Of course there will be no law on mars that says he HAS to provide Oxygen, and if you don't have an oxygen reserve for just that occasion then really it's your own fault.
Colonizing the bottom of the ocean would be orders of magnitude cheaper, and more practical. Same with Antarctica. And there's a reason we don't do that.
I hate to sound anal, but I don't think the public appreciates how monumentally difficult space travel is, and how it gets exponentially worse with every ounce you have to carry. Even with theoretical, morally questionable tech like fission fragment drives or whatever.
Both have unique challenges, but overall brucethemoose is right about the overall cost comparison. For instance, we could easily have a "space elevator" equivalent to the bottom of the ocean, it'd be a fraction of the cost of maintaining a freight network to mars. Pressure is hard to deal with, but not as difficult as it is to get shit out of a gravity well as dense as Earth.
The main point is the usable resources. You'd have a damn near infinite source of usable resources at the bottom of the ocean meanwhile on Mars everything would need to be scavenged or shipped.
I'm not aware of any reason on why we'd want to colonize the bottom of the ocean, but there's many reasons to want to become a multi-planetary species. Space exploration has also lead to many technologies being used in everyday life today.
What's morally questionable about fission fragment drives?
there’s many reasons to want to become a multi-planetary species
Yes but it's a fantasy. The scenario where mars would be truly independant of earth is basically impossible without the far more likely reality:
If we survive that long, we won't be squishy humans anymore. Uploaded, AI, genetically engineered biotech, take your pick, but shuttling regular humans around this century just doesn't make sense.
This multi-planetary species thing just won’t work. The most likely scenario is that we fail. However, if we succeed the species will split very quickly on account of Mars’ unique evolutionary environment. You would get earth humans and Mars humans, and knowing our nature as a peaceful species, I am pretty sure we’d wipe each other out in no time.
Oh and on FF drives, fhey're kind of messy and risk pollution if they fail near earth (though not nearly as much as other nuclear designs). It's fine for scientific missions, but becomes much more eyebrow raising en masse for a Mars colonization type effort.
IIRC the fissile material needs to be relatively high grade.
Again... it's hard to appreciate how insanely difficult space travel is.
Just as an example, the lower stages of rockets are kind of like coke cans in terms of how much fuel they carry vs the actual machine itself. The engineering is insane. Just dropping a big chassis into the ocean in so much cheaper its hilarious.
I actually don't think it's a big deal that there were technical problems, there were millions of people trying to get in at the same time. What I don't like is him lying that it was a ddos attack.
What's weird to me though, is if they were just overloaded at the time, wouldn't it make a lot more sense to just say that and sound like you're super popular and in demand, than to make up some fake attack? I guess persecution complex beats ego stroking.
I'm for boarding every billionaire onto a mars rocket and send em there for Earth's sake! Cause that's what they get anyway. A unhabitable planet where only some people with tons of money live with great technology.
Sell all inclusive tickets for the full value of their hoarded wealth, then distribute it to those who need it the most. And instead of Mars, they land on the moon and the atmosphere vents.
Sounds like a future episode of Black Mirror which will throw shades at a certain narcissistic billionaire who runs a Mars colony and ran it to the ground.
He ran a live stream with like 8 million concurrent users and close to 1 billion views over a short period of time. But keep your hate circle jerk going.