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CNet:
The first aren't even built yet, but [Elon Musk] already has big plans for his company's spacecraft, which includes turning humans into an interplanetary species with a presence on Mars. He crunched some of the numbers he has in mind on Twitter on Thursday.
Musk doesn't just want to launch a few intrepid souls to Mars, he wants to send a whole new nation. He tossed out a goal of building 100 Starships per year to send about 100,000 people from Earth to Mars every time the planets' orbits line up favorably.
A Twitter user ran the figures and checked if Musk planned to land a million humans on Mars by 2050. "Yes," . The SpaceX CEO has suggested this sort of . This new round of tweets give us some more insight into how it could be done, though "ambitious" doesn't do that timeline justice. Miraculous might be a more fitting description.
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fans, rejoice. there will be plenty of jobs on Mars. When asked how people would be selected for the Red Planet move, , "Needs to be such that anyone can go if they want, with loans available for those who don't have money." So perhaps you could pay off your SpaceX loans with a sweet terraforming gig.
Terraforming the planet should be easy if Quaid can get past Cohagen and start the reactor.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday January 18 2020, @07:16PM (5 children)
No, you have a bad economic measure. You haven't acknowledged fully reusable rockets, and until you do that, your predictions will be flat wrong. And if you want to give me the "it won't work" line, then it doesn't matter because it is a prerequisite for all of Musk's Mars plans. No fully reusable rockets means no hundreds or thousands of ships being sent to Mars.
If there isn't significant population growth at the Mars colony, there is no reason that it will have to collapse. Basic needs like food can be met on Mars, and a few shipments of electronics or other luxuries will not be prohibitively expensive. Slavery doesn't make sense because in this time frame, you have to worry about robots taking all the jobs. On Earth, slavery could become an aspiration. People will be begging to become live-in sex slaves.
Thank you for your consideration.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18 2020, @08:01PM (1 child)
Humans with best brains will stay on Earth. Mars will be a remote, expensive colony with little purpose, high risk and only basic medicine.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday January 18 2020, @08:15PM
Find everyone with a wingsuit [wikipedia.org] and send them.
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Saturday January 18 2020, @08:37PM (2 children)
I cannot acknowledge unproven and nonexistent technology. Just look at the costs of submarines, naval carriers or late combat fighters. Life support and logistics in space is comparable to that in those machines. That's in order of magnitude required for space economy, not just some particular cargo lifter.
I tell you what Musk is really doing: it's a Ponzi scheme. That's why he is asking naive people for money. We call that letadlo (aircraft), for a historic reason. Tulips all the way up. He will get lot of money, for sure.
Respect Authorities. Know your social status. Woke responsibly.
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Saturday January 18 2020, @09:10PM
Your smackdown will come soon, yokai heretic.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 19 2020, @03:20PM
So what? I think we have already figured out how to turn unproven and nonexistent technology into proven, existing technology, particularly, when we're already most of the way there. Let's go over the list of takyon's and your moderately speculative technologies:
SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy already are close enough to fully reusable to count - the primary obstacles are economic at this point, finding enough demand to reduce launch costs further and increasing the size of the rocket somewhat to exploit payload size as an economy of scale. And having demonstrated that SpaceX can develop advanced rockets, means they are likely to be able to make the necessary improvements even if their present project turns out too ambitious.
Growing food is not a big deal. We already know that every nutrient that plants (and us!) need is present on Mars. Past that, plants need the usual stuff, and nontoxic soil. It might be tricky to provide all that, but it's something we've mostly already figured out.
We don't need robots capable of "replacing all the jobs", that just makes creating and maintaining the logistics easier and cheaper. And we already have robots that have already made things easier, such as more efficient manufacturing processes that reduce the cost and weight of the Falcon 9 cores (the first stage of the rocket which is also the basic building block of the Falcon Heavy).
Life support and logistics in space? Been there. Done that. We've figured out how to keep people alive for more than long enough to get to Mars and we have variations of greenhouses that could provide the basic life support to keep them alive for years. Same with logistics. It's just not that hard compared to Earth-side stuff like keeping Walmarts stocked in real time.