Again on the subject of what Mars could sell. Writers, artists, poets, musicians, photographers and filmmakers, all strike me as being good colonial material. What they produce is readily exportable electronically at no transportation cost (except perhaps rolled up canvasses in the case of artists). Written items would include blogs, formal diaries, novels, scientific non-fiction, magazines and an online newspaper. With the right quality of participants, Mars could have a thriving literary culture and earning capacity based on topicality, novelty and earthbound enthusiasm for things martian. Facebook pages of colonists would be immensely popular as well, with advertising possibilities.
And looking once more at start-up costs, I think Elon Musk's plans for selling $500,000 seats could be augmented with a lottery. I have in mind a fully global draw (where legal frameworks permit), say once a month. Five dollar tickets could be sold, with the aim of selling perhaps 100 million tickets per draw. That would create a cash income of $6 billion a year. Winners would need to be screened for some aspects of suitability with the alternative of a cash prize if they proved too hopelessly incompatible, but entrants I think would still be willing to take the risk. Even after prizes and costs, there should be left perhaps $4 billion a year in profits. Incredibly, just nine years of such an operation could cover the whole of Elon Musk's cost estimate for setting up his proposed colony, leaving aside direct sales of seats on Mars ships, Mars One's media sales proposals, and the memorial program for space enthusiasts I put forward earlier.
When you start thinking things through there are quite a bag of options out there both for development funding and a long-term economy. The feasibility of setting up a colony starts to look much more plausible I think.
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