No Stupid Questions

Build a large space at least a thousand feet high. Pump in over pressured atmosphere and build a wing suit so I can fly under my own power.

What better place to do all of the dirty work like mining and refining from asteroids that have a ton of metals and resources, then just send the finished product down to earth. No more mining our unique and delicate planet and polluting it.

Space Buc-ee's

Make new rules.

It's for the elite to escape the earth when they render it unlivable via climate change

Tourism. Tell me you don't want to try sleeping in reduced gravity.
Probably invent some new sports. And because we don't know what we don't know. So it's hard to build a robot to look for what we don't know about.

For the billionaires talking about future settlements on Mars and the like, there isn't a short term benefit to actually doing it. That's why they aren't investing heavily in realistic plans to colonize the solar system. They are investing in space, but in a much more limited capacity that mostly involves satellites, government contracts and maybe a little space tourism for rich people.

All the talk of taking humanity to other worlds is good PR, inflates stock prices, and feeds into their own egos. It's a way of projecting the image of being a visionary and being able to claim that they're building a brighter future for humanity, and taking credit for making sci-fi pipe dreams a reality.

There are potentially massive benefits to spreading out in the solar system. We currently have access to a single planet's resources, and Earth didn't vacuum up all the useful materials in the solar system when it formed. There are also resources which are more abundant in space like helium-3.

But that's all long term stuff. We may eventually build a moon base that refuels ships which support asteroid mining operations, send robots to build industrial complexes on Mars, and even start the long process of terraforming Venus so that one day we can have a second habitable planet. But first we have to get to the point where just getting into space isn't so monstrously expensive.

And even if we had a working space elevator tomorrow, there would still be a ton of technical hurdles to overcome before we could accomplish something new that actually helps pay for all of this stuff. There's speculation and research, but don't expect massive investments until we're almost there. Once independent researchers and unrelated technological advances have solved 90% of the problems and it looks like there will soon be trillions of dollars to be made by whoever capitalizes on it first, then you can expect the irrational gold rush moment like the one we see with AI now. Until then, it's all satellites and stock manipulation.

The Moon has the benefit of possibly being a refuelling or assembly spot for spaceships. Due to the lack of atmosphere and low gravitational pull, it may be more feasible to launch larger and heavier spacecraft from there (an alternative is assembly while in orbit).

Also for the clout of being an interplanetary species.

The cynical answer is "charge for air".

So imagine you're someone like Elon Musk, you're invested in space exploration and you've just told the world you're going to build a colony on Mars. What's the benefit? Sure, it's land, you can charge rent. It's going to cost a lot to get appliances and other "creature comforts" there, so that will be a service as well. But look at what else Mars lacks that we have? Air. They will charge for air.

Building a colony on a planet that does not support life doesn't have many obvious short-term benefits. I think the biggest long-term benefit is, you do it to show it can be done, then when you discover a planet that does support life, you take what you learned from the Martian colony and you send people there. After a couple generations of scientists and engineers and others have made it a place worth living, you can start sending regular people.

Now if we could get Earth's population back down to about 3 billion, we might be able to reverse some of the damage and keep Earth much longer. One way to get rid of 5 billion people is to colonise them on other worlds.

But, all that's pretty optimistic. What's to stop these space companies from flying settlers into that planet's star rather than landing them on the planet? Not the sun because people would notice. But if those people take a decade to arrive, and messages take months to get back to us, well, easy coverup.

It is NEVER going to happen. It's just a bunch of wankery.

One should probably at least consider the military applications. Meteors killed the dinosaurs...

We won't know until we go? Perhaps advanced vacuum cleaner research..

Oh you know, just the kind of things they do on remote privately owned islands.

We’re hoping to send all the billionaires one way to mars

I pedo elite want to turn earth into a colony of resources for them. It's not about Mars it's about getting away from us.

Realistically what do people plan to do crossing the ocean. Everything we need is right hear on this side of the Atlantic

For the same multitude of reasons colonists crossed oceans between continents on earth.

Independence, exploration, resource extraction, etc.