A previous Nextbigfuture article went over the costs of sending one thousand fully loaded with supplies and equipment SpaceX Starships to Mars every two years. These costs could be reduced towards the cumulative $1 trillion level or $25 billion per year for forty years. The Starships could be flown back from Mars and reused for outbound trips every 4 years. A high priority could be creating the mining and factories on Mars to build more ships, rockets and other systems.
Let compare the SpaceX real Mars plan compare to an existing long term big Tech investment project. This is the Meta investment in Metaverse for virtual worlds and other virtual experiences and services.
Meta has spent about $50 billion researching and developing the virtual Metaverse since 2019. This spending is continuing and with new AI spending could be grow from $10 billion per year to over $20 billion per year. Meta is getting very little revenue from the Metaverse investment. Meta Net income was almost $40 billion last year and will be over $50 billion in 2024.
Meta wants hundreds of millions of customers using VR headsets and VR glasses.
Comcast has 114 million internet subscribers.
SpaceX Starlink has over 3 million high speed internet subscribers now and the 6000 satellites in orbit can provide services to over 10 million global customers. SpaceX Starlink will triple the satellite bandwidth capacity by the end of 2025 and could triple the capacity again by the end of 2026. SpaceX Starlink could support and provide service to over 50 million high speed internet customers by 2027. This would be $60 billion per year. Premium business, military, RV and other customers could be over $40 billion per year. SpaceX will have direct to cellphone service and this could support over a billion customers at over $100-200 per year for 2G internet everywhere in the world, texting and voice calling. This would be over $200 billion per year in revenue and over $150 billion per year in profit.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
The disadvantage of virtual metaverses is that they are controlled on the VR hosting side.
Whoever has the server managing the VR experience for the users controls the content in it.
Reality is quite more indomitable. It is what it is, and only changes in desirable ways with a lot of work and effort.
He shouldnt bare all costs, other deep funded parties will be very interested for various reasons. I guess not much work has been done on setting up an interplanetary economy concept, have to google that, but when it comes to musk he is number one in driving down costs, I also think many people will be interested in buying into a mars stay, be it permanent or temporary(if feasable in the begin) all ways to fund, there will pop up many more new unexplored ways to fund this!
He could start selling land rights on Mars, like theres companies selling tracts of the moon as novelty birthday presents. Now theres no legally enforceable rights on Mars, but if Musk is the gatekeeper on getting to Mars, its very much finders keepers…