Elon Musk at the moment has a solution to the transport problem that he’s working on. The economics of starship suggest that he will be able to transport ~100,000 kg to Mars for >20 million.
Given that NASA currently spends $3 to $4 billion a year for the ISS, having a small Mars colony seems to be within a reasonable budget.
Of course that colony won’t be self-sustaining at the beginning. On earth we have the problem that we have laws that prevent a lot that’s technical possible from being done.
A Mars colony can do genetical engineering a lot more freely then we can here on earth because there isn’t an existing ecosystem on Mars that could be messed up.
Protein folding is a problem that’s plausible to be solved soon by Deep Mind and once it’s solved it will be a lot easier to design new proteins for various challenges.
A Mars economy that runs on gene-manipulated organisms with designer proteins might look like discontinuous tech progress. At the same time it does provide the Mars colony with intellectual property that it can sell back to earth.
Elon Musk at the moment has a solution to the transport problem that he’s working on. The economics of starship suggest that he will be able to transport ~100,000 kg to Mars for >20 million.
Given that NASA currently spends $3 to $4 billion a year for the ISS, having a small Mars colony seems to be within a reasonable budget.
Of course that colony won’t be self-sustaining at the beginning. On earth we have the problem that we have laws that prevent a lot that’s technical possible from being done.
A Mars colony can do genetical engineering a lot more freely then we can here on earth because there isn’t an existing ecosystem on Mars that could be messed up.
Protein folding is a problem that’s plausible to be solved soon by Deep Mind and once it’s solved it will be a lot easier to design new proteins for various challenges.
A Mars economy that runs on gene-manipulated organisms with designer proteins might look like discontinuous tech progress. At the same time it does provide the Mars colony with intellectual property that it can sell back to earth.