Are we alone in the universe? To answer this question, astronomers have been using a variety of methods in the past decades to search for habitable planets and for the signals from extraterrestrial observers.
The first part of this venture has been highly successful: More than 2,000 planets around distant stars — so called exoplanets — have been found so far. The second part, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), has not yet been successful.
Via
Dr. Stefan Gruenwald
Elon Musk's proposal is probably super ambitious to some but his speech this week has the merit of making things pretty simple and straightforward in terms of what's at stake and how we can address the opportunity.
The scope of his own plan is limited to transportation so he doesn't describe what Mars colonies will look like nor what people will do there. But that's the very interesting take-away to me: rather than attempting to plan everything in a typical government (or soviet-style?) way, he's proposing a platform for other entrepreneurs to build on and leverage the opportunities.
He's not saying "I've planned everything and you should all do what I say". He's focusing on solving the biggest hurdle (affordable transportation) and leaves the rest open. He makes the point that in the 1850's, no one lived in California but that the smart decision made was precisely to build a railroad to California... which became the most populous states a few decades later and economic leadership in technology and entertainment.
So in the same spirit, he's proposing a plan to reduce transportation cost to Mars to $100k/person with enough bandwidth to ship 1M people there over 40-100 years.
What happens next is up to us.