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A comment on Futurists have their heads in the clouds. Parent comment

Re:Futurists have their heads in the clouds by abruzzi on Thursday November 18, 2021 @06:02PM (#29271719)
Yeah, this one was hard to buy, unless there are a lot of billionaires that want to live in houses the size of a college dorm room. The cost to get to mars, and to live on Mars seems to me to be absolutely prohibitive at this point.

A number of the other observations also seemed to be a stretch. I'm not sure AI will have the level of impact he expects in less than 30 years. the death of the local store and getting any product delivered in an hour or less seems way too optimistic when you consider all the small rural towns in the US that can't even get decent broadband today.

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Re:Futurists have their heads in the clouds by DennisP on Friday November 19, 2021 @08:26AM (#29276891)
"At this point" sure, but it's not happening at all unless SpaceX succeeds with Starship at scale, which means fully, rapidly reusable and building at least a hundred of them per year, which gets launch costs to LEO down to about $50/kg.

Starting with that, SpaceX would send at least a hundred Starships to Mars with every launch window, each able to carry over a hundred tons of cargo. Price per passenger depends on how many you can safely pack in and maybe Musk is being overoptimistic on that, but he's shooting for half a million dollars.

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