A City On Mars

[tater]

Any place humans live off Earth (at least in this solar system) is a 100% built environment. Under the assumption 0.38g is not deleterious, the only way to get a colony going is to simply build it. Improvements in robotics will at least help this along. Have an outpost, then send supplies and the robots build out infrastructure.

[PakledHostage]

14 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Given enough time?  

It will look like a colony.

Perhaps.  I can believe that it may eventually turn into an exotic destination for wealthy adventurous tourists. Heck, even Everest Basecamp now has TVs, feather beds and masseuses. Maybe it becomes a sort of Las Vegas like destination (what happens on Mars stays on Mars)?

[tater]

51 minutes ago, PakledHostage said:

Perhaps.  I can believe that it may eventually turn into an exotic destination for wealthy adventurous tourists. Heck, even Everest Basecamp now has TVs, feather beds and masseuses. Maybe it becomes a sort of Las Vegas like destination (what happens on Mars stays on Mars)?

The amount of wealth required would be absurd, as it includes a multi-year commitment. So you have to be rich enough to be gone for years. I suppose with the decline in people living normal lives (ie: more and more childless people), blowing their savings on this as "something to do" might happen—or single people who are no longer young. Leaving Earth for a couple years when you have family is not a thing. If you are younger, kids have school, etc, you have a job... can't leave. If retired, your kids likely have families—and you don't want to miss out on that.

Maybe with torch drives tourism to Mars is a thing, but not before.

The Moon? Yeah, tourism is the killer app for large scale habitats there.

Edited April 20 by tater

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

49 minutes ago, PakledHostage said:

Perhaps.  I can believe that it may eventually turn into an exotic destination for wealthy adventurous tourists. Heck, even Everest Basecamp now has TVs, feather beds and masseuses. Maybe it becomes a sort of Las Vegas like destination (what happens on Mars stays on Mars)?

Billionaire tourism would certainly contribute to semi permanent service workers. 

<eyeroll >

What would be best is some sort of boom economy coupled with something still profitable (sustainable and survivable) on the back end.  Ala the gold rush towns of the West - while leaving ghost towns in many places did pave the way for more permanent settlement. 

4 minutes ago, tater said:

amount of wealth required would be absurd

I think that's kind of the point.  Billionaire tourists are flexing on each other with what they and their kids do - to the exclusion of normies who couldn't possibly afford the trip, much less the catering to. 

Everest really is a good example. 

The flex of having so much money that you can walk away from everything (/ 'work remotely') for that length of time and be one of the few humans in existence to have EVER done a thing? 

It will happen. 

There is already a waiting list for orbit and the moon. 

[kerbiloid]

Reduce the taxes for the billionaires having visited Mars.

[PakledHostage]

2 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

Billionaire tourism would certainly contribute to semi permanent service workers. 

<eyeroll >

I don't understand the eye roll? I said earlier in this thread that I don't see Mars colonies being a thing until several centuries from now. And by "Mars colonies " I mean something more than a scientific outpost. I honestly don't think there's any reason to go there. If it ever happens that a colony arises there, it will probably happen organically. An exotic "sin city" arising there 100s of years from now seems as plausible as anything else.

[DDE]

2 hours ago, tater said:

I suppose with the decline in people living normal lives (ie: more and more childless people), blowing their savings on this as "something to do" might happen—or single people who are no longer young. Leaving Earth for a couple years when you have family is not a thing.

Hm. I wonder whether this affects the ultrarich more or less. Without research, the feel I get is decidedly ambivalent - there's this one billionaire playboy philanthropist that's sired almost a dozen, but one anecdote doesn't indicate whether they buck the trend or not - and then there's their tendency to live for themselves, children be damned.

Maybe the Moon can have highly preferential divorce legislation...

[magnemoe]

4 hours ago, PakledHostage said:

Perhaps.  I can believe that it may eventually turn into an exotic destination for wealthy adventurous tourists. Heck, even Everest Basecamp now has TVs, feather beds and masseuses. Maybe it becomes a sort of Las Vegas like destination (what happens on Mars stays on Mars)?

LEO and later the moon works better, shorter travel time and an luxury hotel both paces would be viable down the line.  Multi year trips then you can not talk normally on the phone has issues if you need to be connected. 
Yes some people will pay for it but it would not bankroll the operation like orbital and moon hotels. 
You then attach the research to the hotels as its cheaper anyway, And you get to run on water on a pool on the moon. 

[PakledHostage]

5 hours ago, magnemoe said:

LEO and later the moon works better, 

Yes, and if you read my posts earlier in this thread, you'll see that I said that there too.

[kerbiloid]

So, there are four Tharsis Montes:

Olympus Mons - for Martian Olympics.

Ascraeus Mons - a righteous bucolic paradise, as wiki says, "ascraeus" is "rural".

Arsia Mons - exotic Sin City  _{they kinda named it for reason}

Pavonis Mons in between - a pilgrimage point (Monastery, Basilica, Tabernacle, etc.) for spiritual choice between them.

Edited April 21 by kerbiloid

[SunlitZelkova]

On 4/13/2024 at 6:55 PM, SunlitZelkova said:

I think this is a flawed way of thinking about the future. It's naive to think the same trends we see now and in the recent past will continue forever.

People thought there would be flying battleships based on the development of airships in the early 1900s as a "natural" continuation of the technology, and it never happened. People thought there would be no more capital ships after torpedo boats made them "obsolete," also during the early 1900s. And people thought the adoption of nuclear power in the US in the late 1950s meant that by 1990 there would be a small nuclear reactor in the basement of every home in America.

When thinking about this stuff, its important to think about the economy of it.

Based on the size of airline fleets and number of total employees, I have seen estimates that it takes about 50-100 employees to maintain a single aircraft.

How many employees does it take to maintain a single rocket? How much extremely specialized labor when compared with maintaining aircraft? Where is SpaceX going to get this army of ground staff to support their launch of 1000 Starships during each transfer window?

In my state it costs about $300,000 to build a new home right now, minus permits and land costs etc. This is very close to the average US cost of 298,000 in 2023. For lack of alternative ideas, I'm going to assume SpaceX uses the "normal buildings in domes" design they have in the artwork on their website. Musk wants to house 1 million people on Mars. Let's say there are 4 people to a home. So $75 billion to build the habitats. This doesn't include the expensive domes, complete with life support on a scale never seen before. The domes will need to be even bigger because there will need to be room for the other aspects of the city. It won't just need more buildings, but a sewage system, schools, farms, the power source, and so on. So the dome will be enormous.

The ISS has about 1000m cubed of pressurized volume and cost $100 billion or so in total. I'm going to be very generous and cut that in half, assuming use of robots will help cut costs, but then I'm going to add $5 billion for those robots. So let's say 1000m cubed of volume on the Mars base will cost $55 billion to build. The city of Portland, which is probably smaller than what the Mars city will be due to lack of farmland, is 233km squared area. I'm going to treat the volume of the dome as if it were a cube, and the extra volume that wouldn't be there on account of shape will go to the farmland. So let's just say to have good circulation and allow birds to live in it, it will need to be a generous 1 km tall (the artwork shows it higher). So, the volume is just 233km cubed.

So, it would cost $233 billion dollars to build a pressurized dome for the city.

From r/theydidthemath

Let's be generous and use the lower estimate. About 250 sq km for 1 million people.

Cost of dome + homes (minus maintenance, services, sewage, transporting dirt for farming, etc.): ~$488 billion.

The article from Payload Space that estimated SpaceX's revenue I found put operating costs in 2022 at $3 billion. They launched 61 rockets in 2022, rounding that down to 60, we get $50 million to launch one rocket.

How many Starships will it take to build the city? Way more than Musk theorizes. An interesting Seattle Times article did the calculations and the weight of a home came in at about 300 tons. So 300 million tons of material need to be moved to Mars for the housing alone. Starship 3 can bring 200 tons to LEO, and with 4-5 refueling flights could bring that to Mars. So 1,500,000 Cargo Starship launches would be required to send the materials, ignoring things like volume restrictions and what have you. Add 4 tanker flights per launch, and that would be 7,500,000 Starship launches.

Thus SpaceX's operating costs including the launch of these rockets, in total, would amount to $375 trillion. This doesn't include the 10,000 Starships needed to launch the million colonists, nor the cost of launching the dome, dirt for farmland, robot laborers, and so on. And of course the associated tankers. Nor the actual cost of the materials themselves.

These would be internal launches and thus generate no revenue.

In contrast, the Earth's GDP in 2022 was about $100 trillion.

Starlink had 2.3 million subscribers in 2023, and generated $4.2 billion in revenue. If Starlink somehow rose to 32 million subscribers and beat out Comcast to become the biggest ISP in the US, they'd have, very roughly, $63 billion in revenue each year.

This doesn't take into account inflation.

SpaceX alone could not pull this off.

$375.5 trillion for the Mars city, and that estimate is low balled. And it won't even turn a profit when it is complete. It will just be a regular old city, but costing $50 million to send stuff to and fro on a good day. Contrast with how sending a 20 ft shipping container to Japan costs about $1,200 dollars.

A Mars city will, in all likelihood, never turn a profit.

And remember those failed predictions about technology in the early 20th century? Let me introduce you to some more bad projections. In the 1920s, people predicted the end of poverty, infinite growth, and even declines in culture because people were becoming so wealthy they wouldn't want to do anything. Then after the crash of '29, people were predicting permanent damage, endless poverty and unemployment, and no hope of recovery ever.

So even though Goldman Sachs predicts the global GDP being $227 trillion in 2050, which maybe could put it at $1 quadrillion by year 2300- at which point the US GDP might be about $300-400 trillion (all at a rate of growth of $100 trillion every 25 years), that would still require a company with the ability to invest an amount equivalent to the US GDP in something they will get no return on investment in.

All that assumes there is no Second Great Depression, no nuclear war, no AI disruption to the economy, and no disastrous damage from climate change.

I really dislike the idea of things being inevitable. If we want something to happen in the future, we have to work for it, we can't assume it will just come to us. No one is really working towards anything right now, and I feel like that's just going to allow another bad cascade of events that will lead to great damage and set humanity back 50 years.

Every generation has talked about something being inevitable, then had things turned on their head and started saying the other way around was inevitable. There is great collateral in the process. I wish for once we would recognize the future is unknown and try to shape it by our own will, instead of letting it take the trajectory set by people who are either in retirement homes or dead. Because it isn't a trajectory at all, just feeling our way through the dark with no interest in our existence beyond the present.

------

Okay, now for fun let's see when a company might have the wherewithal to fund its own Mars colony, based on these unchanging linear projections that I simplified.

SpaceX's total revenue was about $8 billion according to that same Payload Space estimate. So 3/8 of that was operating costs. Assuming SpaceX's revenue can grow with the economy: maybe SpaceX and Tesla merge into one mega corporation, along with Twitter, maybe it produces the world's best mac and cheese, who knows. I'm going to use that trend as the GDP.

So SpaceX's total revenue will be $16 billion in 2050, and $32 billion in 2100. I'm gonna round it up to $10 billion in 2023 so this is easier. So $40 billion in 2100.

$64 billion in 2200, $128 billion in 2300. By the year 3000, it will be $400 billion. $800 billion in 4000, but let's bump that to a trillion. So it will be $3 trillion dollars by the year 8000.

After that, it would take about 200,000 years for SpaceX's operating costs to reach $300 trillion dollars. The extra 75, also rounded up, to 100, would take another 667 years or so to gain.

So SpaceX will have enough money to build a city on Mars starting in 208,667 A.D. By this time, two moons of Uranus will have collided, the Arecibo message will have reached its target, and Pioneer 10 will have passed within about 3 light years of Ross 248, a red dwarf, which circa 60,000 A.D. will have become the closest star to Earth for a brief period of time (10,000 years).

Disclaimer:

This is half serious attempt to calculate the cost of a Mars colony, half tongue in cheek criticism of statements that say things like "All we need to do is send some software engineers to Mars and the colony will be profitable." I did not check my math. The only really serious thing is my critique of making predictions about the future by assuming current trends will last forever.

As much as this post disparages the idea of a Mars colony, I think one will come about one day. It will just be centuries from now, after violence and the “anything worth doing must be profitable” and “anything worth doing must benefit me personally or I won’t do it” mentalities have gone the way of slavery and cannibalism.

I think these concepts of “colonies as resorts” are very poor and flawed, because that means that if the resort ceases to be profitable, everyone will pack up and leave. There were entire towns here along the Oregon coast that were prosperous as resorts in the late 1800s, but once the demand declined they couldn’t be maintained anymore. Today there is not a single trace of them remaining.

To expand beyond a place where we don’t have to worry about securing the existence of the entire food supply or having breathable atmosphere will require a revolution in human thinking. Trying to do things by the current “needs to be profitable to be worthwhile” mentality just points in the direction of space colonization being not feasible at all.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

18 hours ago, PakledHostage said:

the eye roll?

It's my personal prejudice showing.  I used to do rock climbing and mountain climbing in the 80s and 90s.  I'd occasionally bump into people who were serious about it - talking about moving up to summits on known mountains on multiple continents.  Everest was something to be achieved by only the best with great training and after some serious money raising. 

The common theme from those guys was 'respect for the mountain' (and a certain amount of spiritualism). 

The billionaire tourist doesn't fit that model.  (flip side is more money is flowing into Nepal these days) 

[tater]

21 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

I think that's kind of the point.  Billionaire tourists are flexing on each other with what they and their kids do - to the exclusion of normies who couldn't possibly afford the trip, much less the catering to. 

Everest really is a good example. 

The flex of having so much money that you can walk away from everything (/ 'work remotely') for that length of time and be one of the few humans in existence to have EVER done a thing? 

It will happen. 

There is already a waiting list for orbit and the moon. 

Regular people save up and do Everest all the time—even fail, and pay to do it again. Even that only takes months. Mars is a multi-year commitment. A handful of people doing something is not "tourism," IMHO, that's adventurer stuff. Isaacson, for example. Adventure travel is the next level—and Everest is a subset of that, but many went to Nepal just to Trek back when it was harder than now. I did that back when the Everest base Camp trek was a 30+ day (walking) commitment. Real tourism means mass travel IMO. I'd add that Everest had a progression from people who had to organize real climbs—possibly a couple months in country, and arranged for climbing Sherpas, porters, etc—before it got to the point you paid someone $20k-$50k to do all that for you.

So we might have maybe a few billionaires doing something, and so few we will literally all be able to name them. Way fewer than pay to be led up Everest. That's not a business model for "tourism."

At some point for the Moon, we could have "adventure tourism" that gets the sort of people who do difficult hikes. It's will start at Everest level numbers—10s, then maybe hundreds (following the real to guided expedition track). I won't call it tourism until regular (affluent) people can afford a trip to the Moon. Maybe a save up, once in a lifetime thing, but enough that large numbers can do it. $100k? For the tourism model to work, it needs large numbers, though.

I never see that closing for Mars.

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

54 minutes ago, tater said:

tourism model

I don't disagree. 

I was using 'billionaire tourism' to distinguish a subset.  'Adventure tourism' is also distinguished from the Adventurer in my mind by the level of preparation each might do. 

The next level mountaineers I'd run into while hiking or climbing on Shasta or Raineer or in the Alps had a level of technical competency where they could be self sufficient and contribute to the groups they climbed with. 

To my mind, the Adventure Tourist or Billionaire tourist may not.  They often hire competency to 'sherpa' them through the adventure.  (Certainly there are billionaires who can do the thing - but they are themselves a subset) 

There is an analogy, perhaps, to skiing in NA.  I remember the ski bum days when the slopes were covered in poor college students and locals.  Private Equity now owns most of the slopes and some ski towns are so expensive that professionals can't afford to live there -

Spoiler

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna140429&ved=2ahUKEwjNvu381tOFAxW-kYkEHaV0BJEQFnoECBIQBQ&usg=AOvVaw2JSU58NTZVbdEUdHFbVdVh

Now its the designer see and be seen crowd. 

Dunno - just grousing. 

But back to your point - yes, for a city on Mars to enjoy real tourism it would need something on the Disney model: be a self contained adventure that, while expensive, is attainable by millions of of people annually - and that would drive inadvertent colonization as permanent support staff and supporting industries establish themselves and expand. 

Similarly, some kind of permanent scientific or resource extraction outpost or production model could contribute. 

But just altruistic 'go live there... Because' won't 

 

[PakledHostage]

4 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

 Everest was something to be achieved by only the best with great training and after some serious money raising. 

Everest has been gentrified. It was once only the domain of world class experts, but today the two "normal routes" are more of a high altitude via ferrata. People who don't even know how to put on their own crampons are regularly guided up it. That's true for many of the 8000'ers. Orbit was also once just the domain of world class experts, but that is changing. And that's going to eventually be true for the moon too. When Apollo 11 first landed there, the crew was under no illusions about how serious the commitment was. Nixon even pre-recorded an address to the nation that would have been aired if Armstrong and Aldrin became stranded. When we eventually go back to the moon, it will be less "on the edge" than the Apollo missions.  The risk will only decrease as technology and experience increases. And even though "riding an explosion" into space will never be truly safe (just as climbing Mount Everest will never be truly safe), common people will eventually do it. What they'll do when they go there (e.g. research, work, recreate, etc. ) is the only outstanding question.  

Edited April 21 by PakledHostage

[grawl]

I think future Mars outposts will be more like the South Pole scientific stations, rather than a billionaire's rendez-vous hotspot like the Everest.

Also, initial Mars manned missions may look more like the first polar explorers missions, with their boats getting immobilized or worse, crushed by ice, then keeping on with less and less assets until freezing on the way. These guys were outright crazy if you ask me !

 

I really don't see a billionaire going into such a maddening and self-destructing endeavour. But financing the project, publishing expedition's diaries in owned medias and then glorifying the fallen heroes if anything bad happens, yes, of course.

[kerbiloid]

The technologies of remote presence and augmented reality are evolving rather fastly today.

A couple of decades later the generation of people, who had grown in this, will feel no difference if they are currently on a tropic beach, in a casino city, on the Mars surface, or just in the street at their backyard, even without having a travel, right from their room

Spoiler

at the 7th underground level of the vault.

[DDE]

8 hours ago, grawl said:

I really don't see a billionaire going into such a maddening and self-destructing endeavour.

What if they were told it was perfectly safe?

[darthgently]

4 hours ago, DDE said:

What if they were told it was perfectly safe?

This is perfect response of the month here.

[grawl]

15 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The technologies of remote presence and augmented reality are evolving rather fastly today.

A couple of decades later the generation of people, who had grown in this, will feel no difference if they are currently on a tropic beach, in a casino city, on the Mars surface, or just in the street at their backyard, even without having a travel, right from their room

I picture VR experiences of Earth most noisy crowded places to keep mental sanity up into the deep loneliness of space.

  

12 hours ago, DDE said:

What if they were told it was perfectly safe?

[Cursed sub pic]

Dozens of people have already gone that deep under the oceans, and safely at that. The ones lost here probably fell for it because of charismatic discourse and well crafted PPT...
And the scale of this is event is closer to a Moon orbit tourist mission going bad, than a Mars one.

Edited April 22 by grawl
small reword

[DDE]

26 minutes ago, grawl said:

I picture VR experiences of Earth most noisy crowded places to keep mental sanity up into the deep loneliness of space.

As someone who experienced the lockdown in a city of twenty million... you will quickly find people not wanting to ever be in a crowd. Intsead, they could likely succumb to parasocial relationships...

[SunlitZelkova]

On 4/10/2024 at 10:32 PM, SunlitZelkova said:

But I don’t think a Mars colony is going to survive unless we get creative in ways that haven’t been seen since humans settled on land and began agriculture. Unless there is a corporate entity rich enough to build and sustain the colony all on its own in the initial phases and somehow turn into a city-state with a GDP comparable to a small developed Earth country, which is questionable, exporting Earth societal systems- designed to work in a place where you don’t have to worry about losing breathing gases or losing your food supply to a faulty circuit- will not work.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this thread and my responses for a while.

I think building a Mars colony based on earthly ethics, laws, and societal structures is not a good long term backup for humanity. Such a Mars colony has an equal chance of destroying itself as Earth does.

You could say, why not build lots of colonies then? Which brings us back to the idea capitalism will eventually facilitate the construction of a colony, which I believe is wrong…

On 4/15/2024 at 6:35 AM, tater said:

The guys at LANL were playing with a tunneling device. Unlike the offering from the Boring Company, the LANL one was nuclear powered... it was designed to MELT regolith as it drove forward. The resultant glass then seeps into the surrounding regolith forming a glass tube.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US3693731A/en

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4687637

Their civil engineering guys did a paper on this for the Moon and Mars I saw presented in the 90s.

…because if we are going to dig underground anyways, we might as well do it on Earth with fallout shelters.

If the goal is to backup humanity, it makes much more sense to build secure colonies on Earth instead of in space. From a business POV, of course. Why transport drills to Mars when you can build them on Earth and use them here?

I would not be surprised if Elon has such a realization at some point, especially if the economy starts to go up and down, or international tensions get way worse. A Mars colony is just a really terrible way to save life on Earth, if the mindset of “the best part is no part” is being followed. Do away with the rockets and build shelters on Earth.

Life being multi planetary doesn’t matter if the dome gets hit by a micrometeorite (or normal sized meteorite), and if you’re going underground, you might as well do it on Earth.

It makes no economic sense to build a Mars colony based on our current economic philosophy. Therefore if we want to reach into space we need to change it.

On 4/10/2024 at 10:32 PM, SunlitZelkova said:

I personally haven’t seen anthropological evidence supporting this notion. My understanding it that the idea that capitalism is the end all be all of civilization comes from philosophy rather than a scientific look at the history of the world. It’s still a theory, of course.

To elaborate on what I meant by this, by the way, it seems it was Thomas Hobbes- a philosopher, not an anthropologist or social scientist- who suggested humans must bow to authority or end up warring against each other.

Humans are not automatons. We have the power to move beyond selfish impulses we are conditioned to have from birth- not naturally possess- and work together.

Thus, partially for the memes, I put forward the idea of instead seeding a Mars colony with embryos and having them taught differently than Earthlings by robots instead of sending adult human colonists.

[darthgently]

2 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

I’ve been thinking a lot about this thread and my responses for a while.

I think building a Mars colony based on earthly ethics, laws, and societal structures is not a good long term backup for humanity. Such a Mars colony has an equal chance of destroying itself as Earth does.

You could say, why not build lots of colonies then? Which brings us back to the idea capitalism will eventually facilitate the construction of a colony, which I believe is wrong…

…because if we are going to dig underground anyways, we might as well do it on Earth with fallout shelters.

If the goal is to backup humanity, it makes much more sense to build secure colonies on Earth instead of in space. From a business POV, of course. Why transport drills to Mars when you can build them on Earth and use them here?

I would not be surprised if Elon has such a realization at some point, especially if the economy starts to go up and down, or international tensions get way worse. A Mars colony is just a really terrible way to save life on Earth, if the mindset of “the best part is no part” is being followed. Do away with the rockets and build shelters on Earth.

Life being multi planetary doesn’t matter if the dome gets hit by a micrometeorite (or normal sized meteorite), and if you’re going underground, you might as well do it on Earth.

It makes no economic sense to build a Mars colony based on our current economic philosophy. Therefore if we want to reach into space we need to change it.

To elaborate on what I meant by this, by the way, it seems it was Thomas Hobbes- a philosopher, not an anthropologist or social scientist- who suggested humans must bow to authority or end up warring against each other.

Humans are not automatons. We have the power to move beyond selfish impulses we are conditioned to have from birth- not naturally possess- and work together.

Thus, partially for the memes, I put forward the idea of instead seeding a Mars colony with embryos and having them taught differently than Earthlings by robots instead of sending adult human colonists.

Or, we could admit we really don't know how all this works and not try to micromanage existence itself from an ivory tower.  This isn't a single player game of Sim-Earth.  Solutions will emerge regardless of central planning's wet fever dreams

[kerbiloid]

And that's why we need the Vault-Tek vault network, emulating standalone colonies.

By running such experiment, they could develop a proper model of an extraterrestrial colony, and a generation ship.

And that was the apocryphal explanation of the whole Vault-Tek aim from the xDlate youtube channel.

Also if treat Mars as a backup Earth for the best people, the colony should be/include a protected vault.

[tater]

3 hours ago, darthgently said:

Or, we could admit we really don't know how all this works and not try to micromanage existence itself from an ivory tower.  This isn't a single player game of Sim-Earth.  Solutions will emerge regardless of central planning's wet fever dreams

This. "Natural" systems appear by themselves. "Unnatural" systems must be imposed with force. At scale, we already knows which happen by itself. If King Cnut makes markets illegal along with the tide, he creates black markets (and the tide keeps coming as well).

6 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

If the goal is to backup humanity, it makes much more sense to build secure colonies on Earth instead of in space. From a business POV, of course. Why transport drills to Mars when you can build them on Earth and use them here?

Because that's not interesting.