Assuming there would be a middle class and we didn’t destroy ourselves or ended up in a dystopia.
Professionally (like Apollo and Artemis)? Possibly within this century. And the first person setting foot on Mars will likely be a middle-class professional astronaut like Armstrong or Aldrin.
Privately? It’s going to be a while. Middle class people in any country still can’t even go to low Earth orbit, let alone the Moon or Mars.
Why would they want to?
Even in a best case scenario the only thing to do on Mars is to sit inside some kind of bio-dome drinking recycled urine hoping that the destillation process didn’t remove all of the alcohol from yesterday’s batch.
We’re at a point where people can visit Antarctica for the price of a used car and it is likely that price will drop in the future as development outside of science starts occurring. Antarctica is a cold desolate continent where you’re either inside or wearing specialty survival gear.
I read A City On Mars and came away convinced that questions like this one are pretty silly.
Show us a Las Vegas that thrives on its recycled water alone. Show us an airtight building, made of materials that can be recycled into new building parts. Show us a self-contained arcology in Antarctica that’s so appealing, ordinary families dream of moving there to raise their kids.
Then we can talk about Mars.
Never. I don’t think large-scale habitation of Mars or any other planets will ever happen.
The only sensible answer.
Even if we discovered unobtainium there, robots would do the mining.
80% of earth’s surface is still uninhabited. All of that (including the seabed) is vastly better suited to human settlement than Mars, and it’s right here.
There simply isn’t a reason to settle Mars at scale right now.
Once the oceans, the Sahara and Antarctica are full of overpopulated cities, we’re growing our food in low earth orbit and are desalinating oceans for drinking water, it might look different.
But I don’t think we’ll make it to that kind of population before we commit collective suicide.When the rich billionaire fuckers who will have moved there need someone to clean their martian mansions or mow their space lawn.
I love mars and would like to go there. But not this way. Billionaires ruin everything :(
Need … some help ?
Just sand and rocks, nothing else not even sound
Not in my life span thats for sure.
We lack the tech for it.
People can claim they can do it all they want but, even under the assumption we can get there properly, we lack the life support capabilities and the terraforming capabilities to actually make it habitable on a larger scale.
realistically, we need to do baby steps. I think getting someone landed and returned from mars is a much more reasonable milestone then getting someone there and then colonizing/terraforming. This will also give the chance for tech to catch up to the required capabilities we would need. Like we haven’t even colonized the moon and people want to go to mars?
how this relates to the question is: Middle class won’t be going to any celestial object until it’s cost effect to do so, which won’t be until there’s a economical reason for it, which will require a colonization & an economy driver there.
As soon as we can digitize our consciousness and stream ourselves there through the intergalactic routers.
the billionaires will need a slave class so probably as soon as going to mars is viable at all. Id think an earth middle class is a martian slave class
Middle class people can only afford to go on a vacation to another continent if they save for a decade. If Mars is ever inhabited it will only be by the wealthy because they killed the planet and left us to die
wealthy people would not live on mars, because in the best case they would only have the bare minimum food, water and amenities to survive, but not the luxury lifestyle they know from earth. It would be like downgrading their life from a nice house in a city to moving into a run down campsite in the middle of the desert with rationed food and water, no shops, no parties, no business trips, no live internet, no epstein island and no transport to get out for a few days.
As soon as the billionaires figure out a way to monetize it, you can bet your ass you’ll be on the next coach seat headed that way.
Never.
Poor and desperate people will go before middle class people.
Middle class people weren’t homesteaders.
What resources does Mars have that we would really want to build something there? I know the moon has HE3; what does Mars have? I don’t expect humans to live anywhere they aren’t getting some material benefit from. Especially when it is extremely hard to do so, like a space colony.
If you’re curious what astrophysicists rather than CEOs have to say about this, the answer seems to be never.
There is no business case to be made, so no country is trying to settle on mars.
