Granted. I don't see it as a Muskian "send 10,000,000 people and keep sending them supplies" kind of thing but rather "send 100 people, 1,000,000 eggs and the closest thing to a Drexler machine that we can make" kind of thing. The latter is what I think the BoM for a successful Mars colony looks like too.
I'd imagine, given the rate of progress with AI and robots, the most practical would be to send robots ahead and have them build the infrastructure for some people to maybe visit later?
I did an analysis of sending a factory sent to a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid that builds a factory factory which builds a solar sail factory that sends solar sails back to Earth-Sun L1 to counter climate change.
The first thing in the decision tree is "do you send a crew?" and you're trading off the hard problem of teleoperating the thing (need a big advanced in autonomy) vs the hard problem of providing a habitat and liklihood that the crew doesn't come home. So yeah, sending bots ahead to build an environment is an option even on Mars. I think Wall-E.
If you're going that far though you might consider not sending intact humans at all and just sending the eggs and growing them out either artificially or in some other animal.
(I see the Ceres thing as being on the line to interstellar colonization whereas I don't see Mars as such. A likely intermediate step past that is doing something similar on an outer solar system or interstellar body, say, Titan or Pluto, powered by D-D fusion.)
> If you're going that far though you might consider not sending intact humans at all and just sending the eggs and growing them out either artificially or in some other animal.
I don't want to meet the humans that were raised by robots in the astroid belt instead of growing up in a community of humans. I think we would need to 100x our understanding of childhood development to have a chance of raising healthy adults, much less adults that could reintegrate well into 'natural' human societies.
> The first thing in the decision tree is "do you send a crew?" and you're trading off the hard problem of teleoperating the thing (...)
Tele-operating a whole facility and more is something where you can make huge improvements down here on earth, before you even start into space, and even make a profit from it.
kids catch butterflies and other insects to take a look and then rip them apart slowly to take another look.
people like to grow stuff, including other humans, in different environments and under different conditions.
how will "that one" oddly specific cell in the the thigh or the amygdala of population segment X evolve under conditions X to the Z?
call it what you wanna call it; it's all part of the infinite game.
zoom in or out, it does not stop.
it's a wonderful life.
robots will play with linguistics, semantics and all those chemicals and natural laws just as much as we do. after a brief period of mental chaos, they will slow down and find peace in the balancing act and re-interpretation. without torture and sabotage.
