Vandorex (@Vandorex) “Elon Musk was asked how long until there is regular travel to Mars. His answer w” — TopicDigg

Elon Musk was asked how long until there is regular travel to Mars. His answer was not about rockets. He said the threshold that actually matters is whether Mars survives if the ships from Earth stop coming. That means every input: air, food, fuel, spare parts, medicine. He compared it to a long sea voyage where the only thing missing is vitamin C. One missing item and the colony dies on schedule. The ships could stop for reasons that have nothing to do with Mars. A war. A decline. An asteroid. His line: civilisation on Earth can end with a bang or a whimper. That is insurance logic, and it is the honest way to describe the Mars plan. Every policy has a premium, a probability and a payout. The payout here is the survival of the species, so the premium is nearly impossible to argue against. The probability is the part nobody can price. Which creates a strange corporate problem. The premium gets paid by companies whose shareholders will not be the ones rescued if the policy ever pays out. SpaceX is private, so its investors signed up for that. A public company could not easily spend decades of free cash flow on a backup planet and explain it on a quarterly call. The other catch is that redundancy is only worth what you spend testing it. A city is not self-sustaining because the plan says so. It is self-sustaining the day the ships stop and everyone lives. So the number worth watching is not the landing date. It is the date Mars stops needing Earth. Nobody is selling a ticket to that.