"Musk himself has stated the goal is to make money to help pay for colonizing Mars."
Which I continue to misunderstand ...
You can go to Mars ... you can have an outpost on Mars ... you can have scientists and tourists and so on go back and forth to Mars - all very positive and exciting.
But you can't live on Mars for an extended period because the gravity is 1/3 of earths.
Your teeth will decay. Your bones will weaken (even with hours per day of resistance work, which will be mandatory). Your heart will weaken. Your organs will malfunction. You will get cancer from a weakened immune system. Red blood production goes down.
Your body is built for and tightly coupled to Earths gravity. I fail to see how one could actually live on Mars without sacrificing 30 or more years of lifespan.
We only know how the human body reacts in 0g - and it's as bad as you say. But we don't know if 0.3g is bad. Humans might live perfectly fine in 0.3g, or it might be as bad as 0g. However, there's no data either way to make the claims you are making.
> But you can't live on Mars for an extended period because the gravity is 1/3 of earths.
Can't you rather cheaply create a centrifuge where you'll sleep - and may be even work indoors - which will maintain 1G? Centrifuge big enough so no significant side forces would occur?
Feasible for a few billion people, eventually? This concept has been explored in many sci-fi shows, with the usual solution being to make a big ring and spin it in space.
> I fail to see how one could actually live on Mars without sacrificing 30 or more years of lifespan.
Maybe they just cant can't, but don't care. Some people could be willing to decrease their lifespan in order to colonize a different planet, making the human race interplanetary.
Also, theoretically, people will evolve over time to be able to handle those conditions. We're used to making plans a couple years ahead. When thinking of interplanetary colonization, we should think many generations ahead.
Reproductive fitness is less scary--it doesn't always mean "prevented from reproducing"
* Imagine 20% of the population has adaptations that make them better suited to mars--they keep their teeth, their bones are stronger, they do well in sports, they have more energy to take care of kids, so they have 1 extra kid on average. In one generation, that percentage is 30% and in one more it is 45%, one after that and it is the majority and heads toward 100%.
What we'll be looking at is speciation. Also, evolution is at-work on our population as we speak--it doesn't take breaks.
The alternative is to stay on a planet where 20-40% of people don't even "believe in" evolution or taking care of the planet which their eventual descendants would need to inhabit, many times in favor of short-term capital gains. I fail to see how we're not already, as of about a hundred years ago, pretty screwed either way.
And I bet it will help with that- but I don't see that as the sole purpose.
He's an industrialist. He saw he'd need batteries for his electric cars, so he said "I should make batteries". Then he said "Who else needs batteries? Solar producers". So Tesla now makes cars, batteries, and solar panels. That wasn't just by chance, that was planned.
Now he says "I have a rocket company I want to scale up, but I don't know if demand will be there". So what does he do? He makes a company that could be profitable, but more importantly fills in the demand he wants to have for his rockets. The rocket business is bigger, which makes it more stable. The internet company might work, or it might lose money, but it's still a tool to the real goal.
This is why Amazon made AWS. Because they needed cheap, simple cloud infrastructure. Alexa/Echo helps people buy more stuff. They're building a shipping infrastructure ostensibly for themselves but probably soon enough for customers as well.
