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Is one million enough?

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mspohr

Well-Known Member
Jul 27, 2014
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California

Stross’s answer was that given the complexity of modern society, you’d need a lot of people. In fact, writing back in 2010 — when Musk’s Tesla was still a struggling company that had only survived the Great Recession thanks to an Obama administration bailout — he explained how Musk’s current plan is thinking far too small: “Colonizing Mars might well be practical, but only if we can start out by plonking a hundred million people down there.” I agree — if anything, that’s on the low side. To understand why, you need to think about why nations engage in international trade.


As I said, I see Musk on Mars as a teachable moment, an unintended thought experiment that helps remind us of the positive aspects of international trade. Yes, there are downsides to globalization, especially to rapid change that can disrupt whole communities. But you really wouldn’t want to live in a world without extensive international trade. And you really, really wouldn’t want to live on another planet, cut off from the globalization we’ve created on this one.
 
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Stross’s answer was that given the complexity of modern society, you’d need a lot of people. In fact, writing back in 2010 — when Musk’s Tesla was still a struggling company that had only survived the Great Recession thanks to an Obama administration bailout — he explained how Musk’s current plan is thinking far too small: “Colonizing Mars might well be practical, but only if we can start out by plonking a hundred million people down there.” I agree — if anything, that’s on the low side. To understand why, you need to think about why nations engage in international trade.


As I said, I see Musk on Mars as a teachable moment, an unintended thought experiment that helps remind us of the positive aspects of international trade. Yes, there are downsides to globalization, especially to rapid change that can disrupt whole communities. But you really wouldn’t want to live in a world without extensive international trade. And you really, really wouldn’t want to live on another planet, cut off from the globalization we’ve created on this one.
I've read Krugman for years, not for his economics, but for his social spin on economics. Traveling to Mars is a bit like traveling to the Americas looking for gold, except we don't know the riches. Be they many, many will follow...
 
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Tesla did not survive by an Obama era bailout. The ATVM loan was a Bush Administration program. It was certainly helpful but far from proof that Tesla would have failed. Tesla had already gone public before they got the loan.

One million as a starting point seems pretty reasonable. One hundred million would happen once the infrastructure was growing quickly.
 
Tesla did not survive by an Obama era bailout. The ATVM loan was a Bush Administration program. It was certainly helpful but far from proof that Tesla would have failed. Tesla had already gone public before they got the loan.

One million as a starting point seems pretty reasonable. One hundred million would happen once the infrastructure was growing quickly.
I think it was the Mercedes investment that saved them.

At one million, it will be a colony. 100 million to be a fully formed self sufficient society.
 
Tesla did not survive by an Obama era bailout. The ATVM loan was a Bush Administration program. It was certainly helpful but far from proof that Tesla would have failed. Tesla had already gone public before they got the loan.
And Tesla repaid their $465 million loan nine years early. GM was loaned $22.5 billion. Ford got $5.9 billion in loans and is scheduled to finally repay it completely this year.

To get back to Krugman, an economist I have followed and admired for decades now. He wrote:
…in the modern world there are often huge economies of scale in production. These economies of scale make it efficient to supply the entire world market for some goods from only a handful of locations — sometimes just a single location — with international trade delivering those goods to customers in other countries…These economies of scale mean that no one country can reasonably produce the full range of goods required to operate a modern, high-technology economy. International trade is essential…But unless we actually invent the Epstein Drive or something, the realities of transportation costs mean that Musk’s hypothetical Mars colony would have to be largely self-sufficient, cut off from the rest of the solar system economy. And it wouldn’t have enough people to pull that off with anything like a modern standard of living.
I think he may be discounting the same modern technology and innovation that he praises as essential to supporting our current standard of living, and not factoring in the amazing adaptability of humans to novel environments.

Obviously creating a self-sustaining human colony on Mars is orders of magnitude more difficult than anything humans faced as they spread across the surface of the Earth, eventually occupying every land mass, including Antarctica. And Krugman is probably right that one million people is nowhere near enough to be self-sustaining. But over time as increasing numbers of people make the trip the cost will likely go down and the process can accelerate. Reaching 100 million might take a few centuries but it does not seem impossible.

People on Mars are going to have to do without a lot of the things that some people — though far from all people — have here on Earth: many cutting edge medical treatments, easy waste disposal in landfills, large quantities of inexpensive fresh water, an enormous variety of edible foods, hundreds of square meters of personal living space...the list is very long. But the Martians will adapt and their children will course consider they way they live just normal. They will figure out how to make it work and come up with engineering solutions and technology that we cannot foresee right now.