So they didn’t publish the letter then. Ho Hum

Very true. There is no physical export from Mars that is going to be worth the cost of bringing it back to Earth. Not even precious metals. However if Musk’s aim of true colonization is achieved, the “Life on Mars” reality TV series could be a great money spinner. Consequently the first wave of colonization is likely to consist of a disproportionate number of settlers chosen as “eye candy” rather than technical skill and ability to work hard in difficult conditions. The first structures built are likely to be for habitation, power, air and water then closely followed by the hair and nail salon. Only then will food production become a goal.

I can’t trust anybody who can’t even spell Cadwallader correctly.

Remember only a couple of years ago Elon Musk could do no wrong, as far as the media was concerned?

Then they discovered he’s mildly right of centre, which is why the Labour Party was coordinating with the Democrats to arrest and imprison Musk and confiscate his businesses if Trump lost.

The Left are so poor at doing good things they have to make up offences to accuse others of committing and the fact that they themselves pretend not to do them makes them look good.
So mining is the latest fashion as I suppose we all know TGQT+zrtphobia is stalling and transphobia is losing its shine. Islamophobia was always a bit of a non-starter because it’s so easily proved by killing some Lefties daughter after giving her a bit of a bonking with your mates or, rather more satisfyingly, throwing Owen Jones off a tall building. Admittedly, raping and pillaging an uninhabited planet is a bit of a pathetic concept but then Ms Catweazle is, um, a bit pathetic. Apologies to jgh for her incorrect naming.
The perfect example is the Labour prat – sorry, MP – who wants to ruin farmers because Fatcher did that to miners 40 years ago, conveniently overlooking the fact that his minister of energy security (!) would machine gun any miners he came across. When people accuse the current rabble of morons and thieves in power of being sixth form politicians I think they’re about 15 years out.

Any man who feels the need to build a rocket is not overconfident about his masculinity.

Is she talking about the man with so many kids, he has to give them serial numbers?

If Elon has any access to rare minerals on Mars then he’ll be using them on Mars to develop Mars itself.

If he needs stuff like Lithium, it’s likely to be found on Mars in similar quantities to Earth given that Mars developed in pretty much the same conditions as Earth did, the only exception being the Thea impactor.

The gravity on Mars is a fraction of that on Earth, so sending out mining teams for stuff not found on Mars would go out to the asteroid belt rather than anywhere else, but that isn’t going to happen for a long time.

The vast majority of goods shipped will be finished goods from Earth to Mars, the only thing coming back will be people.

BiW – Her argument is that she’s totally not obsessed with the richest man in the world, who has a tiny penis according to Carole Cadfael. Also it’s very important that Elon Musk isn’t able to spy on her purchases of boxed wine and cat litter:

Pay in cash. Ask yourself what an international drug trafficker would do, and do that. They’re not going to the dead drop by Uber or putting 20kg of crack cocaine on a credit card. In the broligarchy, every data point is a weapon. Download Signal, the encrypted messaging app. Turn on disappearing messages.

Colonising Mars will never make money. Mars is a shithole anyway, we need O’Neill cylinders to distribute humanity across the solar system in comfort and style. Instead of squatting in freezing holes on failed planets, let’s build our own planets.

These people assume that tech entrepreneurs create companies to make lots of money, when it’s really about solving interesting problems. Most of these people don’t care that much about personal wealth (houses, yachts, cars, clothes). They want to do things and the money enables that. Some things might be profitable, but if they have the money to do unprofitable things, they do.

Like Steve Jobs could have taken his money from his first time at Apple and just lived on that. He drove a nice Mercedes, lived in a nice house, but nothing extraordinary. He wore Levi’s jeans to work. But he put money into companies like Pixar and NeXT because they were interesting projects to him.

Tim

Your mistake was to use the patriarchal “Sirs”. No letter to the Guardian addressed thus is going anywhere but the bin.

@BF: what if he’d used Dear Sir/Madam? Or abbreviated it to Dear Sadam?

The latter sounds pretty suitable for the G.

Colonising Mars will never make money. Mars is a shithole anyway, we need O’Neill cylinders to distribute humanity across the solar system in comfort and style. Instead of squatting in freezing holes on failed planets, let’s build our own planets.

When you’re the richest man on the planet, what use is another couple of billion? What additional marginal utility would that provide to Elon Musk personally, whereas “The Man who conquered Mars” is an almost Alexandrian epithet.

People like Musk, Bezos and Gates are past making a buck or two. They are looking for a legacy that will live on beyond their own mortality.

That being said, would a Mars colony survive the death of Musk? Harder to answer, maybe Bezos might take up the mantle, maybe nobody, maybe the next trillionaire who today remains unknown.

Theo. There is no way of correctly spelling C7th Welsh princes. Standardised spelling isn’t really a thing before the C18th. And there is no way of transcribing the C7th Welsh language into the Latin character set. We have enough trouble with English. Cadwallader is simply a spelling some Englishman (an historian?*) came up with more recently. For a start there isn’t a Welsh language for the time. There were at least 3 regional variants & 4 periodic variants. I believe the Welsh may have had their own character set, in the same way that the precursor to English had. And how accurately they transcribed Welsh is anyone’s guess.
I did at one time actually know a few words in Welsh picked up from a friend. There are sounds that are just impossible to represent in Latin characters. The letters used in modern written Welsh are really just placeholders.
* I used that particular indefinite article to indicate how hard this is. Depends how you pronounce ‘historian’ when spoken. English doesn’t like consecutive vowels.

Oops with the closing of tags! Note to self: Look below for the WYG. No the site doesn’t need an edit function. It’s contributors do!

Incidentally the double-L in written Welsh definitely isn’t the double-L in written English. As it isn’t in Spanish. So I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be Cadwalladar. You’d tie your tongue in a knot trying to say the letter sequence.

Or will they be essentially slaves or serfs, owned by the Wayland-Yutani corporation and spending every penny in the company store? If you’re going somewhere where even the air you breathe needs to be expensively piped in and you can’t afford to leave, are you a colonist or a prisoner?”

Yes, Alien: Romulus illustrates this exact problem. Quite a good movie as well.

A century or so back, Ms. Cadwallad(e)r’s condition was referred to as hysteria. A good seeing-to was recognised as a treatment, and the vibrator was invented to save doctors the onerous chore of administering it.

That said, I can’t imagine treating Ms. Cadwallad(e)r being a great deal of fun. It’d be a bit like trying to shag Shelob.

WB – In London, Noone Can Hear You Scream

JG – I haven’t seen any of those films since the one where Sigourney Weaver was bald and miserable.

M – How much is it gonna cost to send humans and cargo to Mars? Probably aren’t enough billionaires to justify a first class deck.

Also the Europeans who conquered America were taking valuable land with a reasonable ROI, but land on Mars is worthless. Can’t grow corn or raise cattle in Valles Marineris. Assuming bioengineering ever works, you’ll see a return in 10,000 years maybe?

And you wouldn’t really be living on Mars, you’d be living in an oxygen tent on Mars. That sounds like a nightmare.

But with a cluster of O’Neill cylinders, we can have entire cities* in space. Free solar energy, 24/7. Spun at a comfortable 0.9g that won’t cause bone deformities in your children. Cheap resources nudged your way by automated spaceships surveying the asteroid belt. Places you can live in, and still walk on grass or fly kites.

*Gleaming high tech metropolises a la 21st century Asia, not modern Western cities (eww)

My theory is, there needs to be a better reason for colonising Mars than “it might eventually save mankind from extinction”. Either a pressing social, cultural or religious need that is so powerful it can command enormous resources on Earth, or cold, hard cash that you can spend on triple-breasted Martian hookers.

Plenty of CO2 on Mars. So plants could do well if watered. Not sure about our modern cereal crops, adapted to very low CO2 levels, though.
Might have to engineer some variants of prehistoric ferns or something

I don’t think there’s plenty of CO2 on Mars. The atmosphere is, as I understand it, disproportionately CO2 compared to Earth, but a very thin atmosphere because most of it escaped due to the low gravity.

The radiation problems of living on the surface of the Moon or Mars would be solved by issuing the girls with purple wigs.

Instead of spending all this dosh on getting to Mars and making it ‘habitable’, I wish Elon would spend it on making the planet we’ve already got a bit more pleasant.

Those dust storms are nasty, and radiation is, shall we say, an Issue. You’ll have to go Troglodyte like on the Moon to set up any possible permanent residence that has even a remote possibility to succeed.

There’s been quite a lot of work done on this and movie portrayals down reflect reality (The Martian et al).

Dust storms while problematic aren’t as bad as portrayed or anywhere near Earth dust storms. The particulates are far smaller than Earth dust storms (closer to cigarette smoke/ash) and the thinness of the atmosphere means they are a fraction of the density. The biggest hazard from dust storms is visibility and reduced solar power generation.

Radiation is problematic, but they’ve also found that close to the walls of Martian craters and canyons (Mars has lots of these), they are much reduced aided by marginally increased atmospheric pressure in the deeper canyons.

While using Martian soil is an obvious solution to reducing radiation, it doesn’t need to be total, a shielded covering on top being sufficient to bring radiation down to a manageable level while leaving the sides open for light are a feature of much of the proposed Martian habitation design.

Possibly depends on temperature. Hot you get a Venus. Cold an ice & ocean world. In the middle, Mars.

“How will Martians pay the mortgage?”

Well, I suspect that Mars will be settled (if it is) rather the same way that the New World was. You went out and staked a claim. Or you bought a claim from someone who had.

It is an an interesting question. Kim Stanley Robinson has a go at it in the Red/Green/Blue Mars trilogy which goes from second landing through terraforming. But predictably as an an environmentalist/socialist his is a Big Government/because it’s there, motivated project all the way through. Although you do get a failed war of independence & later a Mars/Earth military confrontation. Yanks to tend to reprise US history.
I think Musk sees it as more of a Disneyland. People would go there to be there, simples. But that could work. That’s really the why of where I’m living. This was the poorest part of Spain. Then Torremolinos happened. Tourism needed a tourist industry to support it. And a tourist industry needs an economic infrastructure to supply it. And now people come to benefit from/be part of that infrastructure until you end up with an entire economy. There’s actually very few people here directly involved with the tourists. It’s not far off a self contained economy.
Doubt there would ever be a Mars/Earth physical commerce unless the price of DeltaV became trivial.. But you could very well get M/E trade in information
space. Mars society/economy could very leading edge.

Another question is why climb up out of a gravity well just to drop down into another? The DeltaV to Earth orbit takes you half way to anywhere. With space, you do have to stop thinking in terms of distance & start thinking in terms of DeltaV & time. Things that seem to be very close together in physical space can be a long way apart in DeltaV/time & vica versa.

Good point, Mr Galt. One wonders about similar for the Earth/Luna trade. The Apollo series did it quickly because the spacecraft couldn’t support a crew for much longer. But it meant they had a helluva clip on for aerobraking on the return & used a lot of propellant. There’s much more economical transfer orbits take longer used for unmanned probes. means you don’t have to lift the same masses of propellant to Earth orbit because you don’t need the DeltaV. And much less at each end for relatively small craft make the rendezvous. Consumables to support crew for the duration would be far less mass than propellant for the short duration transfer. The cycler only needs its DeltaV the once.
What I meant about that distance/time/DeltaV thing. The Earth/Luna trip can be different things depending how you do it. One tends to think of it as Earth/Luna. But it isn’t. It’s low Earth orbit to a higher Earth orbit the Moon’s in. So a velocity change & you want to do the least of that.