Who Wants To Go To Mars ???

Here is a random sample of recent statements people have made about going to Mars:

"The markets are entirely different and it would pay to travel to Mars as opposed to stay on Earth, because the returns here are very, very low," the manager of the Janus Capital Unconstrained Bond Fund, said on CNBC's "Power Lunch".

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When he's not building electric cars or helping to create the idea for a high-speed transit system, Elon Musk really wants citizens of Earth to go to Mars.

During a wide-ranging interview at The Code Conference, the CEO of Tesla Motors and SpaceX discussed everything from life on Mars to the possibility that life is just an elaborate computer simulation.

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For the better part of thirty years, official Washington has been promising that a crewed mission to Mars was firmly, definitely, absolutely on the way - some day. The first President Bush called for bootprints in the Martian soil by 2019. The second President Bush promised a return to the moon by 2015 and a trip to Mars at an undefined date after. President Obama points to 2030 - or, more vaguely, to sometime in the 2030s - as his target date.

On this one issue at least, three very different presidents have been in remarkable agreement: yep, we’re going to Mars - on the next guy’s watch.

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First of all, I am in partial agreement with Mr. Musk; but life as we know it is not an elaborate computer simulation - it is an elaborate computer aided simulacrum. And the gibberish pouring out of his mouth only adds to the unreality of that simulacrum.

Politicians promise expeditions to Mars for personal political gain. The last one who had a real space travel vision was JFK, and someone put a bullet in his head for it.

The Musks of the world seem to want to go into space because of the vast personal power and wealth it will bring them. It has been predicted that the first trillionaires will make their fortunes in space.

Going to Mars will be like coming to the New World. Its current inhabitants, if any, will be massacred. Its vast wealth will be strip mined without regard to the consequences. The workers in those mines are likely to be self replicating robots. The rich will become super rich, and the rest of us will starve in the dark back here on Earth.

So other than the "excitement" we are being promised, just what the hell are we going to get from all of this? The satisfaction of destroying yet another planet?

Here is my prediction - It currently costs about $10,000 per pound to place a payload into low earth orbit. Unless there is a huge leap in our technology, that price is not likely to change by much. That means the optimal cargo to send to Mars will be "seeds" - seeds which will create self replicating robots out of Martian soil, seeds which will terraform Mars to the extent needed to exploit its resources, seeds which will use those resources to build vehicles which will take the extracted wealth back to Earth for the enrichment of trillionaires.

Right now, fewer than 100 people own more than half of the wealth on Earth. That part of the human population is not likely to grow in number, but the wealth they will "own" is very likely to dwarf anything we can possibly imagine.

I don't know about you, but I am NOT at all in favor of allowing demigods and emperors to spring up in our midst. I've had enough of being treated like an unwanted insect.

How about you?

Update - NASA has more or less confirmed what I said:

It has launched a competition for scientists to create a thick and functional skin tissue that could survive off the planet.

The space agency is studying the health risks and improvements needed to medicine keep space crews healthy during future, longer, space missions.

It was worked with Methuselah Foundation's New Organ Alliance to investigate how to improve bioengineering through a competition called the Vascular Tissue Challenge.

The agency fund to three teams asked to create a "metabolically-functional" human vascularized organ tissue that can be artificially controlled inside a laboratory. 

To win, teams have to produce a 1cm-thick tissue that can maintain more than 85 percent survival of its cells over 30 days.

Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator for NASA, said: "The humans who will be our deep space pioneers are our most important resource on the Journey to Mars and beyond."

You can read the rest @
http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/680113/Will-humans-be-cloned-in-space-NASA-wants-to-grow-body-parts-on-Mars

All they have to do is send one or two of each desired organism or android to Mars, and they can clone an unlimited number of them there, which cuts way down on the expense of the overall mission.