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Musk has suggested that a Mars colony is most viable if you can sell tickets at a market price of about $500,000. Or rather, that a mid-to-upper class family in

• overcast 11y ago
  Yes, but who in their right mind would choose to leave beautiful California, to live in desolation on Mars? Sure it's important to explore new worlds, but expecting a family to pack up and leave this world for one with absolutely nothing sounds a bit far fetched.
  • cryptoz 11y ago
    Well, I for one am extremely excited to go! I live in beautiful California right now, and I'm soaking it all up while I'm here just in case I get the chance to move to Mars. And I'm sure that the percentage of the population who'd want to go is small - but it's big enough to start a colony, that's for sure.
    • overcast 11y ago
      You're crazy man! Also, while that percentage is extremely small, the percentage that actually will qualify has to be insanely small. I'm sure everyone headed there is going to be subjected to rigorous testing, they aren't just going to ship off anyone.
    • prodmerc 11y ago
      I wonder how long it would take for you to realize you really miss Earth? Knowing you'll be confined to a closed space for years (assuming no return capabilities on the initial mission), even the awesome research you'd be doing will probably start to look very bleak. Just send robots and control them from Earth...
      • cryptoz 11y ago
        I'm sure I will miss Earth before we even leave Earth orbit! But that won't make me want to go to Mars any less. > Just send robots and control them from Earth... This idea makes me feel isolated and sad. What a dystopian future that would be, with everybody sitting on a single planet at risk of disease, nuclear war, asteroid impacts, global-scale climate change, all without a care, while you look into your VR headset and see the realistic landscapes of other planets. So sad :( I'll take Mars any day over that. And I'm also confident that return trips will be frequent if anyone wants to leave - that's the whole point of reusable rockets, afterall.
        • james-watson 11y ago
          I cannot tell if you are serious, or seriously trolling. >What a dystopian future that would be, with everybody sitting on a single planet at risk of disease, nuclear war, asteroid impacts, global-scale climate change, all without a care, while you look into your VR headset and see the realistic landscapes of other planets. Have you done any reading on the habitability of Mars? I will guarantee that once you truly comprehend what life on Mars will entail, you will be BEGGING for the luxuries of disease, nuclear war, climate change, and all the other great things that life on Earth bring. Mars is a brutal, senseless struggle against a guaranteed DEATH. I recommend going to live in Antartica first, and see how long you can last there. Followed by building a capsule on top of Everest. Then by living in the ISS. Then by living on the Moon. ONLY THEN, would you have any idea of what Mars living will be like. But alas, even then it will be far, FAR more challenging than living on the Moon. The transit time between the Earth and the Moon is childish compared to Earth and Mars. Once you're on Mars, there will be no coming back for a LONG time. I'll take my VR tour of Mars any day, thank you.
  • XorNot 11y ago
    Real estate prices on an otherwise empty planet agree probably pretty cheap, and the lack of atmosphere would be an excellent crime deterrant.
    • kybernetikos 11y ago
      Easier to dome a gated community on earth and pump the air out of it.
  • vidarh 11y ago
    That is why the number he gave is a paltry 80,000 instead of millions. The assumption is a really tiny portion can afford it, and a really tiny portion of those again will want to move there or visit. But there's a lot of people in the world, and people have willingly settled in a lot of desolate, horrible places.
    • overcast 11y ago
      There is nothing as comparably desolate, and horrible on Earth. There is nothing to sustain life, at all. Even in the most punishing Earth environments, people find ways to survive for the simple fact that basic necessities still exist. Mars has none of them, namely air.
      • vidarh 11y ago
        but Mars has something else: It's a different planet. It is unsettled. It has vast, empty spaces. For some that desolation is part of the appeal. For others the challenges. For others the opportunity to be pioneers. Finding volunteers for colonisation won't be a problem.
      • brianwawok 11y ago
        Deep ocean trenches are as bad or worse as the surface of mars. Inside the core of the Earth seems as bad or worse.
        • overcast 11y ago
          I don't see humans volunteering to live in those places either. Deep ocean at least has some way to sustain life. Mars has NOTHING.
  • lsaferite 11y ago
    Well, families with children make things a bit less likely, but I 100% would be on a list to go if I was childless. Even knowing it was a one way trip. Life is already short and if you cannot do something truly meaningful (subject to personal interpretation), then what are you doing with your life? Meaningful to me happens to include space exploration. Having had kids that list also includes raising my part of the next generation to be good members of the human race.
    • derekp7 11y ago
      The thing is, when you get there you are essentially living in a small prison cell. At least until there is enough infrastructure to move around in. But your activities are still limited to about what you can do sitting in a little room in front of a computer. Just thinking about some small things, such as going swimming, or riding a bicycle on a path through the woods. Or hiking / camping, or driving a sports car along a twisty mountain road.
      • MaulingMonkey 11y ago
        > But your activities are still limited to about what you can do sitting in a little room in front of a computer. Which sounds fine until you remember you'll have a ping in the realm of 4-24 minutes. And you thought you had trouble matchmaking in some games now...
      • fudged71 11y ago
        >you are essentially living in a small prison cell. [...] But your activities are still limited to about what you can do sitting in a little room in front of a computer. Honestly the VR scenario here isn't so bad and you get exercise from it too :) What young rich kid wouldn't want to play video games and colonize a new planet?!
    • brianwawok 11y ago
      I think cruising around space on the Enterprise is pretty meaningful life. But how would a more realistic living 20 years on Mars in a 100x100 foot dome do the same? The exploration part would wear off after maybe 2 weeks.
  • wrsh07 11y ago
    People like building new things. Maybe not all people, but there's a type. Besides, Musk can offer free trips back trivially. [see WaitButWhy's extraordinarily long post about SpaceX]
• FatalLogic 11y ago
  >that a mid-to-upper class family in California might decide to move to Mars instead of buying a house on Earth I don't know the details of what he suggested, but, when we talk about 'families' I think most parents would hesitate to subject their children to the rigors and risks of an early-stage Mars colony, even thought they might be keen themselves. Retirees, the childless, and people without plans to have kids soon would be a safer bet for early colonists
  • ifdefdebug 11y ago
    I'm not sure. If that was true, colonization of America by Europeans would not have succeeded. If they succeed to put up some bases and a workable, extensible agriculture (honestly I doubt I will see that within my life time), colonists will come - and bring in or have their children there.
  • kitsunesoba 11y ago
    This is kind of my line of thought. I wouldn't go today, but a couple decades from now once I've had kids and they're grown up? Sure, why not.
  • rwallace 11y ago
    If you don't have children, then you don't have a colony. At best, you might have a pathfinding expedition intended to prepare for a future colony, but then there's a case to be made that the money and time might be better spent improving various supporting technologies.
• grondilu 11y ago
  > How much value has America created since it was a colony? The comparison to America is terrible, if you ask me. If the american continent was looking anything like Mars, people would have never settled there and the value you're talking about would be very close to zero. If seems dishonest to me to compare mars with the American continent, especially considering that if we want to compare mars with the discovery of a whole continent, there is one that looks much more like mars : Antarctica. There is no record whatsoever of any long-term human occupation there. That has to prove that humans tend to dislike living in cold deserts. By comparison, the american continent has been inhabited for thousands of years, and its discovery by Europeans has brought many extremely appreciated plants and animals. What is there to bring from mars that there is not on Earth already? Apart from vast areas of rusted rocks and dust, not much, except perhaps for the possibility of fulfilling the fantasy of people who have read or watched too much science-fiction. I mean, a settlement on mars can have value, but it will only be the value that you'll bring there. For instance if you build an hotel or casino there (as I personally believe tourism is one of the very few business models that make sense for mars), then the fact that it is on mars will not bring much more value than the intrinsic value of your hotel or casino itself.
  • InclinedPlane 11y ago
    > "I mean, a settlement on mars can have value, but it will only be the value that you'll bring there." This is actually true for most countries. America's economic strength lies in the fact that it creates software, micro-chips, manufactured goods, entertainment, etc. Tell me, where in the ground do you dig up a micro-processor? Or a hollywood blockbuster? Or a Tesla Model S? Or the source code for google's search engine? Economic value is primarily created by human activity. Once there is human activity on Mars there is the potential for economic value there. And once human activity on Mars is relatively self-sustaining, which we can achieve through building up the local industry combined with certain technological innovations, then that human activity will indeed provide things of net positive value to the rest of human civilization. It seems so hard now, but in fifty or a hundred years we'll look back and it'll just seem normal and possibly even natural. We tend to discount the truly incredible and jaw dropping amount of labor and ingenuity that has gone into building the prosaic world we see out the window every day. Even something like providing water to New York City is itself a herculean effort beyond the capability of even the entire human race only a few centuries ago. What we've done to network the world together digitally, to build engines of mass trade of manufactured goods across and between continents, to travel across land/sea/air from point to point with minimal overhead beyond the raw requirements imposed by the laws of physics, all of these things are awe inspiring creations when you give yourself the opportunity to look at them in whole. And many of them are vastly more difficult and in some cases more questionably of long term value than colonizing Mars.
• jameshart 11y ago
  You'd need to be able to raise that as cash; you're going to have trouble persuading a bank to give you a mortgage for a $500,000 stake in a mars expedition.
  • cullenking 11y ago
    If the Portland real estate market is any indication, there are countless more people than you'd ever expect to be able to come up with $500k in cash.
    • MichaelGG 11y ago
      Can you explain this? Are banks not lending in Portland? Or the down payment is $500K? (Like 10% on a $5M loan?)
      • cullenking 11y ago
        The Portland real estate market is extremely hot right now, and you can't get a decent house in a decent (or even not decent but "up and coming" neighborhoods) without an all cash offer, or way over asking price. Every friend that has been through the market in the last year has been beaten out of multiple bidding wars by all cash, no inspection offers 10+ % over asking price. Lots of bay area money moving up to PDX, tons of satellite offices opening up for tech companies, it's a big cultural shift that's happening pretty fast.
    • jameshart 11y ago
      What's the future earning potential of a mars settler?
• gozur88 11y ago
  But we don't have the technology for a self sufficient mars colony. We're not even close. Anything we put there is going to have to be expensively supported from Earth. What will you do if you're on Mars and the company that supplies you food, spare parts, and medical supplies goes out of business? The Americas worked as colonies because they could become self sufficient in a very short period of time and had enormous quantities of valuable resources. The trees alone were priceless to the parent countries where every tree was spoken for. Even then some of the colonies failed. What does Mars have that you couldn't obtain more cheaply on Earth?
• JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  To be fair, lets compare a colony on Mars with, say, a colony on top of Mt Everest. Little or no oxygen; massively inhospitable environment; staggeringly difficult to get there or get cargo there; radiation hazard due to thin atmosphere; negligible resources once you arrive. Except, of course, that Mt Everest would be childs play compared to Mars.