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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.