Elon Musk says he wants to die on Mars
Well, dying on Mars ought to be pretty easy...but living, not so much. If he can survive the journey of 35 million miles of bombardment by solar radiation and cosmic rays, against which there is, at this time or in the near future, no protection for, he'll confront an environment that makes the Antarctic seem like a tropical paradise by comparison, with an average surface temperature of -80 Fahrenheit, no breathable atmosphere, and air pressure so low that it would make an unprotected human's body fluids boil.
Musk isn't the only billionaire with his head stuck in 1950s-vintage Space Opera science fiction. Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and even someone as relatively rational as the late, brilliant physicist, Steven Hawking, all believe that the only possible future for the human race is on a distant planet, as yet to be discovered, let alone reached by humans and found suitable for habitation. Not long before his death, Hawking stated that humans needed to terraform Mars within the next 100 years, in order to survive global warming, disease, and overpopulation..
Which begs the question of how, exactly, we will terraform another, totally uninhabitable planet, when we can't even maintain the one planet in the universe on which we evolved, with conditions ideally suited to harboring a vast variety of life. As it is, we've never been able to successfully "terraform" this planet's more challenging environments- only at tremendous cost, and with massive infusions of fossil fuels and other finite resources, can we even exist in the Antarctic, or on the high deserts and in equatorial jungles.
And where would the resources for such an undertaking come from? The estimated cost of sending a mission with 6 astronauts to Mars by year 2030 range from $100M to $400M, which seems laughably optimistic given the vastly greater distance and multiplied complexities involved- and the cost of the Apollo program, a much simpler undertaking, which put our astronauts on the moon and ran from 1960 to 1973, cost $28 Billion, which translates to $288 Billion today.
In the past 60 years or so of space exploration, we've learned a great deal, and what we have learned most forcibly is that we just can't make it out there. This planet, so teeming with life and for whose unique conditions we and all the life we share it with, evolved, is the only place where humans can even exist, let alone thrive, in a universe that is implacably hostile to life- a universe in which it is unlikely that any life could survive the 4.2 light year journey to the nearest "earth-like" world. Even if such a journey were a near-term possibility, say within the next couple of hundred years, we would have no assurance that the place would be earth-like enough for our species and the life forms we need to support us.
Worse, the effort would collapse our wealthy economies, and deplete our finite resources, making life on the only planet we know will support us, nightmarish for the earth-bound population.
It's time for our leadership class- our top scientists, political leaders, and business leaders- to put aside their boyhood fantasies and get real. We aren't going anywhere, and while our leaders are yapping about forming a Space Force and planning a manned Mars mission, we are staggering under $23 Trillion in public debt in the U.S. alone, and our public infrastructure continues to deteriorate. It makes no sense to commit scarce money, and the resources that money represents, to a rankly speculative venture whose unlikely payoff, if it happens at all, will take another 300 years at least.
