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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, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @01:57PM
Let me turn your ideas back to you. Given the state of the earth right now, do you really think humanity is on track to have workable solutions to our political and economic systems, our corruption, our oligarchy, within the next century? Within the next five centuries? I'm not optimistic.
So one could make an argument that it makes more sense to populate the solar system as soon as it's practical, because spreading out the species gives us more time to figure out how to not suck before we wipe ourselves out.
Don't get me wrong, I do share your frustration. The cost of Musk's Mars colonization plan could probably cure cancer world-wide and end poverty on a third of the globe. Sure, I would rather see that happen first and space colonization much later. But for example the United States net national wealth is above 50 trillion dollars and our annual GDP is above 15 trillion. We already have all the resources we need to cure every one of humanity's problems. The problem isn't a lack of resources, the problem is humanity itself.