
Elon Musk: we must put a million people on Mars to ensure humanity has a future - rbanffy
https://aeon.co/essays/elon-musk-puts-his-case-for-a-multi-planet-civilisation
======
blisterpeanuts
Very well written article with a lot of food for thought. Musk is thinking
along the lines of colonizing Mars to save the human race. This is visionary
thinking; maybe realistic, maybe not, but visionary.

The Americans have a great love of adventure that extends to space travel, but
we are also an impatient people who want Buck Rogers and the 25th Century to
happen tomorrow and not in 450 years.

Unfortunately, Vietnam and the Great Society and post-Vietnam stagflation of
the 1970s put an end to our brief push out of the gravity well. Trillions of
dollars were earmarked for other purposes, pushing Nasa and its quaint,
difficult-to-understand projects to the back burner.

Post-Apollo, Nasa limped along with the Space Shuttle and the I.S.S., but the
Shuttle is dead and the I.S.S. will eventually lose its political support. Now
we can't even fly our astronauts to the I.S.S. without Russian assistance.
What kind of commitment to human space flight does that demonstrate?

So, it's refreshing to see a smart visionary like Elon Musk actually walk the
walk. If he says he's going to put a greenhouse full of plants on Mars by
2030, I believe him. This is a project that Nasa could have, and should have,
done long since.

But since the country no longer supports this kind of public effort, at least
we can place our hopes in private efforts to accomplish the same thing. Many
of the 15th-16th Century explorers of the New World were privately funded,
after all.

Probably in the end, it will be public-private partnerships that get us into
space for good; the country will decide that it wants people to be in space,
and firms like SpaceX will become contractors to Nasa like the rocket
companies of old. But the difference will be that these newer companies are
space-capable on their own, can launch their own craft from their own pads and
bypass Nasa completely. Perhaps Nasa will then be more of a research
organization, doing the deep space probes and basic research that private
firms can't justify.

