Comment by marcus_holmes
1 day ago
Which makes it just a matter of priorities. If the USA spent 10% of its defence budget for a year on it, we'd be done. Would humanity benefit more from a Mars base than it does from 10% of the USA's defence budget? Almost certainly.
Though, to be fair, there are a lot of other things we could spend 10% of the USA defence budget on that would benefit humanity a lot more in the short term.
10% is not even 100 billion. You are wildly optimistic. 100B a year is likely closer to the cost of just maintaining a mars base. The cost to actually build one is likely an order of magnitude higher.