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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: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 18 2020, @08:15PM
The only alternative is to go full China. There are too many myopic people for a western-style democracy to ever accomplish great projects now a days. Even just getting to the moon we're forced to pander to identity politics rather than the technological/scientific/human merit. You can spend a trillion bucks blowing up the Mideast, but spend a hundred billion on Space and you'll get attention seeking fools ranting above starving babies in Africa. So instead of focusing on real and meaningful reasons, we're focusing on putting somebody with a vagina on the moon. And once that's happened and people get bored of it on social media a week or two later, people will be right back to starving babies in Africa. Yay democracy.
Yet even 'full China' only works so long as they maintain a technocratic leadership. There's a surprisingly thin line between ideologies that get man colonizing Mars and ideologies that suggest trying to killing all a nation's sparrows to improve grain yields. That's part of the reason that I think decentralization, while much less efficient than centralized authority in the short run, is probably more reliable in the longrun. Same reason I'm a fan of a multi-polar world. Basically capitalism sucks, but it beats every alternative.