Colonization efforts off Earth can't be gradual. There is a baseline infrastructure necessary for people to live. There are no readily available resources on Ma

Colonization efforts off Earth can't be gradual. There is a baseline infrastructure necessary for people to live. There are no readily available resources on Mars that exist like they do on Earth. There's no safe places for people on the planet. Everything people need to survive needs to be brought from Earth. Every aspect of life on Mars needs to be bootstrapped from absolutely nothing. There's no working models for any of that on Earth. That means it all needs to be designed, built, tested, and iterated upon before a single person boards a SpaceX Starship. Even with Elon Musk's billions that is a vast expense. Even if it was all built, it's billions spent to send people to Mars to simply not die in case a nuclear war wiped out Earth. It's not pessimistic to point this out, it's realistic. Dreaming about colonizing Mars and hand waving away every practical consideration is just fruitless fantasizing. It's not a plan. It doesn't actually move towards a colony anywhere. The opportunity cost is billions of dollars and a lot of engineering effort not spent on solutions to more immediate problems that might benefit more people. Musk talking about colonizing Mars is 90% PR for SpaceX and 10% ego stroking. If SpaceX could build a Starship a week to send people to Mars it would be Musk's friends and billionaires and millionaires. I doubt there's more than a car load of people that work at SpaceX that would be able to afford a Mars ticket. I can't fawn breathlessly over a billionaire describing his fantasy of leaving all us poors to rot on a planet his fellow billionaires ruined.