Mars has more fresh water than Earth does. Most of it is frozen, but thawing it shouldn't prove impossible.
> Are there really millions of people who would sign up for the world's most expensive method of committing suicide?
I don't understand this. Are you committing suicide right now, by living out your life on Earth? You're here on Earth and you're going to die here. Does that mean you've committed suicide? How is that any different from people living indoors on Mars? Sure, they may die there. But people die here too. It's not suicide, it's a way of life that people will choose.
Also, you are incorrect in your silly assumption that life will be harsh for the millions that arrive - it seems much more likely that we could send robots to build the infrastructure while the first few land, making small cities, etc, and otherwise preparing for the mass arrival.
Yes, there are millions that would want to go. I've been thinking about this for more than a decade and I am desperate to go live on Mars when it becomes possible.
Antarctica has more fresh water than the rest of Earth too, and on top of that it's twice as warm as the Martian poles, far more accessible and even has a breathable atmosphere — but there aren't millions of people there either, and it's still considered a very harsh environment. In fact, even the people who live in Antarctica tend to avoid it in the winter.
> Also, you are incorrect in your silly assumption that life will be harsh for the millions that arrive - it seems much more likely that we could send robots to build the infrastructure while the first few land, making small cities, etc, and otherwise preparing for the mass arrival.
AFAIK, this is not literally impossible, but is way beyond our technological ability right now. If you mean a couple of centuries from now, yeah, maybe. But do we even have any proof-of-concept cities built entirely by robots on earth? (And keep in mind that to really reflect Martian conditions, they'd have to be thermally insulated cities that produce their own energy without any geothermal or hydraulic input and very little solar input and which have independent air supplies — but any cities built by robots would surprise me.)
The advantage of Mars IMO is that it gets all our eggs out of the Earth basket. I'm not pessimistic about our future, but it would definitely be nice to not be living on a single point of failure in the event of a nuclear war, asteroid impact, pandemic, et al. This, I believe is Elon's reasoning as well. However, I don't understand as yet why he's choosing Mars over the Moon. I've heard him say both are good candidates but he's obviously shooting for the former. I suppose the nuclear doomsday scenario would a little more possible to take out both the Moon and Earth. Also life on Earth depends on the Moon for the tides etc... I wonder if he's trying to distance the baskets so to speak.
I definitely agree in principle, but on the other hand, it's really hard to imagine an event that would render Earth less hospitable than Mars. In general, these catastrophes would just make Earth more like Mars.
Nuclear war? Mars is a desolate wasteland that's bombarded with ionizing radiation from space (because it lacks both a sufficient atmosphere and a magnetic field to protect it).
Asteroid impact? Unless it eliminates all of our atmospheric oxygen, ozone, hydrogen and nitrogen and drops the average surface temperature to -55°C, we're still better off here.
Pandemic? If we can protect a colony from the environment of Mars, we should be able to keep at least that many people safe from a pandemic. (Just stick your Mars-bubble in Antarctica if nothing else. It's a lot like Mars except it has better temperatures, an atmosphere that you can breathe if you need to and the water is more readily available.)
All of that's true in the short term, but if we do end up getting millions of people sustainably living on Mars, these specific catastrophes would be less devastating to the human race as a whole.
I have to say that motivating with fear puts red flags up in my mind as I'm sure it does with the rest of the crowd here. If I were a politician, I'd see the mission to colonize space as an effective way to unite the world behind a single goal. Since I'm not, I have a different view which is that AI has the greatest potential to solve humanity's problems. But that's another discussion.
You could replace 98% of the earths atmosphere with Methane and it would still be more habitable than Mars. (The only way methane would make it worse is if you turned the atmosphere into a fuel air bomb and a few weeks after the detonation it would one again be more habitable.)
Well, I was referring to the hypothesis that the release of previously sequestered methane caused the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event where 96% of marine species and 70% of land species died [1]. I think it's fair to say that a poisonous atmosphere is less habitable than no atmosphere.
Exposure to the Martian environment would kill 100% of species that we know of. If that has happened on earth before, we can say pretty definitively that elevated levels of methane are less harmful.
Earth's is 101,000 Pa dropping to 30,000 on top of mount Everest. Mars's mean surface pressure is around 600 pascals which is below waters triple point which prevents water from forming regardless of temperature. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triple_point Still that's close and in some creators the pressure increases high enough so it's possible for water to form.
Unfortunately, on top of that what makes the atmosphere truly deadly is a lack of Nitrogen one of the primary building blocks for organic chemistry.
It's essentially impossible to own property in Antarctica, and very difficult to set up any sort of business there. Despite that thousands of people still visit Antarctica every year.
Antarctica is not on a diffrent Plant. Lifing there will not earn you a place in human history.
I think a lot of stuff can be send to mars in the beginning. It should not be to hard to build a big house in a couple of parts and stick them together on mars.
Even if we assume that you can send a whole house to Mars for free, your house needs to solidly insulated from the cold and the radiation, it needs to somehow produce air and it needs to somehow produce energy without most of the energy sources we use on Earth (fossil fuels, solar, geothermal, hydro, wind). The latter two are very hard problems. If you can sustainably create breathable air and energy practically ex nihilo, that is a much bigger achievement than getting to Mars.
I was making a general point. I didn't agree with the 50 years thing. It probebly want be posible in 50 years but then again if we are not going to trie we can be sure it want work in 50 years. Just like with the 10 years to the moon thing.
Your comment is singularly unenlightening. I'm just saying that Musk's comments create unreasonable expectations. If you materially disagree, this kind of sarcasm does nothing to express what you think is wrong. If you don't actually disagree, then you're just kind of being rude, aren't you?
> Are there really millions of people who would sign up for the world's most expensive method of committing suicide?
I don't understand this. Are you committing suicide right now, by living out your life on Earth? You're here on Earth and you're going to die here. Does that mean you've committed suicide? How is that any different from people living indoors on Mars? Sure, they may die there. But people die here too. It's not suicide, it's a way of life that people will choose.
Also, you are incorrect in your silly assumption that life will be harsh for the millions that arrive - it seems much more likely that we could send robots to build the infrastructure while the first few land, making small cities, etc, and otherwise preparing for the mass arrival.
Yes, there are millions that would want to go. I've been thinking about this for more than a decade and I am desperate to go live on Mars when it becomes possible.