>>14297373>>14297356>>14297325If true, this is how they survive the Starship and post Starship era. Let's assume that Elon in his infinite autism, manages to achieve his dream of giving SpaceX the capital through Starlink to print 1,000 Starships by 2035. Even if you assume that only 50% of that will make the Mars trip, and then split that accordingly 80/20 into cargo and crew ships, that's effectively 400 Cargoships and 100 Crew ships, achieving an effective downpass Mars payload of: 60,000T colony cargo and 10,000T of life support and crew cargo. 2x of that b 2045 and 3x of that by 2055.
Probably reasonable to assume that Musk will likely have passed away by 2055 latest 2060, which means SpaceX will have reasonably put 180,000T of colony cargo and 30,000T of crew cargo for a cumulative 210,000T downmass by 2055-2060.
With a grain of salt, take this, but:
https://space.nss.org/the-colonization-of-space-gerard-k-o-neill-physics-today-1974/According to this breakdown, you need approx 500,000T in materials to build an O'Neil Cylinder to support a population of 10,000 people near on of the L4/L5 points between Earth/Moon space that is 100 meters across and 1 kilometer in height. SpaceX can get to around 40% of that assuming no change in the Starship architecture or Propulsion architecture over the next 30 years, and the same upmass capability of 150T for Cargo and 100T for Crew. But this O'Neil paper also assumes that you will have to ship 100% of everything there to build and doesn't take into consideration any INSITU benefits.
Plus, there's several other assumptions that have immense positive yields for colonization of Mars if proven true over the next 30 years:
1. Did Mars support large scale oceans over a billion years ago?
2. Did these oceans support life?
3. If life was supported, was it single cell or complex?
4. If complex, has organic decay coupled with billions of years of sedimentary compression caused large scale deposits of hydrocarbons to form?
