Washington DC, Brussels, Beijing, Moscow, and other wannabe power centers are just a few hours of aircraft flight away. That’s too close.
If you want them to stop meddling into your way of life, and avoid all the bureaucrap that they would want to heap upon you, you have to travel a bit farther.
When you have to deal with more paper than what’s your own weight, it’s time to change the planet.
I’d still like to see this happen.
Even if it probably won’t.
Oh, well.
You could breathe at Jamestown, for starters.
Good luck foraging off the land on Mars when supplies run out.
If you’re setting up a Martian colony, ideally you’re doing a couple of things:
Starting to terraform Mars. That means aerobraking a lot of ice asteroids into the Martian atmosphere. The more Mars has a real atmosphere, the less dangerous it is.
Mining asteroids for raw materials that would be valuable on either Earth or Mars and likely using one of the two moons as a refinery. Ice+sun provides unlimited fuel, basically unlimited numbers of asteroids in the asteroid belt provide unlimited resources.
Then on top of it, given Mars has a reasonable gravity, you can basically shoot big giant bubbles filled with supplies at it and some thrusters and not worry about missing. As long as you get it somewhere within a few miles, they’ll be able to get it once they land. Yes, they’re expensive, but you can cut corners that simply can’t be cut when a crash landing means mission failure.
i.e. once you hit a certain point, you gain infinite wealth by today’s standards if no one truly gets in your way. Which is why the corps in KSR’s Red Mars are perfectly willing to let a few rogue colonists screw things up on Mars, but not to the point of threatening the moons. Or to shoot what seems like very expensive supplies at Mars. The end goal is just that crazy.
MarsOne doesn’t seem to have any of that in mind, other than to establish a colony. That’s not likely going to end well.
Die on Mars or die here. there are a variety of black swans circling regarding runaway climate collapse. A Mars expedition/colonization might be the only way to have humans in this solar system by 2050.
If we are messing up the planet we evolved on and tuned for going to a hostile alien world is not a solution, but an act of desperation that can turn just as bad much faster.
Maybe we can bar climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers as a first step, though.
I’m sure you mean Doctor Who. 
C’mon, folks - he didn’t say “How are they in any way different from the people who settled Jamestown?” — he asked how the assertion that they are “either scammers or dangerously naive” distinguishes them from the Jamestown settlers.
You’ll never make it to Mars if you can’t parse a simple interrogative sentence 
This sounds very much like something that Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle would write.
Yeah, that would be like people from 50 years ago getting to the moon in just a few years using protractors and slide-rules. Totally unbelievable. Never gonna happen, eh?
If it is impossible for you to conceive of this project, the Apollo missions must be a real hassle for you to explain.
That well was almost certainly hand dug and not drilled. Just, you know, to be pedantic.
There is nothing to say that technological growth will continue exponentially.
but there is the fact that is still is expanding. Exponentially is your qualifier.
It won’t if we stop trying.
Most of the gains in the last 20-30 years has just been miniaturization and optimization. Very few truly new technologies have been created in the same time. It is quite possible we will hit a point where technology plateaus.
I’m not arguing we do, but the growth in the last century may well be the exception in the human experience and not the new rule.
A lot of potentially really breakthrough stuff is simmering just under the surface. Molecular electronics, for example. And a range of self-assembly approaches for nanostructured materials/surfaces/whatever.
There are vast areas of uncharted knowledge remaining for mapping. We only started to tackle the science of complexity; most of our current approaches are old and linear. We are only starting to get the proper instrumentation for bio/biomed research. The brain sciences are in their relative infancy. And I could continue for hours.
we might, but even your word choice reflects that you know we have not.
Please, enough contrary wordplay. Pony up some facts.
We may also be destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass AT ANY MOMENT. At least I read that in a book somewhere, and didn’t make it up to rile anyone’s feathers.
I am not saying we have hit the plateau yet, just that the gains of the last century will continue at the same pace indefinitely.
True. With the dropping costs of old tools and emerging new ones, there’s no reason why it couldn’t get much faster.
