Maybe Musk and SpaceX will succeed, maybe not. But either way, he's not playing the same tired tune I've heard my entire life.
... me too. Fact is, NASA is currently not even doing human spaceflight. If it wasn't for the Russians and the Chinese, human spaceflight would be a thing of the past.
Musk is disrupting the status quo, thank God. I fear he'll end up more like Preston Tucker than Henry Ford, but I'm glad he's charging ahead.
SpaceX employs a lot of rocket scientists, who have delivered pretty impressive results. What do its life scientists have to show us?
I mean their worst case is you get bored and take up space on a flight home. Slightly less worse case you die and provide some fertilizer for other brave colonists. Best case, martian backup to earth civilization and a whole bunch of new expertise for humanity.
Assuming you give a damn perhaps you should look into it yourself?
That's a smart move to foster an ecosystem of companies specializing in other aspects. Once it becomes possible to send people and cargo to Mars for a reasonable price, it starts to make sense to create a company specializing in, say, inflatable habitats.
Bigelow Aerospace [1], doing exactly that, inflatable habitats, could benefit immensely from cheaper transport of cargo to LEO and to Mars.
That said, we have decades of experience with habitable spacecraft. Mir was inhabited for over 12 years, and the ISS has been inhabited continuously for nearly 16 years. That part of the technology we have a pretty good grasp on.
We have no experience with building, or maintaining self-sufficient - or even somewhat-kinda-sorta close-to-self-sufficient biospheres. Without them, Mars is a pipe dream - it would be far too difficult to maintain any kind of colony.
Unlike building rockets, the thing with ecology is that we don't even know what the hard parts are going to be.