Oh look, it's THIS thread again. But seriously now, what's the point of Mars colonization...

That's a great salesman pitch, selling dreams, not products.

We need to go to venus instead
The upper atmosphere of venus is by far the closest to earth conditions that we will ever find

Mining the surface of venus would first be done by dredging, then capping any active volcano's/vents, then finally by machinery resistant to the high temperatures.

I wasn't trying to argue, no point arguing with retards that think you can just genetically engineer spaceflight osteopenia away. It's literally a function of bone to reabsorb in areas of low stress.

We're not even mining the bottom of earth's oceans properly, what use is it to us if we have stuff on Venus?

Just get the birthrates down to 2 children pre women in developing countries permanently and recycle the metals we already have, and you have abolished poverty without any additional mining.

>We all know that Mars colony won't be self-sufficient in over 100 years
No we don't. That's fucking stupid.

It would have to be close to self-sufficient from the beginning, due to the difficulty of shipping supplies from Earth.

People will die, the funding will run out, the taxpayers will have to pay more just to bring the survivors home, and no one will have had any real benefit.

Mark my words,that's what will happen.

>Just get the birthrates down to 2 children pre women in developing countries permanently
1) This is basically the worst possible solution. If we had wars to keep the population down, at least the fighting would be fun.
2) People won't cooperate with your eternal oppression plan.
3) If they did, the genome would deteriorate rapidly with accumulated mutations and no filter to remove them.

>the fighting would be fun.
Buy a gun, shoot yourself in the head. You can have fun that way and we'll be rid of you.

>2) People won't cooperate with your eternal oppression plan.
And how is sending shit to Venus going to help with that? All you're proving is that nothing will solve the resource hunger anyway because people will keep shitting out children until everybody lives in shit again.

>And how is sending shit to Venus going to help with that?
Oh, I don't know. How is not deciding that the entire human population should live only on Hawai'i (the largest island in Hawaii) going to help?

I mean, what's a nicer place to live than Hawai'i? Hawai'i's finite, but so is the Earth, so letting people live anywhere off the island is just putting off dealing with the problem, right?

Maybe we should send some people in a boat to Maui a couple of times, maybe once a century just to prove that we can, but there's no sense in having them live there, away from the rest of us and all of our established industry and houses and stuff on the big island. I mean, what? Are you sending them there to die? That's fucking cruel. Of course they have to come back.

No, we should keep everyone on Hawai'i with state control over breeding to control the population, and strict enforcement through mandatory sterilizations. That's good enough for humanity, forever.

Are you brain-damaged or something?

It was already pointed out that we're not even mining the bottom of Earth's oceans properly, mining shit on Venus provides no resources whatsover to the child-shitters on Earth.

You know the birth rate is already below replacement levels in developed countries, right? There doesn't need to be an "eternal oppression plan" - once people have enough money that they don't need babies to work in a farm, they stop having babies.

>>>>>>We need to go to venus instead
>>>>>>The upper atmosphere of venus is by far the closest to earth conditions that we will ever find
>>>>>Just get the birthrates down to 2 children pre women in developing countries permanently
>>) People won't cooperate with your eternal oppression plan.
>>>And how is sending shit to Venus going to help with that?
>>Oh, I don't know. How is not deciding that the entire human population should live only on Hawai'i (the largest island in Hawaii) going to help?
>Are you brain-damaged or something?
Somebody in this conversation is.

>It was already pointed out that we're not even mining the bottom of Earth's oceans properly
Yes, this was pointed out, with spectacular irrelevancy. The point of mining on Venus is to provide for people living in the upper atmosphere of Venus.

Some people will always shit out children above replacement. They will outbreed the rest eventually.

>The point of mining on Venus is to provide for people living in the upper atmosphere of Venus.
You're a fucking imbecile if you actually believe this makes any economic sense, except for Musk's attention whoring.

Can't wait to burn more tax dollars on irrational bullshit projects advocated by retards like you.

Better than feeding and providing healthcare for people who refuse to work

Thanks for admitting that your opinions on science are driven by your weird political ideology rather than the facts.

We can always put a bullet in your face, if that's what you'd prefer.

It is objectively better than using pubic monies for those who can but won't provide for themselves.

Perfectly factual.
A welfare queen on sci? Strange.

>A welfare queen on sci?
Military service, actually. The only way you can get rid of the welfare state is by overthrowing democracy, and when you try that, we will shoot you.

>You know the birth rate is already below replacement levels in developed countries, right?
This is what's called a "selection event". Conditions have changed. Those who don't reproduce under those conditions are being selected against. Those who do reproduce under those conditions will pass on the traits which caused them to be reproductively successful.

The population will reproduce under replacement for a few generations at most, before the exponential growth in the sub-population of people who have ten kids each, that have ten kids each, etc. takes over.

>once people have enough money that they don't need babies to work in a farm, they stop having babies.
Yeah man, it has nothing to do with the invention of birth control, the legalizaton of abortion, outlawing child labor, equality of the sexes, telling women they need a college degree and a career to have status, telling men that it's creepy to marry anyone significantly younger, encroaching regulations and economic management making it harder for young people to earn incomes that allow them to raise children respectably, obesity and general unfitness, unprecedentedly sophisticated entertainment (including pornography) competing with socialization for people's limited leisure time, advertising and entertainment constantly displaying far more attractive people than the average person's prospective mates, and urbanization.

It's not "prosperity" that makes people stop having kids, prosperity enables access to some of these conditions, and is associated with connections to a global culture that promotes the other conditions.

The idea that prosperity will automagically end population growth and bring about an eternally sustainable utopia is one of the sillier bits of fantasy circulating as a serious notion about the future, when most of the serious lines of thought are forbidden in polite company.

That's what I said, welfare queen.

And fuck off snowball, you and your gold bricking bravo foxtrot sisters don't scare me.

That's the only thing we can do if we want to realistically colonize Mars for the extremely long term benefits. Almost nothing could be for sale because of the insane shipping cost so there would be no products but luckily there's enough people on this planet that have both the money to go ( Assuming absolute best case scenario with full reusability ) and the drive to endure the shittyness of it all just so in the far future, a self sustaining colony might be possible which would then advance to be a decent home away from home that would keep us going when an eventual extinction event happens. I personally think a handful of astronauts in a rotating underground base controlling robots on the surface would be a much more economical approach to building the infrastructure for a self sustaining city though.

>>The point of planting crops on Maui is to feed people living on Maui.
>You're a fucking imbecile if you actually believe this makes any economic sense
Finding ways to live and provide for yourself on another planet, to gain a whole planet = makes no economic sense.

Exercising brutal state control to prevent humans from being born at anything more than replacement rates, so we can turn our back on the stars and stay on Earth forever = perfect economic logic.

Gotcha.

You can live in your ivory tower until the enemy comes knocking. And then what are you going to do, throw scientific papers at them until they go away?

You take your security for granted, which is surprisingly unscientific. It's almost as if you knew nothing about history and human nature.

>Finding ways to live and provide for yourself on another planet, to gain a whole planet = makes no economic sense.
Indeed it doesn't. We haven't mined all resources on Earth yet, and the transportation costs are abysmal, which means there won't be an evacuation. You can have a small number of people going, while the rest are left behind. Why should they pay for your bullshit?

Also the investment horizons are far too long and the probability of failure is extremely high.

Reducing birth rates would of course be much more elegant, if people actually complied. But okay, they won't and so their children will live in abject poverty forever. Let's at least close the borders then and not repeat the same mistake here.

>I want to waste my tax money on tinfoil projects because if i don't the other unique alternative will destroy the earth
Holy fuck my sides. Keep it up, muh clown.

I take nothing for granted. There's a Victor papa after my mos on my dd214.

>implying a carefully designed weighted suit along with a rich diet can't mitigate this sort of issue

It can't and I'm not even implying.

>implying we can't build special rotating wheels that create centripetal force and can be used by pregnant women a few hours a day to help mitigate weakness to the bones

That's retarded. Why not just make O'Neill Cylinders in space instead and live on those?

>implying in the long run we won't genetically engineer this problem out of people

Good luck with that, kid.

>the rest of your post

Those are nothing but logical fallacies.

That isn't the reason. The reason developed countries have less children is because of consumerist propaganda. It trains them to be extremely selfish and they end up babying themselves instead of having children. They end up staying mentally immature for decades longer than normal.

>We haven't mined all resources on Earth yet
...because it made no sense to the found the USA before all of Europe's resources were mined, right?

How could you ever have mistaken this for an intelligent argument?

The thing about land and resources on Earth is that people already own or otherwise control them. They can exploit them for additional profit, but if you just want to claim them, you've got a fight on your hands. There's a value in exploiting what you have, and a value in claiming something you can exploit.

>the transportation costs are abysmal
Jesus, this stupid meme.

Rockets are expensive because, for various reasons, very little honest effort has been put into lowering their costs, particularly their labor costs. They've been launched primarily by governments, which means that the people in charge of the programs measure their importance (and consequent current status and future career prospects) by the budget under their management, while the people doing the work need to be able to show that their prices are based on real expenses. The incentive of both of these groups of people is to keep the costs as high as they can get away with, and because it's "rocket science", they can get away with an awful lot of bullshit. You can see this especially clearly in the shuttle program, a supposed cost-saving project which was transformed into blatant pork.

Truly private competition has not been allowed, due to the military significance of rockets.

The actual, unavoidable physical cost of a person going to orbit in a chemical rocket is about half a ton of fuel (including what you have to burn to extract and liquefy oxygen). Once you're in orbit, everything else you need can be provided from space resources. To launch that person to rendezvous with a Venus cycler would take another couple hundred kilograms of material thrown from the moon by a simple solar thermal gas gun. The cycler can be made from the resources of an asteroid.

>...because it made no sense to the found the USA before all of Europe's resources were mined, right?
Not really, no. Which is why they did it after. And promptly lost the colonies.

>The thing about land and resources on Earth is that people already own or otherwise control them.
Ok, I trust you can build a self-sufficient Venus colony without initial investment of resources that are already owned by people. So you don't need tax funding.

Check back here when you have livable real-estate to offer at competitive prices.

Good. That is probably the one good thing that ever happened. If you don't like it, go to Africa and shit 10 children into the dirt.

>If you don't like it, go to Africa and shit 10 children into the dirt.

And give up a life of NEET bliss? Fuck that.

>welfare queen.
lol.

just popping in to tell you faggots how good this military shit is.

I spent 4 years drinking beer, traveling the world, and chasing pussy (i was a POG, you bullet sponges can masturbate about the desert all you want). now, with the post 9-11 GI bill and scholarships i pocket 50k$ a year just for getting good grades in college.

enjoy your crippling debt and/or shit tier work-a-matic job as i take 9 credits a semester and have a dope pad in the city. all courtesy of you, John Q Taxpayer. oh, and you can thank me for my service later :^)

>So you don't need tax funding.
Why do you think I support tax funding?

Look, most of SpaceX's plans aren't supported by tax money. They got tax money to build an expendable medium-lift rocket and a single-use, parachute-recovered LEO capsule. They're building a reusable superheavy-lift rocket and a propulsive-landing reusable capsule that can land on Mars.

How is this possible? Well, they're getting a lot of commercial launch contracts, but primarily, their sincere technical ambitions are also attracting the best people and motivating them to work very long hours for ordinary salaries. It's essentially a volunteer effort, by extremely talented people who want to see mankind step into space.

The main thing they're getting from the government is being permitted to operate.

NASA's talking about landing a man on Mars sometime around 2040 (after everybody there now is retired). SpaceX is talking about starting routine flights to Mars around 2025, funded by the money from the satellite business they've started (SpaceX Seattle).

>sustainable Mars colony as volunteer effort
Yeah, right.

>SpaceX is talking about starting routine flights to Mars around 2025, funded by the money from the satellite business they've started (SpaceX Seattle).
Talk is cheap. What we will see is lots and lots of backpaddling and calls for public funding.

But, I don't have any debt and I can shitpost on Veeky Forums 24/7. I'm not seeing an upside to this "going out and doing shit" thing you speak of.

>But, I don't have any debt and I can shitpost on Veeky Forums 24/7

but do you get paid to shitpost?

What for? Just apply for disability.

Personally, I see Mars colonization as more of a high-concept unifying vision for people who can't understand how much more there is to do in space, like showing children robots to get them to study programming. The important thing is that they're putting honest effort into lowering the cost of spaceflight.

When we get their fully-reusable rockets, I think we'll be pretty heavily focused on LEO and the moon for a while, and on throwing material from the moon to Earth orbit, which can be done, using catapults and aerobraking rather than rockets, on the scale of freight trains rather than airliners.

The big problem with space is that there's no material in LEO. Getting yourself to LEO is not that hard, but then there's nothing there except what you've brought.

If we had millions of tons of raw materials waiting in LEO, it would be interesting to do things there, to build stations and factories and laboratories and amusement parks, and produce propellant for departure to deeper space. That's the situation we can create from the moon, without waiting years for launch windows or coasting for months to attempt the journey and see results.

The initial steps toward this or Mars colonization are the same. Reaching for Mars will put first LEO, then the moon in reach, which will make LEO much more interesting and profitable.

>"The unemployed are so because they refuse to work!"
Are edgelords really this edgy?

>"The actual, unavoidable physical cost of a person going to orbit in a chemical rocket is about half a ton of fuel"
>maintenance and refurbishment costs completely ignored

Do you seriously consider your military brothers that actually put their life on the line ''bullet sponges''? Serious question, no dick measuring, no arguments about anything else, just curious.

Maintenance and refurbishment costs are arbitrarily reducible, and therefore not "unavoidable physical costs".

Anyway, for most chemical-fueled vehicles, the fuel and maintenance costs are comparable. The average car driver spends around half his auto budget on fuel and half on everything else: buying the car, changing the oil, tires, repairs, etc. The sum of the plane ticket prices on a typical airline flight is usually about triple the cost of the fuel, and that's with paying for their share of the airport operations, all the overhead of selling tickets, advertising, profit, the pilot's salary, etc.

You might say there's a "fuck it" line around the cost of the fuel. When the non-fuel mechanical costs of a long-lived fuel-consuming system get close to the cost of fuel, the people who might reduce the cost further start to say "fuck it". There's clearly money available in the region of the fuel cost. Why should all the non-fuel businesses settle for less? Fuck it. Better to try and gain a market advantage through things like superior fuel economy, better reliability, or a wider range of product, than to reduce their own footprint.

If there's an honest market, we can reasonably expect reusable rockets to come steadily down toward a small multiple of the cost of fuel, and then stick there.

What's the point in buying that candy bar you ate earlier, you fat fuck?

You had money and you wanted the candy bar.

We have money and we want to go to Mars. Fuck you.

Yes.

>We have money
Hahaha.

>We all know that Mars colony won't be self-sufficient in over 100 years and terraforming Mars will take thousands of years. It's a gigantic, ultraexpensive project.

Sooner started, sooner finished.

Because Elon's whole shtick is using romance to get investments for projects in low-competition industries.

I generally believe in reuseable rockets, I think it's a great technology but the market is my main issue with it. No matter how wondrous a technology is if there's not much of a market it won't take off. Right now there's no reason for lots of people to be in space. I know Veeky Forums can't imagine not wanting to go to Mars but you must think about the wider population; most don't give a shit about space.

>cycler
lol
cycler shit is a meme
It makes far more sense to build shit on earth, using our cheap abundant resources, then spend the million dollars of fuel it'll cost to ship it to venus/mars/jupiter

Going to the moon is difficult because there is no air to aerobrake.

Sure, I think in the near term future we will see autonomous ion powered mining ships going to near earth asteroids.
But I don't think we'll be doing too much with the moon, takes too much delta V.

You're absolutely right about most people not wanting to go to Mars but man do i hope theres at least ~50,000 people out of 7 billion that could both afford it, and be capable, driven, and crazy enough to go. I think a lot more people would love to go to Mars long term if it was developed with luxury and culture.

Elon is an autist, who doesn't care about that. He wants to go to mars and everything he's done is about going to mars.

You are assuming that the space launch market is a fixed quantity. Which is nonsense.
As well Musk can own the entire US launch, EU launch, Russia launch, South America/Africa launch just with the existing reusable falcon 9/heavy.

That alone gives him billions of dollars to play with, which he is investing into his next gen launch vehicle, a super heavy, which will be fully reusable and capable of putting 200+ tons into LEO per launch.

The operations & construction costs of all space craft today are geared around the cost of the launch vehicle. As things go down, suddenly you can do stuff like actually testing your design before committing to the final vehicle, or launching 10 probes instead of 1 for essentially the same overall cost.

Which why you don't do something as flagrantly idiotic as sending people to Mars on the dollar of a people that is largely idiotic and highly prone to thoughtless emotion-driven kneejerk reactions.

The development of human spacefaring will be perpetually hamstrung if the government's the one responsible for it.

There's not going to be any human colonies in the solar system or anywhere else in the universe until we find a way to get around the whole conservation of momentum problem. I don't think people realize just how much energy is required to get a kilogram of mass from Earth to Mars.

>what is a mars cycler?

You'd still have to get huge amounts of mass into earth orbit.

nuclear thermal rockets when

To me, this is one of the reasons why a Mars colony makes sense. Yes, getting setting up there will take vast amounts of energy. Once it's done it's done, though, and we can spin up industry on a body with 1/3rd of Earth's gravity without having to deal with the issues faced by industrial machinery in space or on the surface of the moon. Building heavy equipment for the surface of Mars wouldn't be all that different from building equipment for Earth.

Colonizing other bodies and mining asteroids will be dramatically less resource intensive and cheaper once we have a Martian city running self-sufficiently. The costs for establishing it would pay themselves back quickly not only in the financial sense but in the scientific and technological sense, too. Launch costs are already in freefall here, and launching from Mars is so much easier that I wouldn't be surprised if a Martian rocket launch would cost tens of thousands or even thousands instead of the millions it costs here.

I don't think you have an concept of how much oil/natural gas is burnt annually, nor how cheap it is

Energy is not the issue. Having fully reusable rockets is.

We should be more focused on developing a robot that can hold tools and traverse on uneven terrain and send it to Mars instead of regular people.

>what is Boston Dynamics

All they've built is a headless, buzzing dog that can't do anything.

You greatly overestimate the benefits of the low gravity on mars
It still takes a rocket
But now you don't have a population base to build them, or to fuel them, or to provide power

Fuel costs are really not that big of a deal, and they will always be cheaper on earth than mars.

Were you hiding under a rock for a year or so?
>what is Atlas

They've got a long way to go.

And that's why Musk so often stresses that if we're going to colonize Mars, it needs to be an actual colony/city and not a rinkydink science outpost sort of thing. For it to work it's going to need all sorts of people doing all sorts of things.

And you're right that fuel costs aren't that big of a deal, but hardware costs are, and anything launched from the surface of Mars is going to experience far less stress than would've been experienced launching from Earth. This means that Martian rocket builders can afford to cut corners that can't be cut on Earth, making the manufacture and maintenance of reusable crafts cheaper.

>it needs to be an actual colony/city
He doesn't have the money for that, which immediately reveals the hypocracy of all those here who say he doesn't want tax funding.

You've gotta start somewhere, user.
What do you think will happen if we wait until we can technically send half our population there in one go?

What he's saying is true regardless of how funded he his or isn't. Mankind's future in space is going to be dismal until it stops being a collective limp dick and makes serious attempts at colonization of other bodies.

He'll take funding from wherever he can get it but you're deluded if you think he isn't setting his companies up for eventual self sufficiency. It's the sole reason Seattle's SpaceX offices are working on dramatically higher quality satellite internet service and the first ever mass-produced generic satellite platform. The first is a goldmine and the second has a huge market in parties interested in having satellites in orbit but can't afford the costs associated with developing one from scratch.

>Mankind's future in space is going to be dismal until it stops being a collective limp dick and makes serious attempts at colonization of other bodies.
Cry me a river.

Not an argument.

I could just say

>cry me a river wahhh wahhhh stop trying to advance into space its hard and doesnt add inches to my dick or make my rent get lower wahh

Cry me a river.

And then you could say

>crying about my crying about his crying

''Cry me a river.''

What "argument" do you want to hear?

I don't give a shit about humanity going into space, I was responding to the hypocracy that Musk can't afford a colony, demands a colony, and then his fanboys pretend he's not going to extract money from tax payers who simply want to fund their own fucking private lives.

You're lying through your teeth.

I'm actually convinced that the Madman, seeing how his shit actually fucking works out, will open-source hes design, for other companies/governments to take.
I think he's committed to the core.

And you can't seem to understand that separate from Musk and SpaceX and all that, the pace of progress will continue to be a near-standstill as long as we allow our obsession with overprice RC cars to continue. Great returns require great investment.

It's unfortunate that you deem human presence in space unnecessary, but there are plenty of people who disagree.

This is the impression I get too. He'll probably open up the patents for everything he can – the US government probably won't allow him to open up the rockets (ICBM concerns) but there should be no such issue with actual crafts themselves (Dragon, MCT, etc).

>It's unfortunate that you deem human presence in space unnecessary
It's just rational, given the reality of the situation and the values humanity incorporate, not in as an ideal, but in practical reality.

People want to hear songs of glory and meaning about their nature and their projects, positive to the core, progress! growth! flourishing!

But the practical truth is misery. All space colonization can do is burn a shitton of money and then increase the number of people (and animals) that will live in misery.

It doesn't solve the fundamental logic of malthusianism, because growth just multiplies need. It doesn't solve the problem of suffering. It won't even be voluntary because in reality nothing is ever truly voluntary.

Now you will reframe all these truths as whining on my part and use them as a status attack. But in reality, aside from framing and status wars, it remains a fact that your pet project has no value and it will cause more money to be stolen from people who just want to fund their own private lives.

If we had evil aliens who want to conquer the universe and erect torture chambers everywhere, we would have a reason to prevent that. But realistically speaking, that actually describes humanity pretty well, and there seems to be no competition.

Well to be technically exact, SpaceX hasn't patented any of its technology.
The Musk argued it was because they didn't want China to come up with the exact same rocket.
The man needs the money for proof of work. That's all.That's why it's gonna work.
In an alternate scenario, he could just sell it for the cheap, at other private foreign companies.

I'm not I just wanted to hear specifically how ''Mankind's future in space is going to be dismal until it stops being a collective limp dick and makes serious attempts at colonization of other bodies.'' isn't true but instead of countering it you just tried to say that his post has no substance and is purely just whining, crying.

>I was responding to the hypocracy that Musk can't afford a colony, demands a colony, and then his fanboys pretend he's not going to extract money from tax payers who simply want to fund their own fucking private lives.

Having your tax dollars being used on something you don't want is pretty annoying but either it will somehow be funded by him and hundreds of others, 500,000 dollars per person, or will somehow take maybe a half a percent to a couple percent of the budget if everyone was on board, but I personally would be complaining about the F-35 program first because at least, at least doing shit on Mars would have some spin off technologies and maybe inspire kids to work hard and get into stem whereas the F-35 program just kinda gets scooted under the carpet of the entire military budget (16%) as a ''whoopsy, but what do you care we spend lots of money all the time and it keeps you safe! hurr''.

But I know, I know, you don't wan't any money being used for shit you don't care about at all and pointing to a bigger pile of garbage doesn't make a smaller pile disappear. We can at least agree that Musk fanbois can be really annoying.

What's incredible to think about, is that with Elon Musk metrics, The Military could have colonized Mars a few thousands times by now.
Wouldn't even surprised if they're already there.

Military conflict is a zero-sum game. Of course it consumes resources while seemingly not achieving anything.

But there is no alternative, without a global surveillance state and one world government, which would be even worse.

>Now you will reframe all these truths as whining on my part
No, this isn't whining. This is an idiot trying to pose as a well-informed, intelligent person by passing off cynical pessimism as sophistication, to impress people on an anonymous laotian fingerpuppet imageboard.

And here we go with the status attack.

You were the one who pretended human presence is space is some kind of world improvement.

Objectively it isn't and you can't even fund it without stealing and then lying about that fact.

But thanks for being so predictable, you truly are a despicable specimen and worthy of hostility.

>It doesn't solve the problem of suffering.

It's not meant to make everyone's lives down here instantly be perfect, it's to increase our chances of our species surviving in the incredibly long term.

And what do the individuals who pay gain from that?

It isn't a world improvement, It's a species improvement.

You're a fucking retard.

What is a "species improvement" and why would anyone give a shit?

It sure as hell is not about preventing human misery because, if it achieves anything at all, it will cause more of it.

There's enough even in the solar system's asteroid belt alone (not even counting the planets or the more distant objects) to sustain a population growing 25x the current rate for hundreds of thousands of years. Our solar system as a whole could keep us going for much, much longer. There's so much out there that tapping it will put our economy in a state that it's never been in before even once in our entire history. It's unprecedented.

The jump in population growth required to push the limits of what our system can provide would have to be so unbelievably massive that it's not even possible in less than several hundred generations, each with maximum output (which is unlikely). Even then, with such an increased population progressively more monumental feats become possible and things like generation ships start looking feasible.

But none of this will ever happen if we don't stop navel gazing and obsessing over things that just don't fucking matter.

That's an entire problem entirely. Namely population control.
It's a fucking bad thing to say, but we have to do it somehow.
I don't fathom the means by which it will be accomplished, but we just have to.
If we don't we'll just die off. Whether if it's running out of Earth, or running out of Solar System.

>I was responding to the hypocracy that Musk can't afford a colony, demands a colony, and then his fanboys pretend he's not going to extract money from tax payers who simply want to fund their own fucking private lives.
Musk knows, like everybody knows, that the US government isn't going to spend tax money establishing a Mars colony. What it may pay for are some of the initial exploration missions. What it is definitely paying for is some of the initial R&D costs for foundational, multi-purpose technology.

The US government, and other governments, are spending large amounts of money on space exploration and promoting technological progress already. When you single out someone who's actually using some of that money effectively, rather than running men in circles to put a "reasonable profit margin" on their taxpayer-funded salaries in his pocket, it doesn't seem like you're honestly against the collection and use of taxes, but just casting about wildly for ammunition against the designated target of the moment.

In other words, you see people enthusiastic about what Musk's doing, and you don't really understand, but you're annoyed by it and want to spoil their enthusiasm, so you're making up anything that sounds remotely like a plausible argument against it, regardless of how ridiculous it sounds to actually informed people who can put it in context.

Typical Veeky Forums shitposting: a worthless person trying to feel significant by having some, any effect on others.

>When you single out someone who's actually using some of that money effectively, rather than running men in circles to put a "reasonable profit margin" on their taxpayer-funded salaries in his pocket
False dichotomy, as has been pointed out dozens of times before.

>Typical Veeky Forums shitposting: a worthless person trying to feel significant by having some, any effect on others.
Speak for yourself, asshole. I don't give a shit about your feelings.

>And here we go with the status attack.
>You activated my trap card!
Next will be, "I was only pretending to be retarded!"

>>to impress people on an anonymous laotian fingerpuppet imageboard.
>You were the one who pretended human presence is space is some kind of world improvement.
Do you really not get how an anonymous board works?

I just saw you being garbage, so I commented on what garbage you are.

Please go be garbage somewhere else.

I won't bullshit you with the answer you don't want to hear. ( Don't be selfish bro it helps your fellow man, learn to give a little for the greater good. or something like that )

Spin off technologies, Mars entertainment, science, and maybe a microscopically tiny improvement in the economy because kids might work harder because they're inspired. It's not as good as investing in a farm or some shit but its a lot better than some of the fucking shit we spend on other stuff that has even less benefits.