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This is a great thread…
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Space is indeed a crap place to live. But colonising Mars is conceivable - there’s significant gravity, so the toilets should be easier to make work and it might be enough to stave off the eye thing. She’s right, though, that this isn’t going to happen for any of today’s billionaires. It is, at the very least, many decades away. And if I had to guess I’d say a century or two. And longer than that before you could imagine anything that might be independent of support from earth. Independence requires local healthcare and agriculture (pace The Martian) and industry.
No it’s nothing but a torrid rant.
Rembrandt meets neural nets - filling in Captain Cocq’s missing bits. Along with a warning.
Excellent piece, fully agree that it is just an exercise in ego from billionaires and their rich mates buying joy rides to the edge of space. A complete waste of resource.
Why bother doing it? The benefits of colonising a rock orbiting the sun that is incapable of supporting complex life is???
It looks to me that the atmosphere on Mars is just a red herring, it’s no bloody use at all. So if we’re having to live in underground tunnels, we might as well be on the Moon rather than Mars.
Although I don’t think there’s any point at which fixing issues with Earth isn’t better value than going elsewhere, except for asteroid strikes.
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You are maybe missing the point?
The benefit of the rich taking joy rides is the funding of the research that will help transport people to work elsewhere.
The bit about living in tunnels is valid if people went there to live… isn’t the whole idea that people will go there to work, to displace the dirty industries off the place where people want to live?
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Can’t picture many Billionaires picking up a jack hammer and making tunnels - Maybe man servants will be sent up first? A glimmer of hope for finally being rid of Stronzetto?
I hadn’t thought of Steve’s one about moving mucky industry up there, which does make sense. But the classic one is insurance against disaster. When the next coronavirus turns out to have the infectivity of the Delta one and the lethality of the MERS one (it kills 35% of those diagnosed with it, not the <1% of Covid-19) I might wish I was on Mars, no matter how dull the weather.
I picked Mars rather than the Moon because the gravity is nearly 2.5 times stronger. All the long-term damage to the body that microgravity seems to do ought to be less on Mars. You do pay a price in terms of there being a lower sunlight level, which means you’ll need bigger PV arrays to power the whole enterprise (unless there’s enough uranium or thorium or whatever to make the nuclear option viable).
It’ll be robots, I’m afraid.
VB
I think you’re all rong. Zefram Cochrane will invent warp drive in 42 years time and all this nonsense about the moon and Mars will be just a side order to the real main dish of infinity and beyond
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while probably bypassing Venus
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So when these Uber rich return from their off world lurgy haven, who’s actually going to keep them fed and watered back on Earth if most of the population has pegged it?
I’m just hoping zuck is on the first manned one that gets lost
I wasn’t thinking of short-term bolt holes. I was thinking of colonisation, where you go and you only come back to visit. The other place has to be viable and self-sufficient. That way if the crisis here turns out to wipe us all out, or knocks us all back to subsistence farming, the colonists will still get by. Which might be harder than it seems
I vote we try it out with the fabled 0.1% and since they are notoriously impatient, we do it NOW!!!
Ultimately I reckon that on other planets it’ll be the same as in space: would have to live on mushrooms and the like grown using artificial light. That’s until we find a planet or moon that has a magnetosphere.
There’s also the factor of getting plants pollinated. There are so many non trivial issues involved.
… and history would repeat itself 
.
Many in the group were either gentlemen unused to work or their manservants, both equally unaccustomed to the hard labor demanded by the harsh task of carving out a viable colony …Two-thirds of the settlers died before ships arrived in 1608 with supplies …
Radiation shielding might be easier. There would need to be growlights of course.
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