> The world is run by people who seriously think that we’ll have the means soon to terraform Mars (we won’t) This is the straw-man I was complaining about. He

> The world is run by people who seriously think that we’ll have the means soon to terraform Mars (we won’t) This is the straw-man I was complaining about. Here's a direct quote from Musk, saying the exact opposite ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1329205209915154433 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1329205209915154433 ) "Terraforming will be too slow to be relevant in our lifetime. However, we can establish a human base there in our lifetime." > or at least put a million people there That's an incredibly different question (see the sibling comment about Motte and Bailey fallacies). A million people on Mars seems plausible, if we take "soon" to mean a century or two (Musk seems to have an incredibly optimisitic goal of 2050, but that still seems the right order of magnitude)