Musk, Mars and x-risk

Kawoomba

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip.

Relevant Sagan quote:

(...) we've put all our eggs in one basket. If we were on many worlds and were to mess up down here, there's a way for the human species to continue. I don't for a moment propose that the Earth is a disposable planet, and we have to put enormous efforts into making sure we don't muss up down here. But there is a chance.

This should also at least somewhat reduce the x-risk stemming from uFAI (a subset of uFAI's may not concern themselves with space travel), and may significantly reduce the x-risk posed by many other x-risk categories (bioengineered threats, catastrophic climate change, global nuclear catastrophe, grey goo scenarios, etcetera).

For total x-risk reduction, prima facie it's unclear to me how supporting an endeavor such as Musk's stacks up against the SI's effectiveness, measured by total x-risk reduction per donated currency unit.

What's your take?

Article on space.com

Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip.

Relevant Sagan quote:

(...) we've put all our eggs in one basket. If we were on many worlds and were to mess up down here, there's a way for the human species to continue. I don't for a moment propose that the Earth is a disposable planet, and we have to put enormous efforts into making sure we don't muss up down here. But there is a chance.

What's your take?

Is it true or even plausible that travel to Mars can become that cheap? What about the cost of the colony?

How sure are we that people can stay healthy on Mars? I'm more concerned about the low gravity than the radiation.

Huh, I wonder how technically feasible it would be to build a base that's rotating fast enough so that it feels like earth gravity inside ... It could be just one large circular Maglev, which shouldn't require too much energy for suspension and maintaining a constant speed - though there's still friction and the fact that it complicates connections to things that are probably better left static.

6[anonymous]13y

Not very. We know that no gravity is lethal in the long term for human beings (for a variety of reasons), but we really have no sense of where the cutoff is -- moon gravity is probably too little, but we've no clue if Martian gravity might be enough. Human biology is definitely tuned to Earthly norms for obvious reasons, but it might benefit from greater or smaller g-effects; there simply isn't enough research on the subject, as for obvious reasons it's inordinately difficult to do the relevant studies.

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Musk, Mars and x-risk

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Musk, Mars and x-risk

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