James Lovelock: 'I Would Not Waste My Fortune on Colonizing Mars'

> Also, I suspect that the people who are currently being persecuted (e.g. Uyghurs in China) won't be in a position to leave Earth any time soon (e.g. in the next 100 years).

I think you again need to look to the example of the New World. The Pilgrims were not persecuted like the Uyghurs. They were relatively well off English folk living in the Netherlands who felt that their laws were overly restrictive and prevented the free practice of their religion.

Thus, groups highly likely to colonize Mars would be traditionalist Catholics, evangelical Christians, and maybe some new age movements. These feel like the current system is persecuting them, but still have enough werewithal and freedom to be able to choose to move. That, and their respective philosophies encourage exploration. It is highly unlikely that any group that decided to move because of persecution would be a racial or ethnic one.

I know right?!

> "You can't breathe the air, the pressure of the atmosphere is a tiny fraction of what we have on Mount Everest"

Well, thank you professor science. An observation that my 8 year old nephew could have told me.

The benefit of colonizing mars is all of the ancillary technologies that come along with it. Reusable rockets will give us Starlink, Easier Space Travel and asteroid mining.

Making a habbitat on mars will force us to invest interplanetary internet protocols. It will force us to make better catalysis research for air, water, waste processing and synthesis.

Uninhabitability will force us to increase automation capabilities so robots can build the base structures before we arrive.

Going multiplanetary will give our species apocalypse redundancy.

I'm sure I only touched on 5% of the reality because my imagination is so limited, but anyone who's done a tiny amount of reading on the subject can see the insane benefits, including commercial opportunities that exist here.

But James Lovelock "wouldn't waste his fortune" on these endeavours - isn't it good we don't live in a world of pessimists like him who would hoard their future, secure in the knowledge that, when the planet finishing asteroid hits us, at least he can be vaporised with his pile of money, and it wouldn't have been "wasted"

Sure, but there's a very different barrier between joy rides where they make extremely sure you know the high risk of death (and also your heirs, so they can't sue) and regular, regulated mass transit passenger flights from one spot on the Earth to the other.

I don't doubt that crewed launches will happen before 100,000. But keep in mind that Starship 1) is supposed to be super cheap to fly with fast turnaround, so you can afford a bunch of test flights and 2) will be used for launching a bunch of stuff into orbit already. Falcon 9 will have nearly 100 launches before it launches Dragon Crew, and that one has a launch abort system. 3) Starship has no full abort system like Dragon, so you're going to have to rely on flight history.

Flying people on charter flights may be feasible earlier, as the risk tolerance for general aviation is MUCH higher.

Base jumping has a fatality rate of about 1 in 1000, so to get risk down to 1 in 1000, you're going to need around 500-1000 consecutive successful launches (OR a lot of incredibly expensive mission assurance engineering... honestly might be cheaper just to do hundreds of test launches!). Regular skydiving is MUCH safer at 1 fatality in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000.

I expect the lunar flyby will require a good 25 to 100 consecutive successful launches beforehand. Starlink is supposed to have up to 40,000 satellites eventually. Starship can do about 400 at a time, so that's 100 launches right there. (There's some confusion, there... some say the permit is actually for 12,000 satellites. But Starship is still expected to do a bunch of regular commercial launches, say about 15-20 flights per year in addition to Starlink).

Driving and general aviation (private planes) are much less safe per mile than general aviation. If a Starship flight is 10,000 miles, to be as safe as driving a car, it only needs to get to 1 fatality in 10,000. To get as safe as a private jet (which the rich and famous seem to have no problems using), it's about 1 fatality in 10,000 to 50,000.

If we just have to be as safe as taking a motorcycle for 10,000 miles, that's just 1 in 500, which is pretty doable for Starship.

Ah I know of the Gaia Hypothesis, but did not remember Lovelock.