I see this point get made often, but I'm not sure it is an insightful way to look at the world. Tesla cars are only barely related to Mars colonization, and PayPal is not really at all, which is a product conveniently ignored in your post. Even the SpaceX internet satellite constellation looks almost nothing like what internet access on Mars will be anytime in the forseeable future. It seems like a similarly strong argument could be made that every Google product is designed for Mars colonization.
I bring this up because I think it is important that Elon has some projects targeted at making the world better today, like PayPal, the Boring Company, and Starlink, some projects designed to avoid catastrophes a few decades from now, like Tesla and Solar City, and some projects designed to help humanity centuries from now, like SpaceX going to Mars. This is a very nice way of resolving the objection that Elon should focus on Earth's problems, which is to observe that you can both make the world a better place today while also working towards a brighter long term future.
I think that to the extent that Elon will inevitably serve as a role model, I want that part of the story to be told as well.
The reason PayPal is ignored by most people is two reasons. 1. In its current form, it has less resemblance to what he wanted to do with it (its a better product because of this fact) and 2. He famously found the biggest hurdles for humanity and their solutions after selling PayPal and becoming a multi millionaire with nothing but time to spend it. Originally he wanted to put a mini greenhouse on mars as a media stunt.
>The reason PayPal is ignored by most people is two reasons.
You forgot the most important one.
3) PayPal is a huge PR nightmare, a pseudo-bank that sits between legal boundaries whenever it needs to in order to maximize profit, screwing over thousands of folks -- many of them with small businesses that foolishly relied on them as a service. A successful service that everyone uses, and most people hate -- the customers are swept in by me-tooisms and forced participation.
If I were Musk, or I was a Musk evangelist , i'd stay far away from that 'accomplishment', as well.
He's not responsible for the entirety of the beast, but afaik he IS responsible for the viral aspects of their customer recruitment -- a method I feel is unethical from a monopolistic standpoint for a banking entity to participate in.
PayPal is a nightmare but the reason is that banking and other innovation was so slow. Even if you don't like it, it still solved a massive problem in the internet, or at least made it more possible.
You can say PayPal is bad, but pretty much any company starting on that path run in many of the same issues.
I've said it before, but in the context of solar system colonisation the value behind Tesla is not the cars - it is the gigafactory. Developing a serious Human presence off-Earth necessarily requires highly automated heavy industry and manufacturing.
Anyone can foist one's own unbridled ambitions, mixed in with a dash of lottery dreaming, tossed in with a bit of hubris, to come up with whatever the bright shiny future could be.
Minor note (mostly since a lot of people don't know this): Musk did not start Tesla. He led investment in their Series A, became chairman of the board, and became actively involved with the company's operations, which allowed him to gain the title of "co-founder," but he was not involved with the company before then.
Look in my posting history and you'll see plenty of whining about Google (and other tech company's) bulk collection of data. This should give you a feeling why - someone actually looking at a post history is considered intrusive and overstepping a mark.
Let alone if that wasn't freely posted in public, but instead gathered surreptitiously and correlated from many sources over much time.
He is not really like Jobs at all. Jobs created nice end user devices and that pretty much all he did. Other then some personal things people like to focus much of their process and goals are vastly different.
Mars colonization involves building an entire industrial economy from scratch on top of an airless pile of rusty sand, so you can connect anything you want to it. The idea that a planetary satellite network would be a top priority for a place with no air and nothing to eat is also a curious one. Musk would be better off developing an interest in hydroponics and radiation shielding.
And: Hyperloop actually made sense when you put it in the context of mars. You want transport to link your distant colonies. By running it in tubes you protect it from the storms. And to top it off there’s an extremely low air pressure on Mars so you don’t need to evacuate the tubes like you did on the earthbound proposal. It made no sense on earth but sorta makes sense on Mars. I’m pretty sure this is where the idea was born.
I don't think he's mentioned it specifically for each of the things in the checklist.
I'm pretty sure I recall him mentioning electric vehicles and solar cells being important for mars, but I don't remember the interview.
Elon and SpaceX have been pretty explicit about Starlink as a system for funding the development of Mars transit vehicles and initial colony, though I'm sure a mini-Starlink around Mars would be in the long term plans.
I don't recall anywhere that Elon Musk has mentioned anything about The Boring Company being used for tunneling on mars, but the connection makes a lot of sense to me, as initial colony development would probably take place largely underground as a cheap radiation shield.
It's not just that. The Boring Company wants to automate tunneling as much as possible (manual labour would be highly impractical in a spacesuit), speed it up and make it a continuous process. It also wants to power the boring machine by Tesla PowerPacks to remove the need for kilometers of cables. All of that seems suited not just for cheap tunneling but for Mars as well.
I guess mobile PowerPacks with solar panels? Just deploy a few thousand outside the tunneling area and then automate the battery switching. Could run it 24/7 without anyone ever going to Mars even.
It's a pretty natural conclusion people frequently arrive at. That said, I don't think it's valid, as I don't believe it was all explicitly planned like that. In particular:
1. Electric cars were created with Earth in mind. Musk was, and probably still is, very interested in ways to help fix the climate issue, and that reason was mentioned explicitly.
2. Connected to 1, not to Mars.
3. I'm not sure what the motivation here is; the official one was that Musk was bored ( :) ) in traffic. It meshes with Tesla's business if properly integrated. That said, the utility of tunnels for Mars settlement seems so big that I'm pretty sure he had it in mind too.
4. No colonies in a nearby future will need a Starlink-scale planetary Internet network. I'm 100% buying the official version here: Starlink exists to generate revenue for further work on the Mars transportation system/BFR (whatever its current name; Starship I think?).
I really don't think these were part of a grand plan all along. But they're all ultimately relevant for Mars.
There's a series of posts on WaitButWhy[0] about Elon Musk and his various companies and strategies. The level of Musk worship there generally rubs me the wrong way, but I think the conclusions are valid: the author also interviewed Musk one-on-one in 2015 and took a deep-dive into his businesses, so I would trust the author's conclusions. Essentially, Musk expects/worries that an extinction event (whether as a result of climate change, an asteroid impact, or whatever) will wipe out humanity on Earth, and believes that the best hope for our continued survival is to colonize other planets.
Over a decade ago, when Amazon wasn't the powerhouse it is today, I dated someone who routinely interacted with Jeff Bezos.
According to them, Bezos feels the same way. Amazon is basically a means-to-an-end, and that "end" is to get humanity into outer space, as an insurance policy in the event of a catastrophe on earth.
Realistically, he's probably keeping a low profile because that's best for Amazon.
According to Bezos, Amazon is a means to an end, and that "end" is putting man in space.
If Bezos said something that spooked investors, that would be bad for Amazon, and what's bad for Amazon is bad for Bezos' long term goal:
Colonization of space.
Three week ago, Jeff Bezos said the following:
"But, Bezos said, if the Earth's population and energy consumption keeps expanding as it has, we will reach a point where every corner of the planet would need to be covered in solar panels to provide people with the quality of life the developed world has come to expect.
"We will run out of energy on Earth," he said. "This is just arithmetic, it's going to happen ... If we move out into the universe, for all practical purposes, we have unlimited resources."
You’d think if they were really keen on that they would see the value of working together, not seemingly antagonistically, mind you competition is good, to an extent.
What I have noticed as that Elon uses metric, and Bezos Imperial units, Imperial units in space just seems stupid to me.
For Hyperloop, he did too. And Hyperloop involve battery powered electric vehicles, tunnels and solar panels (on top). So indirectly, there is a connection.
He also made clear that colonizing Mars, or at least getting partway through is one of his life goals, if not his life goal.
There is definitely a connection. But following the progression, it seems like Mars isn't the reason he started these companies, but "how can I make it useful on Mars" is definitely a consideration.
What is special about 1, 2, and 4 specific to Mars colonization? Even 3. Like those things don’t even seem like the top of the list as the next things to tackle for planet colonization? (Is a Tesla the next important thing to tackle?) What about like food and environmental support since we can’t actually breath there?
The big missing part is facilities to enable sustained life on other planets such as Mars. We still pretty much have no clue how to engineer it right, and it does not seem that Musk or any of its ventures is working on it.
I really can’t believe how many people on here take Musk seriously. Tesla is going bankrupt, there’s no evidence that SpaceX is profitable nor that reusable rockets will help in this regard and the Boring Co is a less funny take on Lyle Lanley (they have zero engineering insight as far as I can see).
The goal of Mars to me is silly. Mars is already worse off in terms of climate than Earth. Why not work to improve what we have? The only appeal I see is "uncharted territory" / wild west
Little Elon had a dream that he will one day walk on Mars. He thought to himself, well why can’t I? All I need is billions of dollars, and rockets (lots of rockets), and space ships, and renewable energy, and tunnels, and,...
And then Little Elon started a little company during the dot com boom called Zip2 and sold it to Compaq for $300 million. Then X.com which led to PayPal. Then SpaceX, Tesla, and all the rest.
It’s anything but “silly”. It’s incredible, it’s aspirational, it’s undeniably impressive. I love that his goal is so audacious as to be entirely implausible, and he keeps taking step by tiny step toward to realization of his mission.
And even though the goal may be entirely pointless to 99.999% of humanity, the steps taken along the way are reaping tremendous benefits to our lives and those of future generations.
Back to TFA, again I think they are missing the significance of what Boring will be doing here. An underground autonomous system which otherwise would have cost hundreds of millions for $50 million risk free is a perfect win-win for Boring and Vegas. Boring gets a beautiful test bed for a whole array of new tech, and a marketing demonstration of what they can accomplish if all goes well. Vegas saved a boat load of money, and gets a tourist attraction to boot.
It’s sad hearing/reading all the comments that this is stupid, just build a train, etc. Because that misses entirely the point that while this deployment could be served by a train the bigger vision is not one that could be served by trains, and the whole point, like everything Elon does, is to take a step on the path toward the Big Vision in a way that provides incremental value that can be monetized in order to fund and drive future R&D.
This is a cool story. But the dream of Mars started later than that.
In fact if the Russians had been willing to sell the dot com billionaire some rockets for his publicity stunt of getting a plant to Mars, SpaceX would have never been formed.
> An underground autonomous system which otherwise would have cost hundreds of millions for $50 million risk free is a perfect win-win for Boring and Vegas.
How do you think the boring company is going to be able to achieve these cost savings? If this system is otherwise going to cost hundreds of millions how the hell is the boring company going to achieve orders of magnitudes improvement?
For now, Boring company uses the $50mm to subsidize their R&D cost as they move up the “learning curve” toward the realization of an order of magnitude in cost savings.
I would guess the engineers at Boring have a list of a hundred things they think they could do differently that would lower overall cost. I imagine the biggest ROI is automation which removes humans from the vicinity and therefore the presumably huge cost of allowing humans to safely coexist with the machine while the tunnel is being dug.
Boring will surely spend a lot more than $50mm building this thing in Vegas. Investor dollars (which in this case I think is mostly checks from Elon) make up the rest. But rather than subsidizing glorified taxi rides like investors in Uber/Lyft where the learning curve is questionable, here the theory is there’s a lot of learning to be done in construction of a reusable and highly automated boring machine that isn’t just entombed in the tunnel at the end of the project.
I think the biggest cost savings initially is smaller bore tunnels using much smaller scale transport pods (e.g. reworked Model 3s).
Also, who else would be able to develop the custom small scale transport pods or the autonomous software that they will run on for just this project? Elon has access to all the Tesla IP as a starting point. They can build TM3s without the steering wheel or pedals pretty easily, and they already demo’d the software for driving in the tunnel.
Handling the pickup, drop off, and coordinating multiple vehicles I’m sure is not trivial but depending on exactly how they design the loading/unloading zones could be contained.
I’m just as interested as anyone in how they will be handling safety, and particularly what happens when a vehicle ends up stopped midway in the tunnel.
> For now, Boring company uses the $50mm to subsidize their R&D cost as they move up the “learning curve” toward the realization of an order of magnitude in cost savings.
What makes the Boring company have the exclusive monopoly on R&D? There is billions of dollars available for R&D. If it was just a question of money anyone could idealize those cost savings. Your entire post is mere speculation. There is not a shred of actual fact based evidence to support anything you have said.
I'd like to live in a world where rich dickheads act more like Musk and do cool things. It's like living in a comic book. It's fun.
But that's not our way forward. Forget the billionaires, we need to assemble, reinvest in our political system, and start building a better future from the ground up.
> I'd like to live in a world where rich dickheads act more like Musk and do cool things. It's like living in a comic book. It's fun.
Not to nitpick, but if you were to go by the typical comic-book example most 'rich dickheads' end up being super-villains.
If the question is : Do I want the immensely rich to start moving the world around from under my feet with their unlimited resources in order to do 'Cool Things'?
A: No, I don't. 'Cool Things' is too loosely constrained a parameter to allow trillions of dollars to flow into unchecked. What happens when some ultra-rich individuals definitions of Cool Things involves morally unethical behavior?
> But that's not our way forward. Forget the billionaires, we need to assemble, reinvest in our political system, and start building a better future from the ground up.
Good luck with that. For now people like Musk and Gates are doing a pretty good job of things in various areas though.
I agree, it looks pretty hopeless sometimes, and I definitely appreciate what Musk and Gates are doing.
I’d highly recommend reading “Winners Take All”, as it completely flipped my opinion on this subject. The author argues that giving up and trusting rich philanthropists to fix things further undermines our faith in the political system, requiring us to give billionaires even more power. And it distracts us from the question of whether we should change the system to prevent individuals from having that much power in the first place.
Although I appreciate the sentiment, I actually think this is impossible.
Some people are going to be inherently extremely ambitious. Those people will compete/cooperate and somebody's going to come out on top.
Supposing you establish a system explicitly designed to stop this from happening, you need someone to enforce that system. Congratulations, you just created a role for the ambitious people to fight over.
I’ve read the book you’re referring to. We absolutely should not try to prevent people from amassing enough individual power to do what Elon et al are doing. Bureaucrats are generally good at some things (eg reliably running services that are well known quantities and should be provided to everyone regardless of profitability), and generally awful at others (eg efficient innovation in new fields). You need a mix of both types to both run the world and keep it moving forward. I for one am very happy that sufficiently motivated and skilled people are sometimes able to amass enough resources to try crazy things like competing with each other to start orbital launch companies and deploy a world-wide network of thousands of communications satellites to break the government granted chokeholds a few telecom companies have on internet access.
For me, the main takeaway of the book was that we should stop revering consultants/MBAs and their process.
That is a bold claim, for which you will need some pretty solid evidence.
An election is basically a popularity contest. Winning a popularity contests does not guarantee competence, reliability or even correctness of opinion.
We've got a couple of centuries of evidence that private individuals who stand to feel the effects of their choices are much better at conserving and rationing resources than elected officials.
If you make a list of the horrors of history and rank them from worst to mildest, you'll find that public officials (even in democracies) are much scarier than rich people operating private concerns.
Oligarchies are even worse. The point is that people who win elections, and political leaders in general, are a much more concerning threat than wealthy, powerful & unlikable business leaders.
I'd be quite happy if governments had less power. People aren't threatened by rouge business magnates in the same way as they are by rogue public policy.
A few years of bad public policy does much more damage than any businessman can in a decade. Voters & governments are seriously not good at technical questions like resource allocation. Businessmen will stop doing something if it isn't working, voters usually push on regardless long after it obviously makes no sense to do so.
Because I think we need to change the system so that unelected rich folks don’t have that much power. The more we legitimize their work the harder that will be. I’m all for them continuing their work in the meantime though. I’m doing a poor job explaining it. Defining check out the book I recommended. “Winners take all”
"He's not a genius" thats pretty debatable statement he has very deep technical expertise in a number of fields that alone can easily qualify him as genius.
>"He's not a genius" thats pretty debatable statement
Sure, it's debatable, but 'genius' is a non-standardized poorly defined opinion, anyway.
I don't care if he's a genius or he isn't. He's done very well for himself, and that's praiseworthy by itself without needing arbitrary titles stacked onto it.
Re: unelected, people like to use the phrase "vote with your dollar" around here, so maybe all the people who liked X.com/PayPal and now Tesla cars have "elected" him according to that sentiment.
1. Potential for finding evidence of life outside of the Earth, never mind scientific research into dozens of other topics.
2. Joy and sheer inspiration; why go to the moon, run a marathon, or compose a symphony? Joy and inspiration.
3. Potential to improve our own technology as we strive for the above points. Clear, clear evidence of this in parent's comment and after NASA's innovative tech.
It's irrelevant if you personally don't care, you don't have to do it. It seems there will be billions of dollars and thousands of willing individuals, you can sit back and relax while the rest of us explore the stars.
A dinosaur-killer sized asteroid strike would still leave earth far, far more habitable than mars is (there would at least be air and water) as would essentially any other conceivable natural or cosmic disaster.
I hadn't really thought about that before. But I still think the sudden, cataclysm still could render humans extinct on Earth even if Mars is a more difficult climate. Mars dwellers would have had a great deal of time to prepare for that environment. On Earth, it would be suddenly thrust upon them. This is also assuming that the Mars colony was at a point where it could exist without supplies from Earth.
I thought so too, until I read this New Yorker article [1].
It’s about a site in the Hell Creek formation that seems to show, in incredible detail, what happened in the first hour after the Chicxulub strike a couple thousand miles away.
It reset my ideas about Earth’s habitability after the impact.
It so happens, that the Sun's expansion will eventually consume most of the planets in the galaxy; of course, it will also be so cold long before that point humans won't be alive.
> It so happens, that the Sun's expansion will eventually consume most of the planets in the galaxy; of course, it will also be so cold long before that point humans won't be alive.
Colonizing Mars actually introduces challenges to knowing for sure whether any life is native to Mars as opposed to introduced from Earth. But then I’m more of an “O’Neill cylinders in Earth orbit” kind of guy.
And people are free to work on that. If Musk wants to take a shot at colonizing other planets, more power to him. We're blowing trillions of dollars on pointless wars or 'frivolous' entertainment, so even if you don't agree with his vision, Musk's efforts should be pretty far down on the list of things to criticise...
Musk has said Mars is the backup plan for earth. What if one day there is a disease or meteor that wipes out the entire human population on Earth? (e.g., see the dinosaurs)
Even if the only appeal was the wild wild west and uncharted territory, what's wrong with that?
Look at what exploring the Moon has brought us, many unexpected innovations and inventions useful for life on earth.
The meteor strike wiped out the dinosaurs, but not all life. Mars currently has no life. The strong implication is that, Earth post meteor strike would still be far, far, far more habitable for humans than Mars ever will be.
As far as why describing Mars as Earth's backup plan rubs people the wrong way, I think it's a bit like Noah's Ark. While there is absolutely the cute story about the boat full of animals, and it does make for a good story, there's also the "meanwhile literally everyone aside from a minuscule elect ends up dying" bit. Which would be nothing but sour grapes if you didn't see people holding up the possibility of colonizing other planets as a mitigating factor that implies that we really shouldn't be quite so worried about all the environmental damage that's happening here on Earth.
But you do.
Put it all together, and the complete narrative starts to sound like, "Sure, we're recklessly hurtling toward turning the planet into an inhospitable shithole for billions of people, but don't worry about that, because 0.00000005% of them are going to get to live on a completely different inhospitable shithole instead!"
Which, disclaimer, I'm not wanting to pan human space exploration. But I much prefer the "exploration for the sake of adventure and discovery" narrative. If that's not good enough, the ground to retreat to should be robots, not messianic fables for rich people.
What is the actual goal of environmentalism on earth?
If it is to preserve diverse species, then it absolutely makes sense to colonize other planets and spread the wide variety of plants, animals, and other organisms. The earth will eventually be burned up by the sun.
Let's keep a sense of perspective here. What the sun's going to be doing a billion or so years from now seems like a rather remote concern compared to entire countries being underwater in a few decades.
If interstellar space travel is ever practically attainable - and, FWIW, that is still a controversial subject - then humans absolutely will figure it out. Or rather, they will just so long as they manage to extend both their existential and economic trajectories far enough for it to matter. Ain't nobody gonna be able to develop that kind of technology from Mars; they'll be way too busy on more prosaic tasks, like repeatedly checking their domes for leaks.
> The meteor strike wiped out the dinosaurs, but not all life. Mars currently has no life. The strong implication is that, Earth post meteor strike would still be far, far, far more habitable for humans than Mars ever will be.
Sure, but nobody today is researching the technology to survive a post-dinosaur-meteor earth. If it gets developed at all that's due to our space programs and our desire to survive on the Moon and Mars. So unless we go there we won't survive the aftermath of that theoretical meteor.
Not sure about the ear thermometer or cordless tools, but I'm pretty certain we would have gotten the computer chip and satellite TV without sending a guy to the Moon.
Agreed. Let's first try and "colonize" places like Nevada. Getting safe drinking water to many major urban centres could become a challenging engineering problem in the upcoming decades, much more worthwhile to solve than living on Mars.
There are large parts of Nevada that could be 'reclaimed' (in the Bureau of Reclamation sense) without too much effort -- just a couple of well-placed dams, berms, and canals. Large parts of the state are in closed basins, from which the water just evaporates anyway, so using it first within the basin would make sense. Extensive projects like this were once the norm, but fell out of favor as the 1970s transitioned into the 1980s, feeling the impact of the environmentalist movement, the opposition of Jimmy Carter, and the failure of the Teton Dam.
Some big urban areas already need to rely on interbasin transfers for their water supply: LA, NYC, San Diego, Mexico City, SLC, Denver. Tunnels for water would actually be a sensible and 'boring' pivot for the Boring Company.
If you accept the great filter hypothesis to explain Fermi's paradox, wouldn't that make interplanetary exploration a bit pointless? Presumably many other civilisations would have been able to achieve the same thing, and they were still wiped out by the filter event.
Not really, it could be that the great filter is apathy and single world habitation for instance - maybe we've been really lucky in terms of asteroid collisions so far and putting our eggs in two baskets is the necessary step for survival.
We don't know what the filter is, so it's sensible to reject pessimism and just keep on trucking.
“The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.” -- Randall Munroe
And I postulate that "The universe is littered with one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic and game theory decision of having thousands of thermonuclear weapons pointed at eachother, hoping that MAD will make that whole bit of lunacy sensible." -- vkou
It's got about as much empirical evidence to back it as RM's postulate. (And a similar sample size of N=0)
Anyone care to get on the train for my pet issue, and get around to nuclear arms reduction, already?
The beauty of making arguments, based on observing experiments with a sample size of N=0, is that you can argue whatever the hell you want.
I'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying, "I want to go there."But I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in. This is the kind of person I am. - Linus Torvalds
I came here to say this. If Earth gets struck by a large object we might be glad (i) we have another planet and (ii) we have a way to survive on an otherwise uninhabitable planet that Earth has become.
In fact living on mars might be the perfect preparation for what Earth might be like after climate change in a few hundred years time.
The technology generated by colonising Mars might help with climate change.
I think it's more than a back up. A lot of the problems, like the original poster pointed out, to survive on mars, are solutions that'll greatly benefit us on earth.
You cannot name one endeavor to get to Mars that doesn't have immediate byproducts that are incredibly useful to everyone on earth.
Going to the New World was also silly for Europeans at the time. Everything was going to be more dangerous, more risky and life threatening. But pushing ourselves to go beyond risk is what makes humans progress in the long run. Going to another planet is a huge, difficult step forward. By all means everyone who goes there will be worse off, but think beyond their existence, 300 years in the future. It may become a pretty nice colony once we figure things out.
I think the analogy is poor, because the "New World" was abundant with resources. The new world of Mars is not, and nearly everything would need to be brought there.
Why did the aboriginals hollow out a tree and float across the ocean? Why did prehistoric humans walk all the way from Africa to the southern tip of America?
We explore. It is literally in our DNA. It's what makes us human. It's also why we outlive the neanderthals, who never left the geographic region they were "born" in.
Having a small group of people on Mars would be a great scientific boom.
Einstein was inspired because as a patent clerk he worked across from the railway station and was very aware of time, time standards, physical trains.
We'd give up our earth centric imaginations of time, gravity, and many other things.
> Einstein was inspired because as a patent clerk he worked across from the railway station and was very aware of time, time standards, physical trains.
[citation needed] I guess he was more inspired by the Michelson experiment and the Lorentz transformations.
> We'd give up our earth centric imaginations of time, gravity, and many other things.
Gravity works exactly like here (But you can jump higher). Time works exactly like here too (The length of the day and the year are different, it will be a problem to choose a good calendar, but it's already a mess here. Anyway, it's not a scientific or technological problem, people just don't want to change the calendar they are use to.)
Perhaps they will find a few new interesting cases for climate science an geology???
They would spend all their time struggling to stay alive; no real science would ever get done. Look at the space station today. They're in a low earth orbit, completely dependent on resupply and accomplish very little other than siphon funding from unmanned exploration that actually leads to amazing breakthroughs because, "humans in space!"
There is anything plenty of stuff that could irrevocably nerf the viability of Earth as a habitable world. Something will wipe out all remaining life on Earth eventually. A billionaire wanting to go to Mars makes more sense to me than a billionaire trying to build the world's biggest private yacht.
The moon might have been seen as similarly silly. US might much more easily have focused on nearer space with a greater ROI on the project itself. But apart from the geopolitical bragging rights, the technical constraints of a moon shot meant the development of all kinds of technologies that rippled outward through society. We see some of the same effects with the LHC. Its direct uses have limited (immediate) practical impact, but the technologies required to build it, harness & process those volumes of data, etc., have spurned on all sorts of more immediately practical innovations.
And if that had been the only benefit then of course the whole program would be questionable. You asked for examples for the moon program and LHC, and you were given them in ample supply. If they aren't satisfactory in budging your opinion, this flow of discourse puts the burden on you to say something intelligent, and cherry picking only a single, and perhaps least relevant example doesn't really accomplish that.
There's no lack of material demonstrating that NASA's accomplishments contribute more to the economy than they drain in tax dollars [0] and it's difficult to ignore the volume & leaps of technical advancements achieved by earlier missions. You clearly have a different view though, so perhaps sharing that in a constructive way would be more beneficial than posting shallow comments that obviously ignore the information you requested.
Mars at its best is far less hospitable than the most inhospitable places on Earth. With that said- Earth is still only one planet and it would be wise for us to spread out for survival and resources.
Totally agree. Mars seems a miserable place. I would prefer we sent probes to Europa, Enceladus and upper atmosphere of Venus first to see what’s going on there.
> The goal of Mars to me is silly. Mars is already worse off in terms of climate than Earth. Why not work to improve what we have?
Earth's biosphere has already had five (5) mass extinctions. Guess what happens to humanity if number six shows up before we colonize another planet? Mars is simply the closest option.
The thing about the last five mass extinctions is they didn't involve a species so good at adapting the environment to serve its own needs that said species could colonize Mars.
Of those 5 mass extinctions, did any of them make Earth less habitable than Mars is today? I'm genuinely curious.
The Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event is theorized to be a massive asteroid strike which "release[d] the equivalent energy of several million nuclear weapons detonating simultaneously" and killed off 75% of extant species.
Sure, the preppers will be gleefully LARPing Fallout from their bunkers, and a small percentage of humans would probably pull through. Maybe.
If we have a seed colony on Mars, it significantly de-risks human extinction from an asteroid strike. Elon is the ultimate prepper.
Personal opinion, Elon believes that the earth is going to be uninhabitable by us in fairly short order. Mars is a fantasy to develop life support tech for earth, knowing full well saving ourselves would have been out of the question.
Because being a multi-planet species is required for long term survival. Could be tomorrow or a hundred years from now, sooner or later there will be fifty mile diameter asteroid with our name on it.
Some find better ways to live on other planets, some find better ways to educate people how to live sustainably on this one, without fucking it up. It's all positive in my book.
And yet somehow Mars will [support us]? To me this is like having a car in need of repair (Earth) and instead finding some abandoned junker (Mars) rusting in the forest and saying "yes, I need that one!"
Precisely. Religions are in decline among the younger generations. By the time we go to Mars as a colonizing species, hopefully we won't bring "faith to a deity" with us.
There's plenty of other damaging ideologies to take their place. Look at the extremist 1% on either side of the left/right political divide for examples. Religion isn't a cause of negative ideological/extremism, it's a symptom of cognitive tendencies that give rise to it.
Most species don’t last long enough to get wiped out by asteroids. I’d say that unless we evolve into something else, we’re unlikely to make it to the next big extinction event.
We are done evolving naturally, at this point it would all be genetic engineering.
We can have our eggs in more than one basket this century as long as we put effort into it. That is plenty of time to avoid getting wiped by an asteroid in all likelihood.
It's a coin toss. America, as it came, came at a huge cost. And over the course of 300+ years, it was carried out in possibly the least ethical manner possible.
I for one would have been happy for the Europeans to evolve for another 1000 years before they set foot in the Americas, in earnest, under the aspect of eternity.
I meant it as in "the freedom to do what one wants", not so much literally. And even so, Mars has probably less resources than even the (physical) Wild West did. In another comment I made the analogy that Earth is like a car in need of repair, and Mars is a rusting junker in the forest - in far worse of a state than Earth, but somehow there is the desire to go there.
The settlers back then were not trying to settle a barren rock with no breathable atmosphere or heat. If Britain had tried settling Antarctica, things would have gone very differently.
And as others pointed out, America was already settled when Europeans arrived, so what innovation even occurred there?
Because you have zero karma. The right to negatively impact someone else's comment is predicated on having first positively contributed to numerous discussions.
While I don't discount Musk's obsession with Mars, the recurring pattern I see is government money.
- Electric cars: subsidies
- Solar panels: subsidies
- Tunnel: transport infrastructure
- Rockets: NASA/military contracts
Starlink looks more like a commercial project but it doesn't mean the government can't get interested. After all, the internet itself started as a military project.
There are missing pieces in both theories (Mars and government money), the biggest one being PayPal. And some of them don't fit perfectly. So chances are that we are just making stuff up.
Winning a competition to ship cargo and then people to the space station is a bad thing?
Is there some universe in which entrepreneurs exit the electric car industry solely because the government starts offering consumers subsidies to buy them?
It is not a bad thing. I will never criticize a company for making money or an entrepreneur for grabbing opportunities.
I don't like the hype around Elon Musk and I think Hyperloop is a borderline scam (I can detail if you want). However I also think the success of PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX are well deserved. With them the world is a better place and Elon Musk is a richer man, that's capitalism working as intended. That subsidies helped creating a company that makes nice electric cars and solar panels is the reason the subsidies exist in the first place.
1. Electric cars for transport, Check.
2. Solar panels and batteries for power generation and storage, check.
3. Tunnel digging equipment for making underground bases and transport, check.
4. Satellite communications for an entire planet, check.
5. Then finally, the actual rockets to get us there.
Hopefully he will continue development to the point where the tech can be used on Mars.