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whiplash451 | on: The Shape of a Mars Mission
If the end game is offworld colonies, then we should craft the whole adventure as a series of one-way trips, not two-way trips.

That's a serious paradigm shift compared to what this (excellent) article describes.

somenameforme | parent | next
Colonies on Mars are what drove the founding of SpaceX. Elon was looking up NASA's plans about sending humans to Mars and found that they simply didn't exist. He wanted to send a greenhouse to Mars while streaming its growth to get people inspired and thinking big again. NASA wasn't interested, Russia wanted too much $$$, so SpaceX was born. A colony doesn't mean you live there forever - it simply means a permanent human establishment. Some people will want to go back to Earth, some will want to stay on Mars indefinitely.

This is a big part of their obsession with lowering costs to space. When the launch costs are not such a huge economic factor, you have much greater leverage with doing things like building, resupplying, or even engaging in interplanetary commerce.

whiplash451 | root | parent
My understanding is that what drove the founding of SpaceX was a promise for more efficient use of agencies' money in space programs.

Going to Mars may have been part of the story, but I doubt that it was a strong component of the decision making in the end.

somenameforme | root | parent
His main motivation was about making humanity a multiplanetary species, largely as a means of ensuring humanity's continuation. It sounds hyperbolic, but Earth has gone through multiple mass extinction events and we're rather overdue for another. And while those mass extinction events were all natural, there's also endless ways you can imagine us all managing to kill ourselves off. And, critically, all of these hyperbolic scenarios will seem extremely improbable up to the very day that one does inevitably happen. So the best time to start would be 50 years ago. But the second best time would be right now.

So the most logical place to start for this sort of 'humanity guarantee' would be Mars, which shares an oddly large amount in common with Earth. There's a verbose (and rather entertaining read) with lots of first party commentary here. [1]

[1] - https://waitbutwhy.com/2015/05/elon-musk-introduction.html

burch45 | root | parent
This has been covered before but saying that Mars would be a “humanity guarantee” is actually extremely illogical, not the most logical. Short of the Earth getting blasted to tiny pieces in some way there is no scenario where Mars is more habitable than Earth. This is the sort of sci-fi Utopianism that this sober article is standing in opposition to. Mars may be the second most habitable place in the solar system and it’s infinitely less habitable than a nuked-out fallout-ridden earth or an overheated green house earth. There is no magic scenario where Mars suddenly ends up with a magnetosphere and an atmosphere.
whiplash451 | root | parent | next
The whole "let's by insurance for humankind" story is totally valid in my opinion.

This article is however very useful to bring pragmatism to the discussion.

Maybe the best insurance for humankind is to start shipping a continuous stream of robots to Mars to prepare human landing in many (many) years.

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Ekaros | parent
For me first logical step is to ignore the getting there part. And prove that we can actually build colony here. In suitable location say for example Sahara or Antarctica. After those technological challenges are solved next step is to see how to get it to orbit or make same in orbit. And then we can start thinking how to get all the stuff over there.
whiplash451 | root | parent
I agree. That was the sense of my comment too.