"Terraforming will be too slow to be relevant in our lifetime. However, we can establish a human base there in our lifetime."
> or at least put a million people there
That's an incredibly different question (see the sibling comment about Motte and Bailey fallacies).
A million people on Mars seems plausible, if we take "soon" to mean a century or two (Musk seems to have an incredibly optimisitic goal of 2050, but that still seems the right order of magnitude)
This is the straw-man I was complaining about.
Here's a direct quote from Musk, saying the exact opposite ( https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1329205209915154433 )
"Terraforming will be too slow to be relevant in our lifetime. However, we can establish a human base there in our lifetime."
> or at least put a million people there
That's an incredibly different question (see the sibling comment about Motte and Bailey fallacies).
A million people on Mars seems plausible, if we take "soon" to mean a century or two (Musk seems to have an incredibly optimisitic goal of 2050, but that still seems the right order of magnitude)