I guess a response would include Musk's well-known fears of AI, though I don't recall him stating he is afraid of out-of-control private interests with respect to interplanetary exploration and colonization.
On the other hand we have a chance to save the tens of billions of people who will live and die in the 21st century and experience genocide, starvation, disease, child abuse, imprisonment, other violence, etc. We're already doing it -- it's achievable. It can't wait for a Mars colony!
i don't follow. why do you think those horrible things wouldn't happen on an extraterrestrial colony?
Any opinion you or I have about how long Earth will remain viable is irrelevant. There's nothing else. Mars and every other body are not viable at all and we have no way to make them so.
Reminded me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O5h4enjrHw around the 2:30 mark.
i believe the point was:
"Weyland-Yutani is consistently portrayed as exhibiting the worst aspects of corporate profiteering, willing to sacrifice decency and life in the endless pursuit of profits."
And by the time it does, I'm sure there will be competitors.
The value proposition is that for a half-million you get to move to Mars, and you can return free if you decide you don't like it. (You still spent the half-million though.) So sell your house, move to Mars.
If Musk succeeds, and I believe he will, it will still be quite a long time, possibly hundreds of years, before there's any notable population on Mars beyond a single city.
They won't have any resources we don't have here, aside from Martian tourist trinkets, and the cost of getting resources from Mars to Earth would defeat any potential profit anyone could make. Musk has said this more than once. In scifi, this plot flaw is usually undone by having the alien planet possess a resource that can't be found or made anywhere else, like Avatar's unobtainium or Dune's Melange. But in the real world, that's not a thing.
If we're not fighting over resources, then what? So what if the Martian colonists declare independence? Independence from who, anyway? "Earth"? Because it won't be an extension of any existing country, it won't just be "US territory on Mars." It'll be its own entity, with inhabitants from a variety of the countries on Earth. And it's not like Earth is going to be demanding "tribute" from it, that makes no sense on any level.
In Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress," the Earth demands grain shipments from the Moon to feed its overgrown population. But....is that likely, really? Are we really likely to be dependent on grain shipments from Mars? It's a fun scenario, but I doubt it. It seems more likely to me that they'll find ways to scale grain production with existing land, as they have done for decades and continue to do today.
In a century's time (give or take), being able to build sprawling, cheap (for certain values of cheap), polluting factories without having to worry about poisoning the local rivers or running afoul of environmental regulations might start to look like a decent deal.
Interplanetary war between players that advanced would be a really fast path to extinction.