My take on the Spacex is Mars habitation project is that Musk will put a bunch of edgelords on Mars, and then not really be able to follow up with adequate supply lines and the operation will be offline for a hundred years or so while the climate settles down. The people who live on Mars will then have been there alone for a century and in the 2100s we will send a follow up mission with hilarious consequences.
BTW you can tell I'm not Thunderf00t because he says that "the taxpayer" paid $3 billion. I would never use "taxpayer funding" language, I would only ever call it public money (because Treasury creates money when it spends).
The most succinct way that I have found to express the relationship between taxation and spending is that spending at the federal level is constrained by aggregate spending this year, not tax receipts last year.
https://defector.com/neither-elon-musk-nor-anybody-else-will...
Although I like when thunderfoot compare the archives of what musk said with what actually happened
the government can also destroy money about as easily as it creates it, too. it isn't a politically (and usually economically) desirable thing to do. when it's done, it's usually via replacing the whole currency wholesale (e.g. brazilian real).
I suspect this is because the most casual analysis reveals incredible difficulties - the structures would have to be buried under a few meters of regolith to avoid constant radiation burn, and the ration of human living space to plant growing space (for food) would have to be about 1:6 I'd guess. The amount of material required to build such a structure for 100 humans? Let alone maintenance, etc.
If realistic plans were actually presented no doubt everyone would start laughing, which is why we haven't seen any mock-ups, VR models, etc.
All your other solutions are hand-wavey. Sure, let’s “just live underground” as if that’s just as easy as pitching a tent. And who on Earth is surviving nine months without any food? You’re talking as if Mars is just turning right on Albuquerque.
HN just has forgotten its hacker roots and instead gets off to unconstructively sitting back and criticizing with shallow gotchas.