Why the fuck are you spending so much money getting to a dead planet when you could be spending money to save a living one?
There’s no magnetic field. What’s his long term plan there?
My guess is it’s a billionaire “I wanna” thing and it goes no further than that.
Because it’s better to have a backup than to put all your eggs in one basket.
Leave Mars alone. It is deeply immoral to send people there now. People have no business going there until we have thoroughly explored it and ruled out the possibility of indigenous microbial life. By studying such life, we may prove a second Genesis or prove the theory of panspermia. Either would have profound implications for our knowledge of the abundance of life in the universe. If we contaminate Mars, which sending humans would inevitably do, we may have to go all the way to another star system before we get another chance at answering these questions.
Let the billionaire space cadets stick to the asteroids and the Moon. Leave Mars the Hell alone. If after a few centuries of exploration we’ve thoroughly ruled out the presence of indigenous life, only then can we consider putting actual human beings on the surface.
It’s much easier and more effective to do science with people and labs in-situ than with slow, complex robots. The first people to land on mars will be scientists. We won’t be in a position to mess up the martian environment for generations. Stop spreading fear and propaganda. If finding life is what you’re after, Europa, Enceladus, Titan and Ganymede are much safer bets than Mars. Those worlds are completely inhospitable to humans, so there’s little to no chance that we mess them up. I’d much rather we start colonizing the moon, due to the relative ease of access, but due to its low gravity (and razor-sharp regolth particles) it isn’t a great place for humans.
I’d argue it’s actually immoral not to colonize mars. There will be no future humanity if we blow ourselves up here without a sustainable city elsewhere in the solar system.
