That’s a heck of a lot of Starship launches!
Then again, he will need a lot of people.
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Mushrooms, algae and insects would be efficient ways to feed people in space over traditional crops. Though would those things have a wide enough spectrum of nutrients, vitamins, etc to sustain 1M people? Doubtful, but 20 years is unpossible. Maybe he’s throwing such inane statements into the wind as a distraction from the dumb shit he’s doing at Tesla?
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It must suck to have so much money, yet still be so utterly destitute when it comes to actual human connection.
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In other news, 1 million people are expected to die on Mars in 21 years, but only because they did not read the manual. Musk denies all liability because it is literally on page 1 of the Mars Manual.
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Whadda mean? He’s just gonna science the shit outta it!
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Apropos the reference, if not the topic, I just yesterday received that self-same book from its publisher (Blackstone). In the run-up to publishing The Last Dangerous Visions, they’ve released editions of DV and ADV.
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These could all be supplemental nutrition sources, but are impractical for primary sources.
Mushrooms require decaying matter to grow, and once all the nutrients are extracted, no longer produce in that location. (If you’ve seen a fairy circle, that’s fungus moving outward from an exhausted food source). I haven’t worked with mushroom growers in the US, but in Ukraine, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan they used logs, wood byproducts (compressed sawdust) or compressed wheat chaff to seed the mushrooms. While mushrooms can grow in stacked racks in a small space, it will still take a lot of space to grow enough mushrooms to feed 1 million people daily. while, the cultivation cycle is fairly comple, but manageable, the biggest hurdle is having to ship the growth medium along with the spoors. And then replenish that once used up. This would weigh far more than the seeds for 100,000 hectares.* Once the first crops are harvested, the waste material can be used to start growing mushrooms.
Algae requires a ridiculous amount of water. Water is heavy and is hard to compress, meaning it would require an enormous space to store. The amount of water that would be needed to grow algae to feed a million people would be vast. Unless the colony were to be situated on top an enormous ice deposit, it would have to mine and transport the water back to the colony. Finally, algae also needs its own specific nutrients and conditions to grow. Will it be fresh water or salt water algae. If they can’t be locally recreate the necessary nutrients, salts, and other impurities it needs to grow, they would need to ship tons of that from earth as well.
Finally, insects could be a good source of supplemental protein and nutrients, but the type of insect would have to be a detritivore, otherwise it will compete with humans for the plant crops. This is both through crop infestations as well as consuming plants during production that could have fed more people than the insects themselves will.
Our best bet is intercropping methods to grow bio-fortified foods using conventional breeding techniques. GMO should be avoided since if there are issues with the seed stock, the Mars colony would need to wait at least 2 years to get new GMO seed stock to address issues with the plants, or would have to ship a complete GMO lab to Mars.
*100,000 hectares is actually well below what is needed. A colony would need at least 250,000 hectares. 100,000 to alternate growing seasons to ensure a steady supply of food and 50,000 for crop rotation and resting the soil.
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Sounds like Rimmerworld. Christ, what a w***er.
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All anyone really needs to know about the feasibility of a self-sustaining space colony is that we still haven’t managed to make a functional version of Biosphere 2 on Earth, where building such a self-contained system would be infinitely easier.
For that matter we haven’t even been able to build a self-sufficient settlement in Antarctica, where you get air and water for free.
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Looking at the comment threads in one of the older posts linked to in the story makes me really appreciate BoingBoing’s more recent vigorous moderation policies over the last few years.
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Yeah… some of those opinions really did NOT hold up well over the last 8 years:
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An army of Musk space clones? Temuera Morrison wore it better.
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Still boggles the mind that as recently as 2017 the writers of Star Trek: Discovery put in a throwaway line that established that 23rd Century humans revered him as a pioneer on par with the Wright Brothers or Zefram Cochrane. Yikes.
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All he had to do was keep his big mouth shut, sit back and just enjoy his unearned ‘mythological’ status amongst techies and nerds; but noooo…
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And yet, Zefram Cochrane had to make do with a salvaged missile booster. So where was Elon in that timeline, failed, working for the Norcons or helping to launch Khan’s sleeper ship?
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Welcome to Mars. We hope you like potatoes.
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I’d love it if some later Star Trek episode clarified that the “Elon Musk” revered in the 23rd Century was actually some completely unrelated guy who happened to have the same name.
“Wait—you mean Elon Musk, the guy who ran an electric car company and a fascist social media website in the 2020s?”
“Of course not! I’m talking about the Elon Musk who invented antigravity pants in 2107 and used the proceeds to cure cancer!”
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OTOH “Star Trek: First Contact” reveals Cochrane to be a crazy man with a substance-abuse problem whose organization is being held together by other people
At the climax of the film Alfre Woodard’s character employs her “talk the old man down from a bad decision” skills on Picard as she’s no doubt done many times before with Cochrane
so kind of a Musky story after all 
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