I find it hard to place 100% of the blame on Tesla for the whole FSD debacle though, at one time it was open to everyone and while there were legitimate concerns, there were also idiots who were completely irresponsible about it forcing Tesla into overregulation. Like anything else, you need some sort of personal responsibility.
No, it’s certainly nowhere near 100% Teslas fault. But they do have culpability in overstating the the reliability of the system in their marketing, which is what people pay most attention to. Once again, selling the vision rather than the actual functioning product. But also shame on the government for not having some rules in place to help prevent such accidents.
It's not just building it that's the issue, but having a large enough population to assure genetic diversity to prevent inbreeding in case the colony is cut off entirely from Earth. You'd need at least, what, 50,000 people for that?
We could make a scientific outpost relatively easily. Creating a truly self sustaining colony would take at least 100 years of constant work.
There’s a theory in biology called the 50/500 rule. You need a starting
fertile population of 50 to reduce the chances of inbreeding and 500 to reduce genetic drift.
But the biggest problem in my mind in order to survive on mars you’d have to not only sustain the population, you’d also need to be able to build all the technology used to survive- which of course is sophisticated. It’s not like you bring a piece of equipment to mars and it will last for the rest of time and it’s not like the population could live as cavemen. So even if the people live as “primitively” as possible you’d have to build mines and refining equipment to source the materials to build everything from structures to computer chips to spacesuits, to medical supplies/equipment, to an endless list of machines (and machines to make the material for the machines), etc. Since there is no oil on mars so easily making polymers (plastics, rubbers, synthetic fibers, etc), lubricants, waxes, just became much more difficult if not impractical.
And solar power probably isn’t sufficient to power all the necessary industrial processes, especially considering all the dust storms. Wind isn’t entirely practical either due to the thin atmosphere. You’d probably have to build nuclear plants. Not exactly easy to do, even on earth.
I have no idea how many people would be necessary to actually sustain a population in practical terms but I would guess it would be far more than 50,000… probably millions. It would be an interesting study for someone to calculate. I suppose human-like robots and a sufficient level of AI is the answer, but that’s a long ways off.
You’d probably have better luck hopping in a time machine, going back 250 years, giving an iPhone to civilization, and asking them to reverse engineer it.
