> So yeah, he expects tax-payer money to contribute.

Why wouldn't he? NASA has spent billions on Mars exploration. I suspect they'd jump at the chance to fund a few Geologist-in-Residence positions on Mars.

We already spend significant amounts of taxpayer money sending random probes to other planets. What makes you think it'd be a bad idea to divert some of that money to sending humans instead? Especially if there are people who want to go and SpaceX manages to make it cheap enough for that to be viable.

> We already spend significant amounts of taxpayer money sending random probes to other planets.

I tend to think scientific research deserves public funding. What musk advocates is not for scientific research, it's basically an extremely weird and expensive real estate project. And I don't think real estate deserves public funding, no matter how exotic it is.

And even if I did not think scientific research deserves public funding, that would not matter, for a wrong should not justify an other wrong.

If you believe that sending probes to Mars has scientific value, by what argument are you claiming that sending humans does not? I would think that humans could accomplish far more on Mars than a rover like Curiosity ever could.

We're talking about colonization, not manned exploration.

You don't think a colony would have scientists?

I'd expect NASA to buy enough slots to found an Institute of Martian Studies pretty quickly.

> You don't think a colony would have scientists?

Not a million of them. And if its purpose was scientific it wouldn't have to be "self-sufficient". Science is not Musk's goal. He wants to put people there for the sake of it.

But the government wouldn't need to pay to send a million of them. Just enough to send the people they want to send, along with associated equipment, plus the costs of feeding and housing them.

Remember, we're only talking about the portion of the mission funded by tax dollars here. Not all of the funding is going to come from that source.

A self-sufficient society will rapidly need universities, and I'd expect them to initially be fairly heavy on things like geology majors given the location.

" And if its purpose was scientific it wouldn't have to be 'self-sufficient'."

It would if the experiment is to test whether or not a self-sufficient human settlement beyond Earth is possible.

There's always scientific value in everything we do. It's just a matter of cashing in on that value.

Reminds me of this post I saw last week or so..

https://dissention.wordpress.com/2017/06/06/the-business-mod...