{"id":193,"date":"2020-10-12T18:56:15","date_gmt":"2020-10-12T18:56:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/marshallbrain.com\/wordpress\/?page_id=193"},"modified":"2020-10-12T18:59:24","modified_gmt":"2020-10-12T18:59:24","slug":"mars17","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/marshallbrain.com\/mars17","title":{"rendered":"Imagining Elon Musk’s Million-Person Mars Colony – Chapter 17"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Imagining Elon Musk’s Million-Person Mars Colony – The greatest thought experiment of all time<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Marshall Brain<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chapter 17<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

How can we apply the Mars colony’s principles to the billions of refugees and impoverished people on planet Earth today?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Think about the billions of people on planet Earth today who are trapped in absolutely miserable conditions. There are tens of millions of refugees, many of whom are now living in squalor and in terrible poverty. There are nearly a billion people living in slums. In the United States \u2013 one of the richest and most prosperous nations on Earth \u2013 tens of millions of people live below the poverty line. The full magnitude of the misery being experienced across the planet is impossible to grasp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We know, from a moral and ethical standpoint, that all of this suffering and poverty is horrific, abominable and wrong. To have billions of people on the planet living miserable lives in appalling conditions is completely unethical, inhumane. There is no question about it. But the problems seem so huge, so gigantic, that it is easy to believe that no solution is possible in any near-term time frame.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So let’s narrow the scope, and get down to a scale that a human mind can comprehend. Let’s focus on Syrian refugees \u2013 the people who fled from Syria when war and turmoil destroyed their country, their homes and their way of life. The causes of the turmoil were many: ISIS, civil war, government bombings, etc. [ref<\/a>]. Syria was once a relatively stable country with a population of about 22 million people, but much of the country was destroyed, so people fled:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Syria\u2019s population has shrunk to just 16.6m, down from a pre-war level of around 22m. With 4m UN-registered refugees abroad, at least 1m more unregistered and 7m internally displaced people, more than half the country\u2019s population has been forced to move. UN officials think the number could be significantly higher than that, since estimates of the pre-war population vary widely. One indicator of this is satellite images of night-time electric-light intensity (evidence of human activity) which has fallen over 80% since the start of the war. Up to 250,000 people have died over the same period [ref<\/a>].<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

To put this into perspective, 22 million people out of a world population of 7.5 billion people represents 0.3% of the world population. The millions of refugees from Syria therefore represent about 0.1% of the global population. In other words, approximately 1 out of every 1,000 people on Earth is a Syrian refugee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Millions of these Syrian refugees lost absolutely everything as Syria was destroyed. Therefore, many of them have ended up living in terrible conditions inside of refugee camps. These videos demonstrate the situation faced by many Syrian refugees today:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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