That’s Tannhäuser Gates. The latest CEO of Microsoft.
I know that’s the slogan, but it would be enough, I think, for them just to look human. Especially as they’re illegal on Earth, you’d think the government (UN, US or other) would insist on a means to more easily identify them.
It’s not just a slogan, it’s Tyrell’s driving motivation. And governments insist on what rich people want them to insist on.
Why? There’s no reason a Martian or outer solar system colony couldn’t be doing well.
Not as well as Earth, though. Any colony you can build on Mars, you can build better on Earth.
Despite FTL travel being probably more unbelievable than a large leap in conventional space travel engines, ships etc, extra-solar colonies are easier (once you get there) because you start with a “class M” 
planet. It has metals that can be mined, water, wood, building materials, places to grow crops, and most importantly, a breathable atmosphere. No matter what mining and power generation you can get on your Mars/Titan/Pluto colony, the first thing you have to do is build a dome-thing to live in.
Unless Earth is sooo degraded (by pollution and radiation) and Mars is already successfully terraformed. Which seemed to be the kind of thing they were going for.
Yes, not realistic, but that was the kind of thing SF of the day seemed to love. Probably Cold War malaise.
I think the following hasn’t been mentioned yet in this thread. If it has, excuse me. The Roy Batty speech was written by David Peoples and by Rutger Hauer. Someday I’ve got to get around to reading my copy of All Those Moments, a memoir by Hauer:
I laughed.
Right, and if the ship was in outer space, the only fire it could be on is probably only kept alive by the onboard air supply. And if c-beams were glittering, Roy was probably seeing them through an atmosphere, which suggests that he was planetside when he saw them.
Or the onboard fuel supply. A rocket is supposed to have flames going out the back end. When things go wrong, sometimes the flames come out other places instead. Usually followed fairly quickly by rapid unscheduled disassembly.
More advanced spacecraft might not be rockets, but that just makes it worse, because they’re probably carrying something even more energetic than rocket fuel, and whatever that is, it can probably also have a rapid unscheduled release of whatever that energy is.