[somenameforme]

Well then you loop back to where we began. You implied nobody had made the 'business case' for Mars, as in something tangible. That's been done repeatedly, to quite a high standard. Now you're back to claiming well what about some sort of consensus, but again do everything by committee and all you get is a shinier version of what you had last year. It's easy to critique things, even things that are completely and absolutely sound - before people know that.

For instance here [1] is the NYTimes claiming that human flight would be impossible, published just about 2 months before the Wright Bros achieved human flight. Incidentally they also said space flight would be impossible, and were actively patronizing towards the concept. They felt that any child with a basic understanding of science would understand that there's nothing to 'push back against' in space, so spaceflight simply can't work. Until that's proven wrong by actually doing it, some might actually think 'wait that's kind of reasonable - omg maybe it is impossible.'

As for Musk, you're simply assuming malice when e.g. everybody thought full self driving was just around the corner when he made his claims about Tesla bringing it to market. It's kind of the same way that today everybody thinks that in a decade LLMs will be replacing knowledge workers left and right. It's just extrapolating outward from a trendline that exists at one point in time. But it may well be that in a decade we're still predicting that in a decade LLMs will finally be there. Or maybe there will be some revolutionary change, as promised by by all the people pushing LLMs. If it fizzles out, I wouldn't jump to calling them all fraudulent hucksters.

[1] - https://archive.is/F3nnP