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Mars One demonstrated the demand. An immigration ticket to Mars costing $500k to $1M would be profitable for SpaceX, and there are probably 100k - 1M people wor

Mars One demonstrated the demand. An immigration ticket to Mars costing $500k to $1M would be profitable for SpaceX, and there are probably 100k - 1M people worldwide willing and able to do that. If this seems crazy to you, well you’re just not in the target market.

yread 2y ago
There are 1 million people who have $1M of spare cash who want a one way ticket to Mars and die there? Why?
- adastra22 2y ago
  There are too many bad assumptions baked into that question to attempt a meaningful answer. I don’t even know if you’re being serious or taking the piss.
  - saagarjha 2y ago
    What's the bad assumption in that question? Is the ticket going to come with a cure for aging too?
    - adastra22 2y ago
      1. If you’re going on a one-way ticket to another planet, you don’t need $1m in spare cash. You just need everything you own (house included) to sum to $1m, which is an easier hurdle for an early career engineer, and Mars will want young engineers. In actuality you probably just need a down payment and premiums for an insurance contract. Costs could be closer to $100k. 2. Trips will be two-way with an included but unscheduled return ticket. Orbital dynamics make this not expensive to do. People who take advantage of that and who got part of their trip out on credit would find themselves deeply burdened in debt, but survivable. The gamble being made (and hedged with insurance) is that most colonists would stay. 3. “and die on Mars” can be literally interpreted as old age, but given the aggressive responses in this thread the underlying assumption I believed was that they’d die from lack of food/water/air, too much radiation, life support failure, etc. in other words the “mars is harder than you think and the colonists will die” tired assumption. In reality ISS research has demonstrated what is required to keep humans alive and healthy, and literal decades of preparation has been done on designs for early bases that exploit local resources to reduce external dependency. If you’re actually interested in this, Zubrin’s The Case for Space is a good introduction.
piva00 2y ago
Mars One is a cute prospect when it's just a dream, once reality sets and those people realise that the novelty of being in an inhospitable place, millions of kilometres away from any semblance of a life (air, water, food, nature, hobbies, loved ones, etc.) wouldn't be a good choice to live for 20-50 years I highly doubt that even 1% of those millionaires would still choose to be shipped off.
- adastra22 2y ago
  You’re projecting. A significant number will want to go BECAUSE OF the hardship. Frontier mentality.
  - piva00 2y ago
    You're mixing explorers with frontier mentality. When life was hard and the prospect of getting to new land on a frontier to potentially improve your (and most of the time your family's) life, it gave people very potential tangible benefits to go there against the risks. Going to Mars, a deserted place where living a bare life is only ever possible if a lot of life support infrastructure in small pods is running 24/7 without a hitch. Where there is no direct benefit in terms of human accumulation, not at least for a few generations. Which millionaire living a good life on Earth would consciously choose living in a cramped pod with strangers for the rest of their life, to look out onto a Red Desert of nothingness every day? The novelty of doing a short walk around will disappear fast, the motivation of "let's build a city here" would be 100% dependent on the provisions sent by Earth, and there would be no end in sight for your life in little pods while you toil away Martian soil, lose muscles, have to consume a diet of potatoes, while at any time if your life support systems fail you and everyone else you might bonded with are done. Explorers without much to lose on Earth might embark on this, millionaires living a cushy life not so much.
    - adastra22 2y ago
      Just because it’s not for you doesn’t mean there aren’t people who have dreamed their whole life of doing this and would sell everything they own to pay their way if given the opportunity.
tsimionescu 2y ago
No, there are not. There are people willing to spend money on this illusion, but the vast majority are not actually going to do it. Their best case scenario is that this never becomes attainable, and they can just remain with the image that they are supporting something like this.
- adastra22 2y ago
  Where you so convinced these people don’t exist? They do. They organize annual conferences. They spend their free time posting incessantly in the nasaspaceflight forums. It is a subculture that is out there. I don’t get mad that there are companies targeting niches that don’t involve me. But when SpaceX does it…
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    There are many fandoms that organize conferences and spend their free time posting on forums. That doesn't mean they'll get to fly on the Enterprise or in the TARDIS or anything else. The exact same phenomenon is happening with Mars. People like the idea of it, it's a wonderful fantasy. The new frontier, exploration, etc. None of them truly understand the hardships and ugliness of a life on Mars. It's not a life of exploration, it's a life of living in a small basement and obsessively checking a hundred different life support systems that will kill you if even one fails. Also, every time one of these Mars fandoms went beyond posting on forums and meeting and speaking about it, they showed just how silly their ideas are. They have no idea of logistics, of limitations of construction equipment, of the difficulty of operating it even in good conditions, of how many things break down with dust, of how much water construction needs, of economics and fundraising for such a project, and so many other problems that are already known - not even discussing the unknowns. If anyone truly planned to have a colony on Mars, they would obviously start with a colony project somewhere in the Arctic/Antarctic, importing the digging equipment, importing all the needed water, using exclusively solar energy and so on. They could use the experience as training, but, much more importantly, to actually estimate the required equipment and materials. They would start a relationship with regulatory agencies and suppliers, they would get a taste of the type of fundraising they need to do. If they succeeded, they would also have excellent proof that they know what they're doing, of a realistic time-line, and so on. The fact that no one is even talking about starting something like this is 100% clear proof to me that there is no serious thought being put into this Mars colony fantasy.

yread 2y ago

There are 1 million people who have $1M of spare cash who want a one way ticket to Mars and die there? Why?

adastra22 2y ago
There are too many bad assumptions baked into that question to attempt a meaningful answer. I don’t even know if you’re being serious or taking the piss.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  What's the bad assumption in that question? Is the ticket going to come with a cure for aging too?
  - adastra22 2y ago
    1. If you’re going on a one-way ticket to another planet, you don’t need $1m in spare cash. You just need everything you own (house included) to sum to $1m, which is an easier hurdle for an early career engineer, and Mars will want young engineers. In actuality you probably just need a down payment and premiums for an insurance contract. Costs could be closer to $100k. 2. Trips will be two-way with an included but unscheduled return ticket. Orbital dynamics make this not expensive to do. People who take advantage of that and who got part of their trip out on credit would find themselves deeply burdened in debt, but survivable. The gamble being made (and hedged with insurance) is that most colonists would stay. 3. “and die on Mars” can be literally interpreted as old age, but given the aggressive responses in this thread the underlying assumption I believed was that they’d die from lack of food/water/air, too much radiation, life support failure, etc. in other words the “mars is harder than you think and the colonists will die” tired assumption. In reality ISS research has demonstrated what is required to keep humans alive and healthy, and literal decades of preparation has been done on designs for early bases that exploit local resources to reduce external dependency. If you’re actually interested in this, Zubrin’s The Case for Space is a good introduction.

piva00 2y ago

Mars One is a cute prospect when it's just a dream, once reality sets and those people realise that the novelty of being in an inhospitable place, millions of kilometres away from any semblance of a life (air, water, food, nature, hobbies, loved ones, etc.) wouldn't be a good choice to live for 20-50 years I highly doubt that even 1% of those millionaires would still choose to be shipped off.

adastra22 2y ago
You’re projecting. A significant number will want to go BECAUSE OF the hardship. Frontier mentality.
- piva00 2y ago
  You're mixing explorers with frontier mentality. When life was hard and the prospect of getting to new land on a frontier to potentially improve your (and most of the time your family's) life, it gave people very potential tangible benefits to go there against the risks. Going to Mars, a deserted place where living a bare life is only ever possible if a lot of life support infrastructure in small pods is running 24/7 without a hitch. Where there is no direct benefit in terms of human accumulation, not at least for a few generations. Which millionaire living a good life on Earth would consciously choose living in a cramped pod with strangers for the rest of their life, to look out onto a Red Desert of nothingness every day? The novelty of doing a short walk around will disappear fast, the motivation of "let's build a city here" would be 100% dependent on the provisions sent by Earth, and there would be no end in sight for your life in little pods while you toil away Martian soil, lose muscles, have to consume a diet of potatoes, while at any time if your life support systems fail you and everyone else you might bonded with are done. Explorers without much to lose on Earth might embark on this, millionaires living a cushy life not so much.
  - adastra22 2y ago
    Just because it’s not for you doesn’t mean there aren’t people who have dreamed their whole life of doing this and would sell everything they own to pay their way if given the opportunity.

tsimionescu 2y ago

No, there are not. There are people willing to spend money on this illusion, but the vast majority are not actually going to do it. Their best case scenario is that this never becomes attainable, and they can just remain with the image that they are supporting something like this.

adastra22 2y ago
Where you so convinced these people don’t exist? They do. They organize annual conferences. They spend their free time posting incessantly in the nasaspaceflight forums. It is a subculture that is out there. I don’t get mad that there are companies targeting niches that don’t involve me. But when SpaceX does it…
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  There are many fandoms that organize conferences and spend their free time posting on forums. That doesn't mean they'll get to fly on the Enterprise or in the TARDIS or anything else. The exact same phenomenon is happening with Mars. People like the idea of it, it's a wonderful fantasy. The new frontier, exploration, etc. None of them truly understand the hardships and ugliness of a life on Mars. It's not a life of exploration, it's a life of living in a small basement and obsessively checking a hundred different life support systems that will kill you if even one fails. Also, every time one of these Mars fandoms went beyond posting on forums and meeting and speaking about it, they showed just how silly their ideas are. They have no idea of logistics, of limitations of construction equipment, of the difficulty of operating it even in good conditions, of how many things break down with dust, of how much water construction needs, of economics and fundraising for such a project, and so many other problems that are already known - not even discussing the unknowns. If anyone truly planned to have a colony on Mars, they would obviously start with a colony project somewhere in the Arctic/Antarctic, importing the digging equipment, importing all the needed water, using exclusively solar energy and so on. They could use the experience as training, but, much more importantly, to actually estimate the required equipment and materials. They would start a relationship with regulatory agencies and suppliers, they would get a taste of the type of fundraising they need to do. If they succeeded, they would also have excellent proof that they know what they're doing, of a realistic time-line, and so on. The fact that no one is even talking about starting something like this is 100% clear proof to me that there is no serious thought being put into this Mars colony fantasy.