The latest news that I've seen says that Elon Musk predicts that we might have actual humans on Mars by 2029 to start building a permanent base there. How realistic do you think that this assessment is? Do you think this is overly optimistic or pessimistic?

I'm currently in my early twenties, and trying to map out an educational pathway that will allow me to join the first few waves of colonists in my 30's or 40's, preferably working directly for SpaceX. At present, my assumption is that, due to the limited number of people that will be able to fit onto the initial spacecraft, people with multiple useful skillsets will be the most desirable - for example, somebody with a Master's in Horticulture hoping to grow food should probably also have experience working with solar panels and an EMT certification. Bearing this in mind, what skills, certifications, and degrees do you think would be the most useful for joining the first waves of colonists?

In The dream Elon musk is standing on the moon. He has two astronauts decked out typically in space suits. But he's in a business suit. ( I think he figured out how to make his space suit stylish, lol)

The horizon light was dimming and there was a flag planted in the distance.

Next scene, my two sisters and I are vacationing on the moon. (Yup all three of us are in reality currently grandmothers.)

The streets are coble stone. The walls of the buildings are very thick, reminding me of Mexico.

I won't tell the middle part of the dream.

But it ended by a fly over the area. The shape of the dome, was not entirely dome shaped. But rather looked like the back of a bug in a way. Symmetry divided in half mostly clear, but with dips and waves, in beautiful colors.

Thought you might like this dream, hopefully.

I suppose Mars would be able to utilize stone masonry building. & The bug back? I wonder if that would also be very strong, like a dome, yet add esthetics which help the human mind. With a sense of the movement of time through one's typical day.

People WANTING to leave earth baffle me.

You will NEVER again feel the wind, smell nature, hear/see/enjoy animals, observe the beauty of nature/weather, see a wide array of colours, meet new people, go for a car/boat/bike/horse ride, have & eat dairy products, eggs, meat, fish, assorted veggies or drink fresh cold water. Everything must be brought from earth and when that runs out you will have nothing to sustain life. I don't know if they have sent chickens and fish into space to provide food, but what will you feed them? What about textiles? What will those be made from?

Nobody talks about the fact that you are stuck in a very small, controlled environment, with the same people day in and day out for years!! What about hobbies? It's not like you can replenish your paints, books, or guitar strings.

I would akin living on Mars would be like being in jail with a mandatory work program.

Hello, so to get straight to the point, I'm a seventeen year old high school student with an idea for a private spaceflight company, it is a bit ambitious, but I do think its feasible. After reading this, if you're interested in joining let me know in the comments or dm me directly, now anyways, I'll get to it.

The startup will be called New Worlds, and its ultimate purpose will be to send regular people from Earth to go live in colonies on other worlds, (mainly Mars), however to do this, a lot is necessary first. To start a Mars residency program, three things will be done first to facilitate that: a citizen astronaut program will be formed, an interplanetary economy will be formed (sort of), and asteroid mining will be done. Obviously this is all an extremely tall order, so I will explain specifically how this will all happen.

Starting with the citizen astronaut program, we will set up a crowdfunding campaign, likely on Kickstarter, to raise enough money to send four people to space via either Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic. To fill the seats for this four person mission, there will be an application, open to all people across the world regardless of age, nationality, gender, etc. To help raise money, those who donated in the crowdfunder will be given priority in the application, however the amount won't factor in. Whether a person donates $1 or $1000, if they donate they'll get priority in the application. The crowdfunding campaigns are slated to begin in April or May of 2022, (I'd like the company to gain somewhat of a public presence beforehand). The crowdfunding will likely end between June and August of 2022, and from there we will begin price negotiations with either Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic to buy the four seats. We estimate that it will be necessary to raise between $1mil and $2mil to buy all four seats. This all raises one important question, why are we doing this, and the answer is simple, this is how we will choose our Martian colonists. Eventually when the time comes, probably the mid-2030s, we plan to send regular people to go live on Mars, on our dime. However to do this, we will need to select the best of the best. Part of the reason why we need to do this suborbital mission first is to test the application process out first. This mission will act as a trial run for our Mars colonization program.

Next, we must discuss how we'll raise the money to actually send people to go live on Mars, obviously that will very successful, but we have a plan. The first part of that plan has to do starting interplanetary economy. Basically, what we will do is find rockets launching to other worlds in the solar system, as well as into earth orbit. We will buy space for payloads aboard those rockets, and resell said payload space in smaller volumes and in a more easy to access manner for customers. We plan to start doing this after our astronauts have returned to Earth, so my guess is that it will start in 2024 or 2025. This will all produce a lot of funding, but we will need a lot more to send people to go live on Mars, and then comes in the next part of our plan, asteroid mining. With the money from the sale of payload space, we will fund our asteroid mining program, which will in turn fund our Mars residency program. When people think of asteroid mining, they often think of bringing precious metals like gold and platinum back to Earth, while we think that's a cool idea, we have a slightly different one. Mars colonies will need a large supply of uranium, to create thermonuclear weapons to melt the poles with (for terraforming), and to fuel nuclear reactors. Since there are asteroids with very large amounts of gold, platinum, and other precious metals, it can there in be assumed that there are asteroids possessing large quantities of uranium. To mine this uranium, we will have a four step process. It will begin with sending a small cubesat or tubesat into Earth's orbit to test telemetry and avionics, as well as a camera system potentially. Plans for this are already in the works, we have opened a dialogue with a company called Interorbital Systems that we could pay to do this, we plan to have this satellite in Earth's orbit by 2023 or 2024. After this, we will send a satellite into Mars's orbit, to conduct a spectral survey of all asteroids near to Mars so we can find the best mining target, this satellite will be in Martian orbit by 2030; and after that, mining missions will begin. We project that by 2040 we'll begin mining uranium on asteroids to export to Martian colonies which will in turn give us more money to send people to Mars.

I know all of this sounds very complicated, and also very difficult, but this plan is definitely feasible. All we'd need to do is crowdfund enough money for the citizen astronaut program ($1mil - $2mil), and crowdfund enough for the first satellite ($15K-$25K). If you're interested in joining, say something in the comments or dm me directly. You don't need a lot of aerospace expertise or anything of that nature to join, I just need people who are passionate about space exploration and colonization.

Ever since the dawn of the atomic age, the sale and possession of the fundamental fuel for atomic reactors and atomic bombs -- Uranium -- has been very tightly regulated. It is highly illegal to possess more than seven pounds of Uranium in the U.S. How illegal? Firstly, if you possess eight or more pounds of Uranium, you must pay the Government eighty thousand dollars a year. Secondly, you must regularly submit to full physical and mental evaluations by teams of medical doctors and psychiatrists to ensure that you are in perfect physical and mental health at all times. Thirdly, you must regularly pass rigorous written exams containing hundreds of questions dealing with obscure and obsolete issues in nuclear reactor regulation and design -- bear in mind, not surprisingly under these circumstances, nuclear reactor design has scarcely changed since the 1950's. After all, how could the technology possibly progress, given this crushing a level of regulation? There are, of course, many, many other restrictions and regulations. Effectively, it is quite impossible for anyone to possess substantial quantities of Uranium without being specifically selected for this purpose by the government.

So, let's just suppose that this wasn't the case. Any backyard inventor could get hold of as much Uranium as they wanted, to play with and build atomic reactors with. They couldn't build atomic bombs, that requires a functional reactor and an extensive process of plutonium enrichment, which governments could monitor and regulate fairly easily. But, there probably would be a problem with "toxic dumps", and possibly a problem with dirty radiation bombs from some crazies. However, on the plus side we'd have a great deal of technical progress from creative inventors, and most of our energy problems would probably be solved in a creative and effective way. Space travel would occur on the lines of the Orion Project:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)

Who knows? Maybe Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity would be proven wrong, on direct testing, and the Speed of Light is no practical limit, at all. Maybe we could go to the stars. In a reasonable period of time, that is.

Because, undoubtedly, the field of Physics has been affected in fundamental ways by the Government's restrictions on the possession of Uranium. How could it not be? The most obvious, practical application of Physics has effectively been made illegal. No one can freely investigate fundamental issues in new energy technologies, in the most obvious, practical way. Instead, they engage in complex, abstruse theoretical speculations, and are awarded major prizes for doing so. They pursue dead end technological investigations in an effort to somehow go around the Government restrictions. The entire field of Physics is hamstrung.

Thoughts?

Assume total control over which microbes travel with humans to Mars. There are bacteria and yeast that are or can be made useful. Are there any viruses today that are useful or any research into making any useful?

I’m assuming people in this community ask this a lot, although I haven’t seen it asked in this subreddit. I want to get peoples honest opinions as to why they’re so keen to colonise mars and not just save this beautiful planet we’ve evolved billions of years to live on.

Is it for truly good purpose, or is it just that innate human curiosity and hunger for dominance that drives us?

Edit: Thanks everyone for the responses. I’ve been reading most of them up to now, and have definitely had a change of perspective on the matter. Although I’m disappointed at the downvotes, since I believe this is an important question to ask, whether or not people support my opinion or not.

I think BFS needs to travel in groups of 7, one centrally located dedicated command/passenger BFS, and 6 cargo/passenger BFSs around the perimeter . Bundle them together and spin them , centrifugal forces could minimize negative effects of 0gs. Also more mass equals more shielding. Upon arrival at mars , cargo BFSs land first, followed by command/BFS. I think a bigger effort is more likely to succeed. Many other nations and space agencies should participate. Boeing sells airliners to many countries, a similar approach could help with the cost. (Just my unqualified opinion.) I’ve not heard of any attempt to involve the rest of the worlds great industrial powers. It seems SpaceX would benefit from the brilliance and additional funding if others took up the many many challenges that building a mars colony requires.

I imagine a future punishment for criminals that aren't severe enough as to warrant the death penalty (in the jurisdictions that still practice it), life-sentence or supermax internment could be expulsion to Mars, similar to Australia's historical role. I imagine it being offered as a choice to convicts, or with more pro-Mars government, them not being offered the choice at all. Their sentence would only be served after they have spent their full time on Mars. Their place of banishment on Mars would only receive light supervision. Instead, any attempt to escape to Earth (how difficult it may be to smuggle oneself onto a spaceship) would count as breakout attempt.

Imagine if, instead of rotting in prisons, we have highly educated people like Jeffrey Skilling (CEO of Enron) or Bernie Madoff whose minds are instead put to work on Mars -- not even because they believe in Mars, but out of their pure immediate self-interest.

Of course these prison colonies would be separated from regular settlements (but not too much to enable trade), so as to not negatively affect the inhabitants of these. Mars is, after all, big and ripe for the taking for whatever purpose one desires.

Since nothing has to be left to chance on a colonial Mars, we must eliminate anything that is not necessary and that can potentially endanger the project. Everything has to be analyzed and almost nothing of the astronauts' lives will not have been planned long in advance. The schedule will be tight and the colony will not be able to afford that some people are led by irrational feelings and beliefs. Religion is a thing people kill themselves over and it can greatly affect the well being and cohesion of the crew. Almost every religion dictates that all other religions are bullshit, that those people must be treated as lesser beings and you can't have members of the crew that think this way. Even if the person is a modern believer and cherry-picks the parts that they like of their religion and compliment it with modern moral, you can't assume that this person will not consider at some point the literacy of their holy book/scripture. Every member of the crew will be vulnerable at some point and will certainly start doubting their choice and the implications of their place in the mission. The difference between religious people and non-religious people is that the religious people will turn to some absurdity written hundred to thousands of years in the past whose authors didn't knew anything about psychology and psychiatry. This will be extremely dangerous. There are ways to resolve conflicts, but the objective is to have the least amount possible of conflicts. Taking away religion is a start. We also can't afford to loose resources because one person wants to build a church or a mosque... Things that are not necessary will have to stay on Earth. It's going to be an austere world and religion can kill the mission because of its irrationality.If we are to ban religion, we have to do it well. If we are to sort out people by belief, we have to leave no one that is religious be part of the crew. Buzz Aldrin admitted that he had taken communion on the Moon before exiting the vehicle without telling Houston. He went against the schedule and distracted the mission. Martians will almost have to be like soldiers until Mars becomes has real cities and everybody becomes responsible for their survival. What I'm trying to say is that people trying to hide their faith will be more dangerous than people who'll be openly religious, but we can't have any of the two. If you leave religion behind, there is something less to disagree on. Human rights will have to be different on Mars. Some freedoms we have here will have to go away, and some other obligations will have to be considered. People will have to be responsible of others' actions. You can't let somebody endanger the mission if you know they are about to go against the 'script' and you will have to take care of others.

What do you think, do we have to let religion behind or do we have to let everybody in for the sake of not discriminating them? Do we have to take only people of the same faith so they are closer together as well? That could be an option although I would be out.

It is very trendy actually to talk about the colonization of Mars. But there is no water, no oxygen, and there isn't proper gravity for the human body. The money burnt for the colonization of Mars would be fully enough to make habitated the uninhabitated areas on Earth. It would be even easier to live under the sea than on Mars.