan, which he unveiled at a conference in Mexico in September 2016, in the journal New Space. From a report: The paper outlines early designs of the gigantic spacecraft, designed to carry 100 passengers, that he hopes to construct. "The thrust level is enormous," the paper states. "We are talking about a lift-off thrust of 13,000 tons, so it will be quite tectonic when it takes off." Creating a fully self-sustained civilisation of around one million people -- the ultimate goal -- would take 40-100 years according to the plans. Before full colonisation takes place, though, Musk needs to entice the first pioneers to pave the way.
Taking the sun's-eye view of Life As We Know It, it can all go away with a massive asteroid (that we can't see), a freak solar storm (that we'd see for about 8 minutes), or other event that could take us all out.
After that, all the science, all the technology, all the things we've done to separate ourselves from the rocks we kill each other with are gone. All because we are on a semi-closed system (planet Earth can take new mass in, and ejects minimal amounts of hydrogen).
It seems prudent to me that we make the ark (Stephenson wasn't the first to name it) and get at least some life (some of it with the ability to sustain the rest) off of this planet. That gives us a non-zero probability of surviving if an extinction level event should happen. We have a budget of billions of dollars spent on items of less importance, sometimes I wonder how we get priorities like this.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
I believe Musk's stated reason is that it's good for the long-term survival of mankind to not have all of our eggs in one basket. It could take centuries to create a colony on Mars that is self-sufficient enough to live on indefinitely should Earth get stricken by an extinction level event. If we wait until an unavoidable threat to Earth is on the visible horizon, there might not be enough time left to build such a colony. Even if we ignore all that, however, a perfectly valid reason for going to Mars is simply because we can. Humans dedicate time and resources to all manner of endeavors that serve only to stoke our collective egos over what we're able to accomplish. If Musk and a ton of other people want to go to Mars simply because they think it would be a cool adventure, then that's good enough reason for them to do it.
Every "colonizing Mars" plan has these holes. People say "create an atmosphere" or "dig caves" to live in. With what? There is no Home Depot on Mars. How do you create an atmosphere? How do you keep it when there is no magnetosphere? It is a mystery! But who cares - we are going to MARS!
If not, then how can you say that you want to go to Mars and never come back when you don't even know what its like to live and work on the extremities of this planet?
Don't we have better things to be doing then this?
What, like invade third-world countries that pissed us off? Or sponsor another iteration of the Olympics? Or look at amusingly captioned photos of catst?
In a lot of cases, the potential benefits of doing something are impossible to know in advance, but maybe you just do it anyway because it looks like it would be a cool thing to do. This is one of those cases. If you don't think it's a promising avenue, go do something else instead; nobody will stop you.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.