What Will Draw Musk's Million to Mars

People migrate for a better life: from a subsistence living on a Scottish highland croft to the world of opportunity in the city of Edinburgh or Glasgow, or from the poverty-stricken Old World slums of London and Paris to the American New World of cheap land and high wages. 

What then will drive the million-person migration to Mars that Elon Musk speaks of? 

Cheap land? 

Hardly. There's plenty of cheap land in Antarctica where the air is breathable and the year-round mean temperature of minus 10 degrees C in coastal areas compares favorably with conditions on Mars where the air is barely distinguishable from a total vacuum and the year-round mean temperature is minus 63 degrees C.

But the wages. 

Sure, wages on Mars will be high: high enough to attract a million migrants. But why would anyone pay high wages on Mars when Musk is producing low-cost robots to eliminate the high cost of employing people? 

Anyhow, what's so great about a high wage on Mars if you happen to be one of the few humans Musk or anyone else is likely to hire on the Red Planet? What will be the price of a Martian-raised lamb chop, or an imported one? 

And what about rents? You can't put up a tower block on Mars for a couple of hundred bucks a square foot. The building's gotta be air-tight. It has to sustain an internal air pressure of something like 16 pounds per square inch. That's more than a ton per square foot, ten tons per square meter. You're gonna have to reinforce the walls, the floors, the ceilings with heavy steel plates and steel columns. 

In fact, the solution to the housing problem, that's if there's ever enough people on Mars to create a housing problem, will be to put people underground. Tunnels, a few meters below the surface. Tunnels will provide shelter from the cancer causing flux of solar and cosmic radiation at the Martian surface. A flux over 60 times greater than at the surface of the Earth. The soil around the tunnel will provide the mass to contain the high pressure atmospher that humans need to breath. 

So life on Mars is gonna be a great. You'll live underground, pay a sky-high rent, and compete for work with robots. Good luck, Elon, selling that proposition.