SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
...
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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 19 2020, @02:56PM
Understanding "Why?" should drive the choice of many folks to send first.
There's a list above that may miss the point of why?
(Primary reasons overpopulation underemployment, etc)
I think the starting point is that humans learn a lot like other animals by trying random stuff and occasionally getting lucky.
It's probably in our genes, perhaps from hunter/gather?
Sometimes we can think thru a situation and find a solution, but for really new stuff dumb luck seems a primary algorithm.
That makes exploration a key driver. We want to go to new places because we are driven to go learn something useful.
There are examples where this drive can be stronger than hunger.
I think the top reasons for doing this are more like:
1) Exploration - to see what's there
2) Challenge - because we can
3) Exploitation - we found something there we need here
4) Colonization - we want a new place to call our own
Given the history of space exploration, it would be hard to say that there is not a bit of this well
0) Sell the dream - because we can make profit here by getting folks to dream of going there
Historically, a nation state has been able to get to step 3, but to get to deeply into step 3 and to 4 requires crowdsourcing.
That required some sort of individual incentive more than exploration or challenge.
I don't see this in the talk of 100k?