
The Rich Are Planning to Leave This Wretched Planet - coldseattle
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/style/pigs-in-spaaaaaace.html#
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rgbrenner
oh no.. they paid a deposit to take a ride on a space ship? Clearly trying to
leave the planet... just like that time I took a flight so I could live in the
sky.

If you really believe this, then you clearly don't understand just how
inhospitable the rest of the universe is to human life. Antarctica is tough
for us... Mars is antarctica without breathable air. Colder, far less
pressure. Every resource your life depends on is difficult or impossible to
get on Mars. You evolved here, not mars. And probably for the rest of my life,
going there without a way back is a death sentence.

Do you really think Musk is planning to go to a lifeless planet to suffer and
die?

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smallnamespace
Concomitant to that: if inequality gets bad enough that we do have a
plutocratic class that owns the entire planet, it will be a lot cheaper for
them to actually try to fix things here (or at least slow down on the path to
catastrophe) than to move to Mars.

 _The Expanse_ series, despite not being 'hard SF', does explore a bit of the
challenges in detail. Mars is too cold and too dead, and Jovian moons are too
far from the sun.

You can build arcologies or other artificial habitats where life can be
sustained, but the _supply chain_ for making sure those habitats stay up will
still require Earth. If anything goes wrong, most everything a habitat will
die, and you will need another supply of ready humans and plant/animals to
repopulate it.

If anything goes wrong, you likely will not have a sufficiently self-sustained
autarkic supply chain on Mars to bootstrap the process from scratch again,
hence Earth.

Earth is an 'infinite' (from the POV of a relatively dead place) supply of
biodiversity, genes, organics, people, and manufactured goods.

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roywiggins
Being staff on one of those things would probably be the most thankless
highly-skilled job in the world. Can you imagine: you're trapped in a tin can
with a bunch of extremely rich, extremely bored, extremely motion-sick people,
and its your job to not only keep them alive, but also happy enough to justify
their $55m outlay?

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taneq
If you also want to leave this wretched planet, but you're not plutocratically
rich, I imagine that would be motivation enough to serve some drinks along the
way.

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olefoo
For the foreseeable future life off earth is going to be boring, deadly,
uncomfortable and require a high degree of technical skill even from someone
who is mostly a passive observer.

It does not sound like something that will be attractive to the leisured
wealthy aside from the very few who are into extreme sports and bragging
rights. You don't see rich people going on six month camping trips in
Antarctica and any space colony that isn't in LEO is going to be even more
distant, less stimulating and more dangerous.

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JPLeRouzic
The rich people are already visiting Antartica, but certainly not in camping
trips.

And when you have visited most wonderful places, the most unlikely one are the
one you seek. There are many travel agencies proposing this. And it is better
if there is a well known scientist on board:

[https://oceanwide-expeditions.com/blog/at-home-in-
antarctica...](https://oceanwide-expeditions.com/blog/at-home-in-antarctica-
an-interview-with-polar-scientist-and-guide-katja-riedel)

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whatshisface
> _“My vision is to create a comfortable egg, friendly, where walls are so
> soft and in harmony with the movements of the human body [...]_

That sounds like a padded cell... Apparently, that's also exactly what it
looks like[0]. Further... check out "axiom" on Google Images[1].

[0][https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/06/10/fashion/10AXIOM-i...](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/06/10/fashion/10AXIOM-
interior/10AXIOM-interior-superJumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale)

[1][https://www.google.com/search?q=axiom+spaceship](https://www.google.com/search?q=axiom+spaceship)

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rootusrootus
That looks ... horrid. I think I'd rather use my $50M to buy a big piece of
land somewhere remote and beautiful here on Earth.

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breitling
After you've bought a few of those and still have plenty left over... Then
what?

Might as well go on this trip

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ykl
I love that the url for this is "pigs-in-spaaaaaace".

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gallerdude
_A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies! A chance to begin again in a
golden land of opportunity and adventure!_

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cdiddy2
If we look at this purely from a 'what is the best option to attempt to ensure
the continuation of the human race?', then we should be attempting to do this
asap. Having 100% of humans exist on earth leaves us very vulnerable and a
single point of failure.

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ams6110
Unless we are already a colony that originated from some other planet.

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bitwize
Like Golgafrincham?

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taneq
At my old job we frequently referred to humans having come from the "B Ark."

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VectorLock
I'm 100% convinced this is what Elon Musk's end goal is. Tesla is just buying
him time until he can pull it off. The Boring Company is a backup plan.

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toomuchtodo
Elon Musk has always said he wants to die on Mars. The Boring Company is
useful on earth for transport, as well as on Mars (underground habitats).

Edit: now I’m interested in how many BFR flights gets one TBM to Mars surface

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maxerickson
"Lots".

It depends on how big the TBM is and you also have to ship a bunch of power
generation to run it and so on.

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Madmallard
Too bad we won't survive in space. So maybe they should look at making the
current situation more livable.

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mmealling
No matter how livable you make it here, there will be people like me who will
always want to go somewhere else. Like all of those people in Europe who left
and came to the New World. Why didn't they stay in Europe and make it more
livable?

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Madmallard
Because it sucked ass and there was new frontier that likely was livable...
The latter doesn't apply to space.

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Apocryphon
The investment in commercial orbital stations is more interesting to me than
hypothetical Martian colonies, since those might actually get built in the
near future. Guess it's another part of Carl Sagan's vision of the future as
seen in Contact that's coming true.

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xivzgrev
Click bait alert. This isn't about living on another planet, it's about a
short trip to a space station.

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ButterflyWar
The meek shall inherit the earth.

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pixelpoet
The rich are going to give themselves cancer, with all that radiation...

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mmealling
The material on those walls absorbs a great deal of that radiation...

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macawfish
thus the reptilian race was born

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trumped
The sooner, the better? I bet they will send somebody else first...

