Does the FCC have the *authority* to do that though? They are charged with regulating communications - not state legislatures. If an executive-branch bureaucrat can unilaterally restrict what state governments can do, then I think we have a little bit of a problem with the whole "democracy" thing.
It's really hard to manage your resources effectively when you've been strip-mined by a foreign military power, and continue to be governed by colonial-style governments which, while now under the control of locals, are still designed to their core to pillage the natives, rather than function as anything resembling a Western-style government.
Meanwhile, most of the aid we've delivered could hardly be delivered in a manner better designed to destroy any hope they have of getting back on their feet. Local farms are struggling to produce food in a cost-effective manner, so what do we do? Supply the farms with the infrastructure (pumps, etc) necessary to produce the food needed? No. Guarantee them a fair price for their produce so they can secure the funding needed for such upgrades themselves, and then distribute that food to the starving? No. We ship in and distribute free food, and predictably destroy the local market for food, forcing farmers to grow non-food export crops to have any chance of paying their bills.
Bottom line - the problem is not the starving people, they've done nothing wrong except not rise up and overthrow their well armed colonial governments. The problem was created and sustained by the interference of Western governments. If our goal was to help them, then doing nothing whatsoever would have been a better long-term strategy than what we've done.
Humans can live to 80. That doesn't mean they all die by then, just that that's how long you expect a human to last on a good run. The article even mentions that the oldest rat in their lab is now 35.
With a 1/10,000 daily chance of mortality, mole rats have a half-life of ~19 years. Which means that the average lifespan of a molerat = 1.44*19y = 27.4 years.
According to the article - exactly. That what makes them so incredibly interesting. Not just that they live an extremely long time for their size, but that their mortality curve is completely unlike any other animal we know of. Their mortality curve is flat at a constant ~1/10,000 per day, regardless of how old they get, and actually falls slightly as they get older.
They "live to thirty" not because they get old and die around age thirty, but because most of them die at a much younger age so things average out to a 30 year "expected lifespan". At those odds, the "halflife" of a mole rat is 6931.125 days: (1-1/10,000)^6931 = ~50% chance of not having died. So, they have a 50% chance of living to see 19, and if they make it, they have a 50% chance of living to see 38. And if they make it to 38, they would have a 50% chance of making it to 57 - assuming age based mortality doesn't start to show its head by then. As they mention in the article, perhaps age-based mortality starts making itself felt eventually, but their oldest individual made it to 35 and they're not seeing any evidence of an age-based increase in mortality yet.
If they make it to 29 then they've got a better-than average chance of making it through the next 10 years as well, but they only have a 35% chance of making it to 29 in the first place.
Well, good luck with both solving biological mortality and the heat-death of the universe.
In the meantime I would suggest finding some other yardstick of self-worth, because even if you somehow succeed in both, odds are pretty good that some accident or other will kill you sometime in the next 100^100,000,000,000 years.
Also, you might consider giving a little credit to all those great minds that came before you and made it possible for you to succeed - because there's zero chance you could solve either problem if you had started out in the stone age.
Try again. The fact that you can't even be bothered to explain how your imaginary immortality machine would work suggests you're just tossing around words you heard somewhere. You can't magically generate energy in the ergosphere, you just drain it from the black hole itself, speeding its evaporation.
Meanwhile - unless you're spawning an entire independent closed pocket universe you haven't solved anything. The black holes will spiral in and merge (because they can't orbit each other indefinitely - at those distances they're shedding kinetic energy as gravitational waves at an incredible rate) and then eventually evaporate.
If we clone you, and then kill you, you're still dead. Having a clone still running around doesn't make you any less dead.
Similarly, if we clone your mind, and then kill you, you're still dead. Having a mind-clone still running around doesn't make the original you any less dead.
A bathtub curve gives you a high probability of failing early on (manufacturing defects, etc), then a long period of relatively low, constant odds of failure, and then a climb back to a high probability of failure as things wear out. So that if you graph the odds of failure you get a U shape, or "bathtub cross-section"
They're claiming mole rats never get that final climb - in fact as they get really old the odds of dying actually *diminish*. That means that the older a mole rat gets, the better its odds are of still being alive in 10 years time.
I think the menopause thing is a red herring - only three mammalian species are known to experience menopause: humans, orcas, and pilot whales. Never experiencing menopause is the default assumption for mammals.
Similarly, I don't think weak hearts, etc. are a factor - anything like that would increase your risk of mortality as you age. Along with anything else that could be categorized as "wearing out" - cancer (cellular mutation "clean up" wears out), organ disease of any kind (scar tissue, etc. builds up over a lifetime of minor problems), etc. Basically, if anything whatsoever wears out, then it will have a greater chance of killing you at age 80 than at age 10. And they're not seeing that in mole rats - assuming their observations are correct, a 20 or 30 year old year old mole rat is no more likely to die in the next ten years than a six month old one. In fact, their risk of death actually drops slightly as they get older.
So, honest question: why haven't you committed suicide yet, if you so strongly believe that you, and everything else in the universe, are completely worthless?
Having enough space is not the problem - the problem is having too much space, so that the finite amount of mass-energy in the universe gets spread too thin to support complex structures.
Also, if you have black holes then heat-death hasn't struck yet - they're still complex structure. But don't worry, they'll evaporate eventually, and then, when the last black holes have evaporated, heat-death will finally be complete.
And then, eventually, maybe, just the right quantum wrinkle will appear to spawn another big bang and spontaneously repopulate the universe - opinions vary on that question.
CO2 - yes, the pressure is incredibly low, but it's everywhere, and we have this little thing called a vacuum pump designed specifically for creating the pressure gradients needed to bring it into a pressurized environment.
H2O - actually, yes we do. We have clear evidence of water ice at the poles, and pretty strong evidence for subterranean deposits in a few other specific locations. It may be heavily contaminated, but melt it, filter it, and maybe distill it and you've got all the usable water you could want.
However, the government offices will still want internet, so *somebody* will be providing it - and now who do you suppose will be the ones getting more favorable consideration in future legislation and other government dealings?
Plus the sate of Montana is responsible for over 5% of employment in the state - that's a lot of well-distributed business to just hand over to your competitors. Especially if nobody in the oligopoly wants to play ball - then some little upstart is suddenly going to be getting really favorable pole leases, etc. from the state to deploy the necessary infrastructure.
Yep, that's the impression I got - one of the reasons I didn't stay long - I'd rather spend most my time making new and useful tools than constantly learning how to use the new tools in my toolbox, even if they really are superior to the old ones.
Still, they've obviously got enough of a developer base willing to jump through those hoops to let them get away with it, and it's probably letting them evolve much faster than they otherwise would. Almost Linux-like in a way, with new better technologies constantly replacing old ones to the frustration of many - only controlled by a single golden fist instead of an ecosystem of distros. I kind of suspect they have a lot more developers for their platform than any Linux stack though. Maybe even more good ones.
Actually, it was a great success - they had a couple of *major* problems with the first experiment (especially unexpected CO2 loss to the concrete), but were able to make it through by the skin of their teeth - though admittedly it was pure stubbornness that kept them going to the end of the mission. And I seem to recall a lot of people problems as well. Basically the problem (beyond the unexpected) was they had too many people for the size of the ecosystem - and not enough people for healthy social interactions - things were basically working, just not quite well enough to quite cut it.
There's also been at least a couple long-term Russian experiments using switchgrass and the like for atmosphere recycling, though I believe they ate stored rations. And I think I've heard of a few others, though I can't recall any details.
An actual colony could address the problems relatively easily - you have a decent population of at least several dozen people and growing, and eat mostly imported food for the first few years as the gardens expand, which they will do as fast as you can manage since there's no need to keep plant life in balance with animals when you have an unlimited supply of CO2 right outside. You make absolutely no attempt to maintain a sealed environment - you import resources and dispose of waste as needed - and the most vital bulk ecological resources, CO2 and H2O, are in plentiful local supply.
Life will certainly survive, but civilization may well collapse is the face of such unprecedented challenges - it's collapsed many times before in the face of much smaller ones. In which case an outpost of high technology could eventually be quite valuable in rebuilding.
Research outposts is indeed one of the more likely starts, though "outpost capable of surviving" is the first step even there. Not much point in doing anything from orbit though - it's not like you'll be sitting outside sunbathing in that toxic sand in your skivies - not in near vacuum and subfreezing temperatures. You'll need to make the effort not to track too much into your habitat of course, to keep it below toxic concentrations, and will have to neutralize it before you can mix it into your garden soil, but from what I can find it's not a massive threat in trace amounts. Not compared to the sorts of high radiation exposure you'd get in orbit (far worse than the ISS, since Mars has no appreciable magnetosphere to protect them). Hypothyroidism might kill the early colonists eventually - but in the early days of colonizing a alien world, there's a lot of much more immediate threats.
And sadly terraforming is largely irrelevant to colonization - you're generally talking at least thousands of years to accomplish anything substantial on that front through any plausible mechanism thus far conceived. By the time the 50-times-great-grandchildren of the people who started the process finally start seeing appreciable results, they will have long since been able to easily colonize the barren environment. It's the sort of project that mostly makes sense if you're making your world a better place for the future, or have a relatively cheap "fire and forget" plan and grand dreams for humanity's distant future.
I think that's part of the reason people like Musk want to rush the game - throw lives and resources at the problem while we still have them in abundance to spend. This next century could start getting pretty grim, and even a minimally self-sufficient Mars colony could serve as a repository of life and knowledge to help rebuild.
Life might get pretty grim for a while if supplies from Earth got cut off before they were really ready, but it's unlikely much would impact them any more directly. As long as they had enough infrastructure to make do they might end up better off than they would have been on Earth.
Probably - that's historically pretty likely with expensive colonization projects: Company towns where the appointed governor had extreme power so long as he stayed in the good graces of his superiors back home.
That may prove to be the case, but what little we do know suggests otherwise. All we know for sure at this point is that it works fine on Earth (where gravity varies a bit more than 0.5%), and that "Space flight studies of pregnant mammals have shown a significant reduction in pregnancy weight gain, prolonged parturition, lower birth weights, and increased perinatal mortality" (as quoted in section 7 of your linked article), from which we can reasonably conclude that something about the combination of microgravity and constant high energy radiation bombardment is hostile to embryo development.
We have zero data on any intermediate states - nobody has done orbital centrifuge experiments to simulate partial gravity, nor heavily shielded experiments to reduce radiation closer exposure to planetary levels. So far as I know we haven't even done any centrifuge research here on Earth to at least get some high-G datapoints to let us try to extrapolate possible curve shapes.
And frankly, I don't know that it really matters. As long as the birth rate isn't *too* low, or developmental complications too severe, all you've done is created a society with ubiquitous moderately effective birth control, a necessarily high tolerance for miscarriage, and a high demand for intensive neonatal care.
And if the problems *are* too severe, then you do what so many classic works of SF have suggested - you make "maternity rings": well-shielded centrifuges at least big enough to eliminate any Coriolis-related problems, potentially large enough to be fully-contained resorts, where expectant mothers spend whatever amount of time is necessary. Planetside it could be essentially a long underground train perpetually racing in circles (probably tethered to a central point to reduce lateral stresses on the track foundation). In space it would probably look a bit more like some kind of centrifugal space station inside an appropriately hollowed asteroid - pretty much where you'd want to live anyway.
At worst, if access is restrictively expensive, then you've introduced a relatively effective and compassionate way to reduce poor people breeding. Which would likely have all sorts of strange social impacts, but wouldn't directly threaten the society's viability. If it did, then the folks at the top have incentive to offer "scholarships", lotteries, etc. to encourage more pregnancies. Genetics-based "pregnacyships" would certainly make for a fairly friendly form of eugenics.
Exactly what tech are you thinking of that's conspicuously missing, beyond the rockets themselves? Sealed terrariums have been done for decades, and on Mars you have unlimited CO2 and water to let the plants outpace the animals and fuel expansion. I seem to recall that we've already worked out concrete based on simulated-Mars sand, and gas-impermeable sealants are not difficult, and can even be made from waste cellulose with the right equipment, so habitat domes shouldn't be too much of a problem. Airlocks, space suits, computers, etc. will need to be imported until local infrastructure has become sufficiently industrialized, but that's always been the case with new colonies.
It could certainly be done a lot more safely, and probably cheaply, if we waited to develop a fleet of technologies with limited if any use on Earth while rocketry continued to be refined - but that's been true of most every colonization ever done. A lot fewer people would have died colonizing the Americas if they had waited another 30,000 years until they had iron-age tools, but that wouldn't have accomplished anything for the people in the intervening millenia.
Where do you see any support for Jobs? I always disliked him and consider his "look at the shinies" brand of evil preferable only to Microsoft's mafia-esque behavior. And used Windows anyways because that's where all the decent software was, and Macs were way too focused on shiny at the expense of interface functionality.
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Does the FCC have the *authority* to do that though? They are charged with regulating communications - not state legislatures. If an executive-branch bureaucrat can unilaterally restrict what state governments can do, then I think we have a little bit of a problem with the whole "democracy" thing.
It's really hard to manage your resources effectively when you've been strip-mined by a foreign military power, and continue to be governed by colonial-style governments which, while now under the control of locals, are still designed to their core to pillage the natives, rather than function as anything resembling a Western-style government.
Meanwhile, most of the aid we've delivered could hardly be delivered in a manner better designed to destroy any hope they have of getting back on their feet. Local farms are struggling to produce food in a cost-effective manner, so what do we do? Supply the farms with the infrastructure (pumps, etc) necessary to produce the food needed? No. Guarantee them a fair price for their produce so they can secure the funding needed for such upgrades themselves, and then distribute that food to the starving? No. We ship in and distribute free food, and predictably destroy the local market for food, forcing farmers to grow non-food export crops to have any chance of paying their bills.
Bottom line - the problem is not the starving people, they've done nothing wrong except not rise up and overthrow their well armed colonial governments. The problem was created and sustained by the interference of Western governments. If our goal was to help them, then doing nothing whatsoever would have been a better long-term strategy than what we've done.
Humans can live to 80. That doesn't mean they all die by then, just that that's how long you expect a human to last on a good run. The article even mentions that the oldest rat in their lab is now 35.
With a 1/10,000 daily chance of mortality, mole rats have a half-life of ~19 years. Which means that the average lifespan of a molerat = 1.44*19y = 27.4 years.
According to the article - exactly. That what makes them so incredibly interesting. Not just that they live an extremely long time for their size, but that their mortality curve is completely unlike any other animal we know of. Their mortality curve is flat at a constant ~1/10,000 per day, regardless of how old they get, and actually falls slightly as they get older.
They "live to thirty" not because they get old and die around age thirty, but because most of them die at a much younger age so things average out to a 30 year "expected lifespan". At those odds, the "halflife" of a mole rat is 6931.125 days: (1-1/10,000)^6931 = ~50% chance of not having died. So, they have a 50% chance of living to see 19, and if they make it, they have a 50% chance of living to see 38. And if they make it to 38, they would have a 50% chance of making it to 57 - assuming age based mortality doesn't start to show its head by then. As they mention in the article, perhaps age-based mortality starts making itself felt eventually, but their oldest individual made it to 35 and they're not seeing any evidence of an age-based increase in mortality yet.
If they make it to 29 then they've got a better-than average chance of making it through the next 10 years as well, but they only have a 35% chance of making it to 29 in the first place.
Well, good luck with both solving biological mortality and the heat-death of the universe.
In the meantime I would suggest finding some other yardstick of self-worth, because even if you somehow succeed in both, odds are pretty good that some accident or other will kill you sometime in the next 100^100,000,000,000 years.
Also, you might consider giving a little credit to all those great minds that came before you and made it possible for you to succeed - because there's zero chance you could solve either problem if you had started out in the stone age.
Try again. The fact that you can't even be bothered to explain how your imaginary immortality machine would work suggests you're just tossing around words you heard somewhere. You can't magically generate energy in the ergosphere, you just drain it from the black hole itself, speeding its evaporation.
Meanwhile - unless you're spawning an entire independent closed pocket universe you haven't solved anything. The black holes will spiral in and merge (because they can't orbit each other indefinitely - at those distances they're shedding kinetic energy as gravitational waves at an incredible rate) and then eventually evaporate.
If we clone you, and then kill you, you're still dead. Having a clone still running around doesn't make you any less dead.
Similarly, if we clone your mind, and then kill you, you're still dead. Having a mind-clone still running around doesn't make the original you any less dead.
Telomeres would cause an increase in mortality rates towards the end of life.
No, absolutely not a bathtub curve.
A bathtub curve gives you a high probability of failing early on (manufacturing defects, etc), then a long period of relatively low, constant odds of failure, and then a climb back to a high probability of failure as things wear out. So that if you graph the odds of failure you get a U shape, or "bathtub cross-section"
They're claiming mole rats never get that final climb - in fact as they get really old the odds of dying actually *diminish*. That means that the older a mole rat gets, the better its odds are of still being alive in 10 years time.
I think the menopause thing is a red herring - only three mammalian species are known to experience menopause: humans, orcas, and pilot whales. Never experiencing menopause is the default assumption for mammals.
Similarly, I don't think weak hearts, etc. are a factor - anything like that would increase your risk of mortality as you age. Along with anything else that could be categorized as "wearing out" - cancer (cellular mutation "clean up" wears out), organ disease of any kind (scar tissue, etc. builds up over a lifetime of minor problems), etc. Basically, if anything whatsoever wears out, then it will have a greater chance of killing you at age 80 than at age 10. And they're not seeing that in mole rats - assuming their observations are correct, a 20 or 30 year old year old mole rat is no more likely to die in the next ten years than a six month old one. In fact, their risk of death actually drops slightly as they get older.
So, honest question: why haven't you committed suicide yet, if you so strongly believe that you, and everything else in the universe, are completely worthless?
Having enough space is not the problem - the problem is having too much space, so that the finite amount of mass-energy in the universe gets spread too thin to support complex structures.
Also, if you have black holes then heat-death hasn't struck yet - they're still complex structure. But don't worry, they'll evaporate eventually, and then, when the last black holes have evaporated, heat-death will finally be complete.
And then, eventually, maybe, just the right quantum wrinkle will appear to spawn another big bang and spontaneously repopulate the universe - opinions vary on that question.
Yeah, because clicking the wrong button *once* in a horribly designed user interface is totally a fireable offense where you work, right?
1.9 pills per day, per person. Better lay off the pills when you're doing math.
CO2 - yes, the pressure is incredibly low, but it's everywhere, and we have this little thing called a vacuum pump designed specifically for creating the pressure gradients needed to bring it into a pressurized environment.
H2O - actually, yes we do. We have clear evidence of water ice at the poles, and pretty strong evidence for subterranean deposits in a few other specific locations. It may be heavily contaminated, but melt it, filter it, and maybe distill it and you've got all the usable water you could want.
However, the government offices will still want internet, so *somebody* will be providing it - and now who do you suppose will be the ones getting more favorable consideration in future legislation and other government dealings?
Plus the sate of Montana is responsible for over 5% of employment in the state - that's a lot of well-distributed business to just hand over to your competitors. Especially if nobody in the oligopoly wants to play ball - then some little upstart is suddenly going to be getting really favorable pole leases, etc. from the state to deploy the necessary infrastructure.
Yep, that's the impression I got - one of the reasons I didn't stay long - I'd rather spend most my time making new and useful tools than constantly learning how to use the new tools in my toolbox, even if they really are superior to the old ones.
Still, they've obviously got enough of a developer base willing to jump through those hoops to let them get away with it, and it's probably letting them evolve much faster than they otherwise would. Almost Linux-like in a way, with new better technologies constantly replacing old ones to the frustration of many - only controlled by a single golden fist instead of an ecosystem of distros. I kind of suspect they have a lot more developers for their platform than any Linux stack though. Maybe even more good ones.
Actually, it was a great success - they had a couple of *major* problems with the first experiment (especially unexpected CO2 loss to the concrete), but were able to make it through by the skin of their teeth - though admittedly it was pure stubbornness that kept them going to the end of the mission. And I seem to recall a lot of people problems as well. Basically the problem (beyond the unexpected) was they had too many people for the size of the ecosystem - and not enough people for healthy social interactions - things were basically working, just not quite well enough to quite cut it.
There's also been at least a couple long-term Russian experiments using switchgrass and the like for atmosphere recycling, though I believe they ate stored rations. And I think I've heard of a few others, though I can't recall any details.
An actual colony could address the problems relatively easily - you have a decent population of at least several dozen people and growing, and eat mostly imported food for the first few years as the gardens expand, which they will do as fast as you can manage since there's no need to keep plant life in balance with animals when you have an unlimited supply of CO2 right outside. You make absolutely no attempt to maintain a sealed environment - you import resources and dispose of waste as needed - and the most vital bulk ecological resources, CO2 and H2O, are in plentiful local supply.
Life will certainly survive, but civilization may well collapse is the face of such unprecedented challenges - it's collapsed many times before in the face of much smaller ones. In which case an outpost of high technology could eventually be quite valuable in rebuilding.
Research outposts is indeed one of the more likely starts, though "outpost capable of surviving" is the first step even there. Not much point in doing anything from orbit though - it's not like you'll be sitting outside sunbathing in that toxic sand in your skivies - not in near vacuum and subfreezing temperatures. You'll need to make the effort not to track too much into your habitat of course, to keep it below toxic concentrations, and will have to neutralize it before you can mix it into your garden soil, but from what I can find it's not a massive threat in trace amounts. Not compared to the sorts of high radiation exposure you'd get in orbit (far worse than the ISS, since Mars has no appreciable magnetosphere to protect them). Hypothyroidism might kill the early colonists eventually - but in the early days of colonizing a alien world, there's a lot of much more immediate threats.
And sadly terraforming is largely irrelevant to colonization - you're generally talking at least thousands of years to accomplish anything substantial on that front through any plausible mechanism thus far conceived. By the time the 50-times-great-grandchildren of the people who started the process finally start seeing appreciable results, they will have long since been able to easily colonize the barren environment. It's the sort of project that mostly makes sense if you're making your world a better place for the future, or have a relatively cheap "fire and forget" plan and grand dreams for humanity's distant future.
I think that's part of the reason people like Musk want to rush the game - throw lives and resources at the problem while we still have them in abundance to spend. This next century could start getting pretty grim, and even a minimally self-sufficient Mars colony could serve as a repository of life and knowledge to help rebuild.
Life might get pretty grim for a while if supplies from Earth got cut off before they were really ready, but it's unlikely much would impact them any more directly. As long as they had enough infrastructure to make do they might end up better off than they would have been on Earth.
Probably - that's historically pretty likely with expensive colonization projects: Company towns where the appointed governor had extreme power so long as he stayed in the good graces of his superiors back home.
That may prove to be the case, but what little we do know suggests otherwise. All we know for sure at this point is that it works fine on Earth (where gravity varies a bit more than 0.5%), and that "Space flight studies of pregnant mammals have shown a significant reduction in pregnancy weight gain, prolonged parturition, lower birth weights, and increased perinatal mortality" (as quoted in section 7 of your linked article), from which we can reasonably conclude that something about the combination of microgravity and constant high energy radiation bombardment is hostile to embryo development.
We have zero data on any intermediate states - nobody has done orbital centrifuge experiments to simulate partial gravity, nor heavily shielded experiments to reduce radiation closer exposure to planetary levels. So far as I know we haven't even done any centrifuge research here on Earth to at least get some high-G datapoints to let us try to extrapolate possible curve shapes.
And frankly, I don't know that it really matters. As long as the birth rate isn't *too* low, or developmental complications too severe, all you've done is created a society with ubiquitous moderately effective birth control, a necessarily high tolerance for miscarriage, and a high demand for intensive neonatal care.
And if the problems *are* too severe, then you do what so many classic works of SF have suggested - you make "maternity rings": well-shielded centrifuges at least big enough to eliminate any Coriolis-related problems, potentially large enough to be fully-contained resorts, where expectant mothers spend whatever amount of time is necessary. Planetside it could be essentially a long underground train perpetually racing in circles (probably tethered to a central point to reduce lateral stresses on the track foundation). In space it would probably look a bit more like some kind of centrifugal space station inside an appropriately hollowed asteroid - pretty much where you'd want to live anyway.
At worst, if access is restrictively expensive, then you've introduced a relatively effective and compassionate way to reduce poor people breeding. Which would likely have all sorts of strange social impacts, but wouldn't directly threaten the society's viability. If it did, then the folks at the top have incentive to offer "scholarships", lotteries, etc. to encourage more pregnancies. Genetics-based "pregnacyships" would certainly make for a fairly friendly form of eugenics.
Exactly what tech are you thinking of that's conspicuously missing, beyond the rockets themselves? Sealed terrariums have been done for decades, and on Mars you have unlimited CO2 and water to let the plants outpace the animals and fuel expansion. I seem to recall that we've already worked out concrete based on simulated-Mars sand, and gas-impermeable sealants are not difficult, and can even be made from waste cellulose with the right equipment, so habitat domes shouldn't be too much of a problem. Airlocks, space suits, computers, etc. will need to be imported until local infrastructure has become sufficiently industrialized, but that's always been the case with new colonies.
It could certainly be done a lot more safely, and probably cheaply, if we waited to develop a fleet of technologies with limited if any use on Earth while rocketry continued to be refined - but that's been true of most every colonization ever done. A lot fewer people would have died colonizing the Americas if they had waited another 30,000 years until they had iron-age tools, but that wouldn't have accomplished anything for the people in the intervening millenia.
Where do you see any support for Jobs? I always disliked him and consider his "look at the shinies" brand of evil preferable only to Microsoft's mafia-esque behavior. And used Windows anyways because that's where all the decent software was, and Macs were way too focused on shiny at the expense of interface functionality.