Almost everything about the plan to go to Mars, especially about creating a "backup population" is uncertain. Compare that to the current, immediate suffering and lost potential that is caused by poverty and disease.
Polio is an occurrence with a probability of one, and a non-zero impact.
An catastrophic asteroid impact is a low daily probability, with an impact of up to one (one being complete wipeout of the human race).
I think it's a tossup which yields better happiness or productivity for humanity to address in the short run. In the extreme long run, of course, if you don't solve the second, there's little point solving the first issue.
The problem is a lack of resources - that resource being some collective focus of humankind, as there's no real physical resource limit preventing us from pursuing both at the moment.
Why Mars? The moon is nearer and no less hospitable (frankly they both suck).
Mars is a vanity project however he chooses to dress it up. An interesting vanity project sure but a vanity project all the same.
And personally I have no issue with that, I just wish he'd be honest. We didn't go to the moon the first time for any good reason, we did it because it was there. Governments can't afford to pay for the "because they're there" projects any more but if Musk, Page and co can then great but don't pretend it's for the good of humanity - "because it's there" is all the justification you need for something that amazing.
The cynic in me says we went to the moon because putting a man on the moon made real the capability of getting an ICBM to anywhere on the earth - both to ourselves and the rest of the world. The optimist in me hopes we can setup shop somewhere, anywhere off-planet without similar motivations prodding us.
As the probability of the asteroid problem is low short term we should tackle the poverty problem first. Then we will have more people to tackle the asteroid problem in the long run.
If number of people are not the limiting factor to working on both problems, why would one a) impose a condition to work on the problems in a sequential order, and b) prefer an order based on gaining more people first?
That's a bit of a negative way to look at it. I think in the end the goals don't have to be mutually exclusive. Elon Musk does what he does best, and Gates does his thing.
They're both great goals and I'm glad we live in a time when going to mars is something we can propose as a serious point of discussion, instead of being an unrealistic dream.
Some people may have said this before Polio vaccine was discovered:
"Almost everything about the plan to help Polio victims, especially about creating a "polio vaccine" is uncertain. Compare that to the current, immediate suffering and lost potential that is caused by poverty and disease."
Polio is a disease that that's causing immediate suffering and lost potential. And it was even more so before discovery of the vaccine, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
The only specific alleviation that colonizing Mars yields is that people who don't want to live on Earth don't have to live on Earth.
There are some very good reasons to pursue the colonization of Mars, mostly in the form of advancing science. A backup population is not one of these good reasons.
Curing polio is a force multiplier that will probably help us get to Mars, in the form of more demand for satellites and space related industries, as well more inventors and scientists.
Colonizing Mars will be a force mulitpler as well, mostly through indirect technology benefit and ancillary space industries(asteroid mining). It probably won't impact the effort to cure polio but will probably increase our ability to cure other diseases.
