See, while the space-obsessed child who still lives on in me thinks this is wicked cool, the thirty-something pragmatist says "Why a colony?" Why set such insanely expensive and extensive goals as having thousands of colonists? Why touch on terraforming, for God's sake, a project with a magnitude of centuries?

There are so many areas on Earth which we've barely touched. It would be vastly easier to establish colonies in the vast deserts of the planet, or on or under the oceans. Why don't we? Because there's no need to. We don't need the room. We don't need the resources. I mean, for fuck's sake, the entire population of the world could fit in the state of Texas, and it wouldn't even be that dense. We're not talking like, Manhattan or Hong Kong, we're talking 2-3 storey buildings.

Now don't get me wrong--I'm all in favor of manned missions to Mars. I'm in favor of scientific exploration of space as its own goal. But living in space? Colonizing it? People being there who aren't there for scientific purposes, just because it's, I don't know, cool? That's kind of silly at this point in human history. Someday I think we're going to get there, but right now, it seems like a waste of resources.

Now, somebody is of course going to throw out the "eggs in one basket" argument. I can sympathize with that. Survival of the human species is important. But I think there are much better, easier, less expensive ways to improve our odds as a species than a Mars colony. Developing better means to detect and eliminate asteroids heading for earth, for instance. Working to get rid of end nuclear proliferation. These are not, granted, mutually exclusive from the Mars colony plan, but why should we invest trillions in this when we're not investing it in those? Again, just because it's cooler? To me, that's not enough of a reason, and it's one of the issues I have with Elon Musk in general. So much of what he does seems based around the rule of cool, which works great for movies, but not for real life.

CMV.