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My LLM-sense is tingling, but let's leave that aside.
As a work of futurism, this sucks. Bold statement, yes, but it seems to belong to the category of prediction that goes:
It's the equivalent of writing The Martian exactly as-is after SpaceX announces and test flies Starship.
What are the cardinal sins? Well, it seems to assume that over the course of several decades or millennia (long enough for sub-speciation!):
No significant advancements in AI or robotics, which would obviate the need for a very skilled, astronaut-tier colonist pool. Assuming there's demand for meat and bones humans at all.
No genetic or cybernetic enhancement that would directly address many of the consequences of Martian existence, or that would simply allow useful traits to rapidly flow through the gene pool.
You can already deal with some of the downsides of low gravity by embedding centrifuges on the Martian surface so everyone can get in some single g time.
Further ink spilled on the new Martian Ubermensch is a complete waste of time, and that's coming from someone who advocates for space colonization, and Mars as low hanging fruit, even if we really ought to be aiming at asteroids as well (it'll happen anyway, if launch costs keep dropping).
Even leaving aside my previous concerns and my own interest in space colonization, the odds of Mars brain-draining Earth are... low. It is rather unlikely that we have millions of people clamoring to move there, or that losing them makes any damn difference. Mars is not a very attractive place to live, we'll go there despite that inconvenient fact, not because of the excellent sea-side views in the Hellas Basin.
Agree with you on all points. But I'd also add that the original premise is probably wrong, I'm guessing the main selection effect for moving to Mars will be a willingness to leave Earth entirely behind.
The first few hundred or few thousand might be WHIMs, but the first million will merely be those who are willing to leave Earth behind. And the individual reasons why people are willing to do that won't always be good or even neutral. The anti-social, the misfits, the failures, and the criminals will all end up in the mix at some point.
Willing to leave Earth behind, and also able to afford to leave Earth behind. Musk thinks that Starship can get Mars one-way-ticket prices down to $500K in the medium term and $100K in the long term. I'd append another zero to those numbers (and I'm a huge SpaceX fan! others may prefer larger grains of salt still!), but even if I don't, it's hard to see the most anti-social/failure/criminal element ever managing to front the dough. Some of the misfits will (I'm also a huge capitalism fan in general) but I'd bet the net selection effect is still not in their favor.
That’s a quote from the new Taylor Sheridan series Landman. It’s about an oil boom town in Texas, but it would fit the pattern of New World settlement, and probably the settlement of any new world. There’s 8 billion people on the planet, I doubt Musk or anyone else would have trouble finding a few thousand fit, motivated, high IQ people who would be willing to truck out to Mars. If the deadbeats and the penal colonists and the political refugees ever show up it probably won’t be until quite a while later
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