This is not good news.

Musk's stated, overt plan is for the Earth to die and a few thousand plucky billionaires to escape to Mars.

If we cannot save the Earth, flying to a dark, cold, arid, airless, lifeless poisonous desert will not save us.

And the cost of actually living on Mars is ridiculously great. I worked out that the investment it would take before Mars built a single computer entirely of Martian-made parts would be on the order of one quadrillion dollars, bet you never saw that amount before! - that over a decade of the Earth's entire GDP (most of which we already use on things like food and shelter).

Try working it out yourself. Before you build a PC, you need to have built a chip fabs, which means you need to have an active chemical industry producing the 30,000 or so chemicals that are used to make computers, and you need blast furnaces, copper and aluminium refineries, and plastic manufacturing for the plastic, and you're going to need gigawatts of power, and food for everyone, and water, and air!, all of which take immense amounts of power, and where are you getting all that power? For example, the sun is less than half as intense on Mars as on the Earth.

I grew up worshiping space travel. I wish we had money to do both but clearly we do not.

Spend the money saving the Earth. Mars has to wait.