+1. Greg Egan's novels Permutation City and Diaspora actually explore this very well. I am not opposed to space exploration and generally support SpaceX but re

+1. Greg Egan's novels Permutation City and Diaspora actually explore this very well. I am not opposed to space exploration and generally support SpaceX but reading about doing 100,000 launches makes me slightly wary, especially with our track record on climate and Musk's general penchant for breaking laws. Unless we develop anti-gravity or something which would make space travel energy-equivalent to flight travel, I don't know how you would ever scale this without wrecking the environment. Reading between the lines, you get a sense that the average citizen should be "willing to take the hit for the greater good". Yeah, right. Musk has an immense amount of goodwill today and for good reason but I don't imagine this will play well with any crowd. Even assuming that Musks's Marsshot comes through and a Mars colony is established in 50 years (which would be optimistic going by the current pace of development), what are the odds that I (or the average SWE on HN, let alone average human) would ever end up on Mars? I imagine a 70-80 year old is probably not very high on the (tentative)waitlist? It is looking more and more likely that Earth's climate and politics would necessarily have to take a backseat if we were to go all in on Mars. I see the wisdom in Kim Stanley Robinson's opinion that fixing Earth climate/politics should take priority. I am in support of AGI research and biotech. Training even GPT-scale models is not really comparable to rocket launching. If it is possible to clone yourself to a digital form, or even train an NN model to think like yourself, there may be a way for the average denizen to get to Mars and extend one's life while keeping energy consumption low.