In 1900, a first class ticket cost £30/US$150 to cross the Atlantic one way by steamer. The average weekly wage in 1905 in the US was $10.05, so a first class one way ticket across the Atlantic cost about 1/3rd of year's wages. Wages overseas were lower (the US already had a higher standard of living than most of the rest of the world, excluding places like New Zealand and Argentina), so as a percentage of annual income, the cost of a ticket for the immigrants to the US would have been higher, relatively. That didn't stop immigration, though. Between 1900 and 1914, immigration into the US averaged nearly 900,000 a year. But of course, 3rd class ("steerage" or "emigrant class") was around $40 one way, one third of the first class fare, which worked out at a month's wages.
OK, so using transatlantic migration as a template, how many immigrants to Mars will there be?
I estimate here that a one-way ticket to Mars will cost $220,000, if SpaceX's Starship is successful. Average wages in the USA are ±$63,000 per annum. So that's 3 and a half years of an average person's income. On the other hand, the $220,000 assumed that each passenger would also take a 600 kg of baggage and 300 kg of food for the journey to Mars. What if they just go with a backpack and food (provided to them by the space line, but it still has to be costed). Then the cost falls to $110,000, or 1.7 times a year's income. There won't be many immigrants at those prices.
And given how long the journey takes, and how confined the spaceship will be, it is unlikely that there will be third class fares. Millionaires only, at first. A few hundred "immigrants" a year, most of whom will be scientists/astronauts. However, there are 1.5 million "deca-millionaire" households in the US, i.e. households with a net worth of more than $10 million. They will be able to afford the tickets, and will go as tourists. The ultimate after dinner gloat: "When we flew over Valles Marineris ...."
Yeah, I know―but these early visitors will bring down the costs for everybody, as we move down the learning curve. Because any new technology is expensive at first. As we learn how to do things better, its costs fall. So at first, even though only the "deca millionaires" and above, and staff from government agencies like NASA, will be able to afford a ticket to Mars, that will change.
It's impossible to tell just how rapid the learning curve will be, but just have a look at SpaceX's learning curve so far. Before SpaceX started it cost $22,000 to lift a kg into orbit. When Starship starts regular flights to LEO (low Earth orbit) next year this will have fallen to round $20/kg. Even if cost declines in future are much slower, it's surely plausible to assume that there will be significant declines in the cost of a ticket to Mars over the next 2 decades. Could the costs decline 75% as space liners get bigger and propulsion systems improve over the next couple of decades, pushing the cost of the ticket to Mars down to $50k? Meanwhile, wages on Mars, as Musk has remarked before, will be high, because there will be a shortage of labour, just as there was in the US before WW1. As the price of a ticket to Mars falls, and development on Mars builds, the number of people willing to pay will rise exponentially.
Let's assume that the number of people travelling to Mars starts at 500 in 2025 (5 ships), and increases by 50% every "orbit sync", i.e., every two Earth years, or each Martian year. That suggests something like 60-70,000 immigrants/visitors a Martian year by 2050, and a couple of hundred thousand a year by 2060. Of course, the growth rate will slow, but Musk will have achieved his goal of making civilisation multi-planetary. By then, there will be bases on the Moon, space stations in orbit round the Earth and Mars, and we will be mining the asteroids.
And before you dismiss this as pie in the sky, consider that SpaceX started 20 years ago with a handful of employees, and was mocked for its plans to enter the space race. 5 years ago, though the Falcon 9 was a huge success, Starship was just a twinkle in Musk's eye. Construction of Starship was only switched to steel in December 2018. 3 years later, we are close to the first orbital flight. Of course, the first launch, and the second (and the third ....) are likely to fail. But each failure will give SpaceX more data. And then there will be successful launches, one after the other. It took SpaceX several tries to get landings of its Falcon booster right. Now they are routine. And all this from a company which didn't exist 20 years ago, and which has already cut the cost of launching a kilo to space by an order of magnitude.
Becoming a space-faring civilisation with colonies on the Moon and Mars will also be a powerful technological forcing function, engendering rapid change in a hundred different fields, ranging from health, water and air purification, rocketry and electricity generation, through to biology and agriculture. Just because the change isn't right in front of you, don't assume it isn't happening. At breakneck speed.
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