SpaceX's Mars colony plan: How Elon Musk plans to build a million-person city

[alpha128]

Here's an interesting article I found about founding a real Mars colony. Since Sinclair said that the first Mars colony was destroyed in a sneak attack, I hope Elon Musk has better luck.

Elon Musk has put his Mars-colonization vision to paper, and you can read it for free.

SpaceX's billionaire founder and CEO just published the plan, which he unveiled at a conference in Mexico in September 2016, in the journal New Space. Musk's commentary, titled "Making Humanity a Multi-Planetary Species," is available for free on New Space's website through July 5.

"In my view, publishing this paper provides not only an opportunity for the spacefaring community to read the SpaceX vision in print with all the charts in context, but also serves as a valuable archival reference for future studies and planning," New Space editor-in-chief (and former NASA "Mars czar") Scott Hubbard wrote in a statement.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/spacexs-...n-person-city/

[Looney]

Interesting. My personal thoughts on the subject are that I never want to hear that this is being undertaken by private enterprise. Society needs to wake up and realize that this should be a global effort and not a goal of wealthy entrepreneurs, even if those entrepreneurs have the most noble of intentions.

[Delenn_of_Mir]

Elon is awesome. I hope his dream city becomes a reality and that I get to move there!!!

[Jonas]

Interesting. My personal thoughts on the subject are that I never want to hear that this is being undertaken by private enterprise. Society needs to wake up and realize that this should be a global effort and not a goal of wealthy entrepreneurs, even if those entrepreneurs have the most noble of intentions.

Complete agreement. It's sad that our representatives utterly lack such vision, but at the same time, this is the single most terrible way of approaching a huge and impactful project of this kind.

[WorkerCaste]

I'm not sure it's a bad thing. The reason governments did these things in the past was because it was almost impossible to write a business case for such projects. It wasn't that the overall effort couldn't be profitable, but it was generally more beneficial on a macro scale and also was more long term. That's really still the case. Space tourism and supply lifts can be profitable for a private company, so they are thriving in those arenas. Pure exploration and expansion, though, is a different matter.

Rather than a corporate effort, I see Musk's efforts as philanthropy. More akin to the Carnegie libraries and other past contributions to arts and humanities. Now we're seeing philanthropy reach into technology.

If musk wants to finance it and can pull it off (he does have a good track record), then I think that's great. All I would want to see is an international framework that ensures that it stays philanthropic and allows the benefits eventually gained to go to all humanity and not a handful of companies.

All that said, I am constantly disappointed that the US doesn't contribute more to scientific research and advance through efforts such as the manned space program.

[Ubik]

Elon Musk is cool, has more vision and concern for furthering humankind than any nation or short sighted government.