> Let's be real

I think what you mean is "let's speculate on what's going to happen over the next 100 years"

From Musk's various interviews it's a race between getting ~1M people living on Mars vs WWIII

There is the common knowledge amongst major powers that the next World War will probably be an extinction level event, so where as it's probably inevitable there's a reasonable chance that it won't happen for 100 years.

Musk estimates that it would take ~50 years (2070) to get a self-sustaining Mars base. Where as lots of his Tesla predictions have been off, his Space X predictions have been pretty good (e.g. re-usable rockets, expected launches per year).

I don’t trust to common knowledge.

Consider how many people thought “nobody could possibly vote for Trump”? Or pretty much any opinion on Brexit, for or against.

Then there’s the question of dead man switches starting, instead of responding to, a nuclear war. Only the people in charge of them even know for sure they exist, so how can we even estimate the chances they’ll be triggered by something short of an attack on their host nations?

Fair enough.

The world has managed to not blow itself up for 60 years, we can speculate on whether that will hold long enough to build a self-sustaining base on Mars.

I think we'll achieve singularity level mind uploading before anyone physically goes to any other planet. And, to be honest, makes a lot more sense to do it that way. Carrying humans around, with limited lifespans and feeble bodies, makes space travel wasteful and stupid. All those problems dissapear once people are only software. I even think trying is a waste of time, I wished Musk was focused on brain research, not rockets.

Disagree. The tech to reach Mars has already been invented, and while the cost needs to decline Musk has a plan to get there from here; conversely nobody yet knows how much we have yet to learn about brain function in order to make the simulations people instead of p-zombies (or even non-functional, not sure which is worse), and right now (despite Musk’s brain interface side project) full brain scanning requires death.

Further, the only estimate I have for how much processing power will be needed to simulate a human brain in real time is 10^19 flops, which means Moore’s Law needs to carry on for another 25 years just for the hardware to beat Musk’s Mars ticket price.

One thing is having the technology to send a rocket to Mars, another thing to have a completely functional and self-sustaining colony, that doesn't depend on Earth supplies and that offers the possibility of a life that is not just growing potatoes and looking at rocks from the habitat's window. I suspect we're hundreds of years from the latter.

That’s reasonable, but you did originally say “physically goes to” rather than “colonises”.

I think it's possibly the same or similar. I don't buy the pioneering mission with people who go knowing that they're not going to get back and possibly die of radiation exposure. I think nobody is going up there until there's a lot more tech in place, at least at the level of The Martian, ie: knowing how to get them back and guaranteeing survival

A single ballistic missile sub has the potential to nuke 192 cities in a single go.

Better hope your singularity/mind uploading stuff happens before then. Maybe if there were some people left on Mars after the nuclear holocaust we would of had a better chance.

I hope so too :) but what I mean is even removing apocalyptic scenarios, I still think serious space travel with flesh and blood humans is never going to happen

There's a chance it will die out, nuclear war or a meteor is always a possibility. Don't think it's anywhere close to being certain. There's a good chance we'll survive and regularly visit other planets.

What do you mean “die out”... like total extinction?