Send a pile of good robots and tools there first.

Build a lab. Run it with things that we hope are good enough, but don't value enough to get home (back to earth) safely.

If we're really smart we can even use the whole thing to bootstrap a useful environment to get to and a far easier environment to get back from.

It's been 12 hours, so rather than an edit to elaborate I'm adding a reply.

I mean very different robots from the rovers we've sent to date. Maybe not even more complex robots but definitely bigger (and smaller too) robots.

Their task not to survey with minimal disruption, but to actively disrupt. To build, to transform materials (lab), to create the base buildings and infrastructure of civilization. So there's somewhere with resources to better support humans.

Until now, rockets have been produced "by hand", one by one. And you get handcrafted prices for rockets. To lower pricing, and revolutionize space travel, you need a production line of rockets. What will you do with 100s of rockets of this factory ?

Also, you need a vison to advance things. Millions of electric cars ? 10 years ago it would have been a joke

> Millions of electric cars ? 10 years ago it would have been a joke

Viable electric cars were a thing even way back in the late 19th century [1]. The problem was that burning oil was cheaper (as the users had to pay none of the externalities for decades), and so it lost out for a good while despite being more efficient (i.e. energy contained in the fuel vs distance driven) on paper.

On top of that came the massive, decades-long lobbying efforts of the fossil fuel industry to get rid of public transit.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_electric_vehicl...

The electric cars of the late 19th century were extremely slow and limited in their abilities. Of course, gas cars were too, but they advanced quickly, because there's SO much energy stored in gasoline and diesel fuels. Electric cars, I don't think, could ever have progressed that far until recent times, because batteries just didn't have enough energy density to make them practical (in the way that cars of, say, the 1970s-90s were practica), until Lithium-ion batteries because cheap and commonplace, which was only in the last 20 years.

> The electric cars of the late 19th century were extremely slow and limited in their abilities.

Agreed on the speed, but 100 miles range on a single charge? That's more than enough to account for the needs of the vast majority of commuters.

> until Lithium-ion batteries because cheap and commonplace, which was only in the last 20 years.

I wonder how that one would have played out if we didn't have oil. The abundance of cheap fossil fuels didn't make it exactly worthwhile to invest in battery R&D.

>Agreed on the speed, but 100 miles range on a single charge? That's more than enough to account for the needs of the vast majority of commuters.

1. If that were true, EVs would have been much more successful in America. They haven't been. The Nissan Leaf was around long before Tesla and it never went far, because the range sucks.

2. Back in 1900, 100 miles would have been great. In 2000, it's not sufficient at all for most car-owning Americans.

3. You can't have the same range at higher speeds: energy usage goes up dramatically with speed. So you need much more energy storage, and the battery tech of the time just wasn't sufficient.

>I wonder how that one would have played out if we didn't have oil. The abundance of cheap fossil fuels didn't make it exactly worthwhile to invest in battery R&D.

That's a very good point. It would be interesting to see an alternate universe where this was the case.

100 miles is good for commutes but commutes aren't the only use people have for cars. Vacations are something that even if the US doesn't get to take as often as we should people still aspire to them and the further you move up the income ladder the more they happen. 100 miles isn't enough for that, so you'd have to either have a second car that's gasoline powered, a more capable long range vehicle, or rent a car for those trips.

100 miles is not sufficient for commutes in America these days. Many people drive more than 100 miles in a day. Even if they don't do it every day, the drive to/from work plus an extra shopping or social trip in the evening could easily put them over 100 miles.

The problem is that, because of cars, they built everything farther apart, and people willingly chose places to live farther away from work. Just look at a map of the city of Phoenix AZ for instance: 100 miles' range won't cover a trip from one side of the city to the other side and back.

However, for vacations, a rental car is absolutely the right idea. That's what people here in Tokyo do: there's lots of convenient places to rent a car for shopping trips to Costco, or a trip to the mountains, etc., because so many people don't own cars.

> Millions of electric cars?

Electric cars are nice and all but if you want to credit Elon Musk with contributing to the switch from gas to EV, you also have to credit him with killing high-speed rail with spitballing about the vaporware that is building underground vacuum tunnels to shuttle cars around, aka the Hyperloop (before it became a closed-loop underground taxi service with no regard for fire safety).

Also the classic rich guy idea of reinventing buses/trains but worse to "solve traffic" without having to risk sitting next to another person. That's a foible not unique to Elon though.

The problem isn't purely solvable by the number of rockets we can produce. Mars is wildly inhospitable with the majority of the soil being poisoned by perchlorates, it's a convenient source of oxygen but it also means the soil needs to be processed before we could even start to use it as a substrate for crops.

Fundamentally the issue with long term Mars habitation is that any technology that allows us to live on Mars full time without support from Earth would make even the wildest 'destroyed' Earths livable. The only thing Mars gives you is there's not going to be people beating on the outside of your trillion dollar dome trying to get in.

The first human landing on Mars destroys a large section of Mars science forever, because then we can no longer be sure if life traces we find there are indigenous or not.

Slight nuance. We can most definitely tell if a life source you find there is from mars or not - assuming it has the same dna backbone, sequence comparison can tell exactly when life diverged into the two planets (as it likely did if mars ever had life).

The real danger is that life forms hitchhiking the first humans can totally overwhelm any existing life and completely condemn it.

I'm pretty sure that changes nothing and we can still be absolutely sure what we find there is indigenous or not.