Comment Re:News Media (Score 1) 110
Would it only cost $4.5 billion? Bill Gates' net worth is $79.2 billion, Zuckerberg has $33.4 billion, Elon Musk has $7.9 billion and then I've skipped a lot of billionaires in between. If a few of those guys pool together, $4.5 billion sounds like peanuts. I suspect that figure was wildly optimistic, though. And anyway, even with all the money in the world, pulling off such a mission is simply unlikely with current technology. They'll get something wrong, or some vital equipment will fail unexpectedly, and that will be the end of it.
SpaceX is still having trouble simply landing a rocket booster back on the same planet it came from, would they be able to do it with twice the amount of money? Ten times? A hundred times? Nope, they just have to try, fail, try again, and finally they'll get it right. It's not about money, it's about experience.
Maybe try the moon first. I've always wondered why they didn't go for that first. See if you can get people to live there and survive. You can even get them back after a few years. Then, when we've got a colony up and running on the moon, we can start thinking about Mars.