Ask HN: Are you convinced enough by Elon Musk's vision to go to Mars now? Why?

No. Because it&#x27;s bad science, and bad engineering. He&#x27;s mistaken about scale, about logistics, about individual movations, legal structure, about closed and open cycle economies in energy, food and air.<p>He&#x27;s espousing a fantasy and sucking in money and time and labour which could be better used.<p>It&#x27;s a giant Ketamine fuelled boondoggle. LEO is making money and strategic sense. Mars is multiple decades off for a small group of scientists maintained at 10,000x the cost and effort of Antarctica.<p>I love watching the rockets launch. Nothing about the actual space mechanics right now is awful. His sense of time, place, purpose and outcome is truly bad, by repute since like 99% of people here I know only his projected persona.

Mars ? now ?<p>Their Starship is barely going to the orbit and then blowing up, and people are seriously considering going to Mars now ? After all, people believed him when he said they solved FSD 10 YEARS ago.<p>We are several decades away from flying humans to Mars. Maybe if it&#x27;s a one way trip and they don&#x27;t need to arrive there alive, we could go within 10 years. Maybe.<p>The thing I really fear, is that Musk will manage to siphon effectively infinite amount of money from the US government for this project. Which is all this is about.

These plans always seem fanciful or wasteful at first. Any mission of exploration has always been met with derision. Based on past history, it will indeed take a long time for space colonies to break even, not to mention self sustaining or profitable.<p>Despite the caveats above, building a sustainable earth-to-orbit-to-various targets is probably the most significant thing that could happen in the next few decades.

Nothing interesting about Mars.<p>If the goal was Venus, or another cool(pun not intended) planet, sign me up!<p>Also, don’t want to live in some off world fascist dictatorship. The whole thing should be run as a Swiss style democracy. Don’t want to get purged out of some airlock for wrong think.

The question is wrong. It’s not about going to Mars, it’s about having a long term plan for space colonization and exploration. The best time to start this was two decades ago, the next best time is now. It would make sense to pilot habitable zones on the Moon first, and send autonomous systems to Mars, or remotely build habitats. We can’t imagine going beyond Mars without faster travel.

The title is slightly ambiguous, not sure if it&#x27;s asking whether one should go oneself, or if its generally a good thing.

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Not anytime soon. Perhaps in the future, Tesla Robots&#x2F;AI could be sent to build out some comfortable habitable infrastructure first.

Tech isn&#x27;t perfected for it yet. They are still blowing up rockets, and need better quality control.

He can go first.