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Perhaps it might have been possible in some long distant past to underestimate Elon Musk and write him off as a crazy person. That time is gone. If Musk appears

by keanzu 7y ago

Perhaps it might have been possible in some long distant past to underestimate Elon Musk and write him off as a crazy person. That time is gone. If Musk appears to be doing something crazy you've not understood it. > It’s crazy, completely crazy. Elon Musk has read too much science fiction. He got carried away with it. If I were in his position, I would not waste my fortune on colonizing Mars. And all they would learn is how awful it is up there: You can't breathe the air, the pressure of the atmosphere is a tiny fraction of what we have on Mount Everest. Instead of straw manning Musk and implying he doesn't know about the composition of Mar's atmosphere, try steel manning him and trying to figure out what he's doing. Musk has captured the imagination of financiers, engineers and the public and gotten them all pulling in the same direction - into space. Musk is marketing, that's his core skill. Mars is the sales pitch that drives SpaceX.

skellera 7y ago
I wouldn’t say marketing is his skill. His skill is getting shit done. The only reason why we listen to his (crazy) words is because he actually does what he sets out to do.
- deleted 7y ago
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- est31 7y ago
  > His skill is getting shit done. The main contribution is from his employees, not himself. He manages to convince them to work for him with extreme hours for bad pay and without even receiving proper credit (check out how many authors the Neuralink paper listed, then check out the cern paper's authors). How does he convince people to work for him? Marketing. He's a marketing guy.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    If you watch his presentations over the years, he has very much shifted towards "this is my team's accomplishment" versus taking the credit for himself. With time comes wisdom; whether it's to further motivate employees or because of how he genuinely feels, can't say, but it's observable.
  - Veedrac 7y ago
    https://www.reddit.com/r/Neuralink/comments/ce8a5i/new_neuralink_paper_an_integrated_brainmachine/eu26jiz/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Neuralink/comments/ce8a5i/new_neura...
    - est31 7y ago
      Thanks for the link. The fact that his employees agree with this instead of going the cern route proves my point.
- faitswulff 7y ago
  I would argue that marketing is a core skill for getting things done.
- jamespetercook 7y ago
  It's not his only skill, but you have to admit he's pretty good at it. Just look at his twitter account.
- 9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
  For getting shit done you need to market your ideas well to right people who work and who give out the capital. If you don't inspire them, you won't get anything done.
- keanzu 7y ago
  People are willing to buy a ~100K car sight unseen. Tesla has a near zero marketing budget. Musk is the marketing department. No other car, or truck, has generated anything close to the buzz Musk is able to consistently pull off.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - pound 7y ago
    people buying that car not because of Musk himself, but because finally there is a fun car being produced. And that is what other car manufacturers haven't gotten done in many years.
- Melting_Harps 7y ago
  > I wouldn’t say marketing is his skill. His skill is getting shit done. The only reason why we listen to his (crazy) words is because he actually does what he sets out to do. This, he is actually a horrible public speaker, and has a knack for going on tangents that often confuse even his biggest proponents. But, he has the Public's adoration because his insight and vision can bring people like Shotwell (who really runs SpaceX) into the foray and allows for the coordination of a great talent pool to work for extended hours, and what amounts to not much money in a selfless manner and this captivates the imagination of the People and subsequently inspires them to want to be a part of it all.
AndrewKemendo 7y ago
JFK sold us on space because "we choose to do these things because they are hard." It was an aspirational exploratory message. The reality is that we are in space because it is required for great power contests. I'm mired in space as a DoD executive, so I promise you space - at least inside the GEO orbits - is extremely practical. Starlink is honestly amazing. Mars though? I've steel-manned that one and I don't see it as anything more than what JFK did. Tickling the never-ending exploration/expansion desires of humanity. I say it frequently: Outside of the sun exploding or the moon crashing into earth, there is no future event that would make earth as uninhabitable as Mars is today.
- wrsh07 7y ago
  Is that true of nuclear winter or a major impact event? Wouldn't either of those render the Earth temporarily uninhabitable? Is the argument that it would be easy enough to build on Earth places to survive such events rather than going to Mars?
  - rubidium 7y ago
    A massive, underground biodome would be cheaper and easier.
    - jacobush 7y ago
      Can't fall behind on the mineshaft gap.
  - msl 7y ago
    > Is the argument that it would be easy enough to build on Earth places to survive such events rather than going to Mars? I'd say the argument is that Mars is currently a (much) less hospitable place for life as we know it than the Earth in any nuclear winter scenario that I know of.
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    Nuclear winter is probably quite survivable. Its mechanisms are the same as volcanic winters, with the caveat that it requires the assumption that nuclear weapons will result in uncontrollably large fires in cities that are as effective stratospheric soot pumps as volcanoes. And the worst volcanic winter in recorded history was in 1816, and the fact that you probably never learned anything about it in your history class should give you some indication of how close it was to a humanity extinction event.
Angostura 7y ago
> If Musk appears to be doing something crazy you've not understood it. I'll remember that next time he accuses a rescue worker of paedophilia,
- keanzu 7y ago
  That rescue worker temporarily had a platform high enough to speak with Musk's typical level of reach and attempted to use it to pull back the curtain and reveal Musk's publicity hound ways. This is an existential threat to Musk's operation and he reacted rashly and extremely aggressively slinging the nastiest mud which might stick. That type of reputational damage is extremely difficult to recover from. It also drew the public's eye away from the the "Elon the publicity hound" story to "Elon possible defamation" which is a much less serious problem.
bitexploder 7y ago
Not only that, but the cynic in my says... what SHOULD you be spending your billions on? Carefully grabbing more billions and political influence/power so you can have more influence/power? Or, you know, try to make humanity better?
- Devagamster 7y ago
  I'm not sure Mars is the most effective way to make humanity better with your billions
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    The tools you'd need on Mars are: Electric mobility and energy storage, launch vehicles to cheaply lift satellite constellations to Earth orbit (which just so happen to heavy lift what you need for a Mars transit), cheap tunnel boring to reduce transportation congestion on Earth, but also to build underground (radiation protected) habitats on Mars. If you have a hobby you love (go to Mars, die on Mars), it doesn't hurt to get rich building the infra your hobby needs. You will need those funds to buy services from your companies for your hobby.
- valgor 7y ago
  My reply to thoughts like these are always the same: In the US we spend an insulting amount of money on military and defense. The amount of money Spacex is spending is nothing in comparison. If one is truly interested in helping humanity, then one should be advocating moving funds from the military to any branch of science or social welfare. To nitpick the small difference someone like Musk could make by doing something else is to not have your priorities set.
  - keanzu 7y ago
    There's no comparison here. Musk acquired his money through voluntary exchanges with buyers freely and willingly engaging in market transactions. The government uses coercive force to raise taxes, it is not voluntary. Tax money is public property and we should have a say in how it is spent. Musk's money we gave to him freely and is his to dispose of as he sees fit.
RivieraKid 7y ago
No, that time is not over. I still underestimate him and think that he often says stupid stuff (for example some of his claims about Hyperloop, self-driving, world as a simulation theory). Musk is someone who's obsessed about being admired and considered smart.
- keanzu 7y ago
  We are both going to get killed with downvotes! > Hyperloop He's spreading FUD and trying to undermine any kind of mass transport which could negatively impact Tesla's car. > self-driving Not sure what the stupid part is here (maybe I've fallen for it!). His cars have some driving assists which he oversells as auto-pilot (it isn't). Straight up marketing. > world as a simulation theory Consolidates his image as a great genius ahead of the curve with a certain segment of the population.
deleted 7y ago
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mnl 7y ago
Well, I've been trained in Radiation Protection and I think I understand quite well why the crazy parts are just crazy or too crazily expensive to fund. On the other hand, Elon presenting some rendering across Jupiter's radiation belts doesn't strike me as an example of understanding anything, to be honest.
- keanzu 7y ago
  > Rendering across Jupiter's radiation belts doesn't strike me as an example of understanding anything. Marketing. He understands that a great visual excites people, accuracy be damned. Never let the truth get in the way of a great story.
legohead 7y ago
Mars is totally inhospitable to humans in multiple ways. And that's precisely why we should go there! We would have forced leaps in technology, habitation, and most importantly for Earth, terraforming.
- dirktheman 7y ago
  Yep. I'm Dutch, we've been converting sea to land since the early middle ages. Considering the technology at hand at that time, colonizing Mars is even somewhat comparable.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    It is absolutely not comparable at all. Not even close. Not even in the same ballpark (cheap shot: not even on the same planet...).
    - keanzu 7y ago
      > (cheap shot: not even on the same planet...) I shouldn't have laughed. I definitely shouldn't have upvoted. Apparently I am not a good person. :P
me_me_me 7y ago
> If I were in his position, I would not waste my fortune on colonizing Mars I might not like Musk and most of his ideas seems bit out there, or like hyper-loop pure bs, but... At least he is doing something with that wealth as oppose to other billionaires who are only growing and hoarding it.
- njb311 7y ago
  I've been excited by the potential of hyperloop since the first time I heard about it maybe 30-40 years ago. The idea isn't new - there have been pneumatic trains in the 1800s and at least a design for a vacuum train in the early 1900s - it is the engineering challenges that have held it back. I'm sure these challenges would require no less effort to solve than projects like travelling to Mars, but the outcome would benefit more of mankind and would create something truly amazing (until it's been around for a while and then it would seem no more amazing than a laser printer).
Seenso 7y ago
> If Musk appears to be doing something crazy you've not understood it. That's a pretty ridiculous attitude. You're literally talking about Musk like he's a god or something. He's a regular guy, not some kind of superman: he makes mistakes, has limited understanding, and is often wrong.
- SuoDuanDao 7y ago
  Sure, but he's been right on enough deeply contrarian bets that the kind of 'common sense' dismissal we'd apply to most people making the kind of claims he's made are clearly the wrong heuristic. It's not that he's never wrong. It's that how outlandish his statements are is not a good indicator of how likely he is to be wrong.
  - Supermancho 7y ago
    > It's that how outlandish his statements are is not a good indicator of how likely he is to be wrong. What someone considers outlandish, is subjective. By my observation (of topics I think are interesting), he's wrong all the time. Same as Nostradamus, although Musk probably isn't as crazy.
- keanzu 7y ago
  > You're literally talking about Musk like he's a god or something. There's absolutely the risk, probably already too late for some, of getting into hero worship of Musk. We should definitely steer away from that type of erroneous thinking. If you are playing Kasparov at chess and he appears to have made a beginner blunder so stupid you think him crazy then you are not seeing the full picture. Kasparov makes mistakes and loses matches but never one so serious he could be called "crazy" in the sense that any fool can see the error. Elon Musk is a regular guy, not some kind of superman: he makes mistakes, has limited understanding, and is often wrong - but never would he commit a blunder so severe as to earn the description: "crazy". Something else is going on if it appears crazy, look closer.
rriepe 7y ago
> Musk is marketing, that's his core skill. Yeah, he's not obsessed with sci-fi, he's getting other people obsessed with sci-fi.
awb 7y ago
> If Musk appears to be doing something crazy you've not understood it. Even geniuses make mistakes. We can celebrate him and question him at the same time. We don't need a hero or a fairytale ending to be able to appreciate the impact his companies are having and could have on the world.
- keanzu 7y ago
  "It's not that he's never wrong. It's that how outlandish his statements are is not a good indicator of how likely he is to be wrong." -SuoDuanDao https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22225597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22225597
bryanrasmussen 7y ago
Quote from 1945: Perhaps it might have been possible in some long distant past to underestimate Howard Hughes and write him off as a crazy person. That time is gone. If Hughes appears to be doing something crazy you've not understood it. I do however agree that Mars is a sales pitch for SpaceX, but the idea that Musk is not crazy may also be headed for a turnaround.
snarf21 7y ago
It will be interesting to see how this plays out but one thing has always confounded me. We haven't even started to figure out how to build a self-sustaining base of operations on the moon. We've been there, it is close but we don't know what years of low gravity will do to our bodies. If we can't figure that out, how could we ever go to Mars to set up a permanent colony.
- zionic 7y ago
  I don't get this "we don't know how to do it" mindset. We know exactly how to do it, we're just not spending the money on it.
leto_ii 7y ago
I'm gonna take the risk of being extremely unpopular and I'll say that Musk is completely overrated. I think he's nowhere near the level of people that we usually think of as geniuses. In certain ways he's good at marketing and hyping things up, but a lot of his ideas, especially the Mars one, are nonsensical. Just try to think about this: how bad do the conditions on Earth have to get before it makes sense to try to move to a planet that is essentially uninhabitable? Where even in the best scenarios we would live really harsh lives after a long and dangerous voyage.
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  Musk's skill is not pure genius. He's relatively smart, but nothing Earth-shattering. And he's also not particularly good at marketing... What he's good at is executing on ideas that people think are absolutely crazy. And he leans into the craziness a bit beforehand by choosing to describe stuff in a way that sounds a bit unbelievable ("hoverslam onto a droneship" = land under constant deceleration on a barge with station-keeping thrusters... "bioweapon defense mode" = good air filters, "autopilot" = good lane-keeping like an airplane's autopilot), drawing scoffs from a lot of intelligent, serious people. ...which pays off in spades when the thing succeeds. So maybe that's a bit of marketing instinct, but not in the traditional sense. So the more nonsensical he makes it sound, the greater the return when it actually happens. He gets the scoffers to do his marketing for him.
  - leto_ii 7y ago
    > So the more nonsensical he makes it sound, the greater the return when it actually happens. I agree, but this is true only when things actually happen. How about his idea of using rockets instead of planes for long haul flight (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LENvGRsr7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LENvGRsr7Q)? Or how about the hyperloop - any real progress on that? Or his idea of a submersible to save those kids trapped in a cave - was it good that he hyped that up? Remember when he started calling people pedophiles without proof? I'm also curious if you have more details on his technical contributions to Tesla and SpaceX. Do you know to what extent he's actually involved in the work (design, engineering etc.)?
adamsea 7y ago
What then, is Elon Musk marketing? Space? For whom? In what fashion, and for what purpose? Exactly how many people, in the best possible scenario, would we have the capacity to transport to Mars, or even simply into space? What happens to everybody else? There are billions of people on the planet. Does Elon Musk plan to send even 1/10 of them to Mars? So yeah if one's goal is helping preserve the human race, unless you're ready to write off the planet and everyone on it as totally fucked, not sure how Mars is a solution. You can make an argument about the _technologies_ developed in the space application process having value for the planet, but, that's a different argument.
yongjik 7y ago
Linus Pauling received two Nobel Prizes. Later, he advocated for "mega-vitamin therapies," which wasn't backed up by science. Elon Musk could be exceptionally brilliant and crazy at the same time. (Probably not as brilliant as Pauling, though.)
DraftDodger67 7y ago
The advantage of space colonisation is that you can control everything - the microbes, the infrastructure, the laws, the people. There are no environmental regulations, no taxes, no diversity policies, and with appropriate screening, no human, plant or animal diseases. To put it simply: imagine a space colony of a thousand of the best and brightest men and women Earth had to offer, where gonorrhea, AIDS, chlamydia, the common cold just didn't exist? Where one could work without the tax burden of paying for a huge welfare state? This is something that Earth cannot offer. Even in the most remote desert you will have to deal with the local tribes and the United Nations. Space colonies could developer free of the burden of socialism.
- UnFleshedOne 7y ago
  Interesting take. The Red Mars trilogy explored something along those lines extensively and believably arrived to what you'd call Socialism. :)
viburnum 7y ago
This is the way people in cults talk.
vraivroo 7y ago
Yeah, he's definitely playing 4-dimensional chess. Complete with the insane Twitter outbursts.
mnm1 7y ago
Getting people to invest money in crazy ideas that have no hope of working was also Elizabeth Holmes' gift. It's not rare or even that difficult. Now Musk has had previous successes, but I'd hardly call electric cars or even rockets and satellites genius or novel. The sad thing is that while he focuses on this, he's not only wasting his money and time, he's wasting the time and money of all the fools who believe that's it's possible and desirable, diverting what could be resources for fixing our own planet. That is the exact opposite of genius and that's why he rightly gets criticised for this insane idea. This Mars idea is no different than Theranos' product. In fact, it's a lot less likely to ever happen.
- UnFleshedOne 7y ago
  "fixing our own planet" is not a problem of resources. It is a problem of politics. Most of the people working on space (Musk included) are not that good at politics. They are working on hard problems instead of impossible ones.
malux85 7y ago
I know right?! > "You can't breathe the air, the pressure of the atmosphere is a tiny fraction of what we have on Mount Everest" Well, thank you professor science. An observation that my 8 year old nephew could have told me. The benefit of colonizing mars is all of the ancillary technologies that come along with it. Reusable rockets will give us Starlink, Easier Space Travel and asteroid mining. Making a habbitat on mars will force us to invest interplanetary internet protocols. It will force us to make better catalysis research for air, water, waste processing and synthesis. Uninhabitability will force us to increase automation capabilities so robots can build the base structures before we arrive. Going multiplanetary will give our species apocalypse redundancy. I'm sure I only touched on 5% of the reality because my imagination is so limited, but anyone who's done a tiny amount of reading on the subject can see the insane benefits, including commercial opportunities that exist here. But James Lovelock "wouldn't waste his fortune" on these endeavours - isn't it good we don't live in a world of pessimists like him who would hoard their future, secure in the knowledge that, when the planet finishing asteroid hits us, at least he can be vaporised with his pile of money, and it wouldn't have been "wasted"

by keanzu 7y ago

skellera 7y ago

I wouldn’t say marketing is his skill. His skill is getting shit done. The only reason why we listen to his (crazy) words is because he actually does what he sets out to do.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
est31 7y ago
> His skill is getting shit done. The main contribution is from his employees, not himself. He manages to convince them to work for him with extreme hours for bad pay and without even receiving proper credit (check out how many authors the Neuralink paper listed, then check out the cern paper's authors). How does he convince people to work for him? Marketing. He's a marketing guy.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  If you watch his presentations over the years, he has very much shifted towards "this is my team's accomplishment" versus taking the credit for himself. With time comes wisdom; whether it's to further motivate employees or because of how he genuinely feels, can't say, but it's observable.
- Veedrac 7y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/Neuralink/comments/ce8a5i/new_neuralink_paper_an_integrated_brainmachine/eu26jiz/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Neuralink/comments/ce8a5i/new_neura...
  - est31 7y ago
    Thanks for the link. The fact that his employees agree with this instead of going the cern route proves my point.
faitswulff 7y ago
I would argue that marketing is a core skill for getting things done.
jamespetercook 7y ago
It's not his only skill, but you have to admit he's pretty good at it. Just look at his twitter account.
9HZZRfNlpR 7y ago
For getting shit done you need to market your ideas well to right people who work and who give out the capital. If you don't inspire them, you won't get anything done.
keanzu 7y ago
People are willing to buy a ~100K car sight unseen. Tesla has a near zero marketing budget. Musk is the marketing department. No other car, or truck, has generated anything close to the buzz Musk is able to consistently pull off.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pound 7y ago
  people buying that car not because of Musk himself, but because finally there is a fun car being produced. And that is what other car manufacturers haven't gotten done in many years.
Melting_Harps 7y ago
> I wouldn’t say marketing is his skill. His skill is getting shit done. The only reason why we listen to his (crazy) words is because he actually does what he sets out to do. This, he is actually a horrible public speaker, and has a knack for going on tangents that often confuse even his biggest proponents. But, he has the Public's adoration because his insight and vision can bring people like Shotwell (who really runs SpaceX) into the foray and allows for the coordination of a great talent pool to work for extended hours, and what amounts to not much money in a selfless manner and this captivates the imagination of the People and subsequently inspires them to want to be a part of it all.

AndrewKemendo 7y ago

JFK sold us on space because "we choose to do these things because they are hard." It was an aspirational exploratory message. The reality is that we are in space because it is required for great power contests. I'm mired in space as a DoD executive, so I promise you space - at least inside the GEO orbits - is extremely practical. Starlink is honestly amazing. Mars though? I've steel-manned that one and I don't see it as anything more than what JFK did. Tickling the never-ending exploration/expansion desires of humanity. I say it frequently: Outside of the sun exploding or the moon crashing into earth, there is no future event that would make earth as uninhabitable as Mars is today.

wrsh07 7y ago
Is that true of nuclear winter or a major impact event? Wouldn't either of those render the Earth temporarily uninhabitable? Is the argument that it would be easy enough to build on Earth places to survive such events rather than going to Mars?
- rubidium 7y ago
  A massive, underground biodome would be cheaper and easier.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    Can't fall behind on the mineshaft gap.
- msl 7y ago
  > Is the argument that it would be easy enough to build on Earth places to survive such events rather than going to Mars? I'd say the argument is that Mars is currently a (much) less hospitable place for life as we know it than the Earth in any nuclear winter scenario that I know of.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  Nuclear winter is probably quite survivable. Its mechanisms are the same as volcanic winters, with the caveat that it requires the assumption that nuclear weapons will result in uncontrollably large fires in cities that are as effective stratospheric soot pumps as volcanoes. And the worst volcanic winter in recorded history was in 1816, and the fact that you probably never learned anything about it in your history class should give you some indication of how close it was to a humanity extinction event.

Angostura 7y ago

> If Musk appears to be doing something crazy you've not understood it. I'll remember that next time he accuses a rescue worker of paedophilia,

keanzu 7y ago
That rescue worker temporarily had a platform high enough to speak with Musk's typical level of reach and attempted to use it to pull back the curtain and reveal Musk's publicity hound ways. This is an existential threat to Musk's operation and he reacted rashly and extremely aggressively slinging the nastiest mud which might stick. That type of reputational damage is extremely difficult to recover from. It also drew the public's eye away from the the "Elon the publicity hound" story to "Elon possible defamation" which is a much less serious problem.

bitexploder 7y ago

Not only that, but the cynic in my says... what SHOULD you be spending your billions on? Carefully grabbing more billions and political influence/power so you can have more influence/power? Or, you know, try to make humanity better?

Devagamster 7y ago
I'm not sure Mars is the most effective way to make humanity better with your billions
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  The tools you'd need on Mars are: Electric mobility and energy storage, launch vehicles to cheaply lift satellite constellations to Earth orbit (which just so happen to heavy lift what you need for a Mars transit), cheap tunnel boring to reduce transportation congestion on Earth, but also to build underground (radiation protected) habitats on Mars. If you have a hobby you love (go to Mars, die on Mars), it doesn't hurt to get rich building the infra your hobby needs. You will need those funds to buy services from your companies for your hobby.
valgor 7y ago
My reply to thoughts like these are always the same: In the US we spend an insulting amount of money on military and defense. The amount of money Spacex is spending is nothing in comparison. If one is truly interested in helping humanity, then one should be advocating moving funds from the military to any branch of science or social welfare. To nitpick the small difference someone like Musk could make by doing something else is to not have your priorities set.
- keanzu 7y ago
  There's no comparison here. Musk acquired his money through voluntary exchanges with buyers freely and willingly engaging in market transactions. The government uses coercive force to raise taxes, it is not voluntary. Tax money is public property and we should have a say in how it is spent. Musk's money we gave to him freely and is his to dispose of as he sees fit.

RivieraKid 7y ago

No, that time is not over. I still underestimate him and think that he often says stupid stuff (for example some of his claims about Hyperloop, self-driving, world as a simulation theory). Musk is someone who's obsessed about being admired and considered smart.

keanzu 7y ago
We are both going to get killed with downvotes! > Hyperloop He's spreading FUD and trying to undermine any kind of mass transport which could negatively impact Tesla's car. > self-driving Not sure what the stupid part is here (maybe I've fallen for it!). His cars have some driving assists which he oversells as auto-pilot (it isn't). Straight up marketing. > world as a simulation theory Consolidates his image as a great genius ahead of the curve with a certain segment of the population.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mnl 7y ago

Well, I've been trained in Radiation Protection and I think I understand quite well why the crazy parts are just crazy or too crazily expensive to fund. On the other hand, Elon presenting some rendering across Jupiter's radiation belts doesn't strike me as an example of understanding anything, to be honest.

keanzu 7y ago
> Rendering across Jupiter's radiation belts doesn't strike me as an example of understanding anything. Marketing. He understands that a great visual excites people, accuracy be damned. Never let the truth get in the way of a great story.

legohead 7y ago

Mars is totally inhospitable to humans in multiple ways. And that's precisely why we should go there! We would have forced leaps in technology, habitation, and most importantly for Earth, terraforming.

dirktheman 7y ago
Yep. I'm Dutch, we've been converting sea to land since the early middle ages. Considering the technology at hand at that time, colonizing Mars is even somewhat comparable.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  It is absolutely not comparable at all. Not even close. Not even in the same ballpark (cheap shot: not even on the same planet...).
  - keanzu 7y ago
    > (cheap shot: not even on the same planet...) I shouldn't have laughed. I definitely shouldn't have upvoted. Apparently I am not a good person. :P

me_me_me 7y ago

> If I were in his position, I would not waste my fortune on colonizing Mars I might not like Musk and most of his ideas seems bit out there, or like hyper-loop pure bs, but... At least he is doing something with that wealth as oppose to other billionaires who are only growing and hoarding it.

njb311 7y ago
I've been excited by the potential of hyperloop since the first time I heard about it maybe 30-40 years ago. The idea isn't new - there have been pneumatic trains in the 1800s and at least a design for a vacuum train in the early 1900s - it is the engineering challenges that have held it back. I'm sure these challenges would require no less effort to solve than projects like travelling to Mars, but the outcome would benefit more of mankind and would create something truly amazing (until it's been around for a while and then it would seem no more amazing than a laser printer).

Seenso 7y ago

> If Musk appears to be doing something crazy you've not understood it. That's a pretty ridiculous attitude. You're literally talking about Musk like he's a god or something. He's a regular guy, not some kind of superman: he makes mistakes, has limited understanding, and is often wrong.

SuoDuanDao 7y ago
Sure, but he's been right on enough deeply contrarian bets that the kind of 'common sense' dismissal we'd apply to most people making the kind of claims he's made are clearly the wrong heuristic. It's not that he's never wrong. It's that how outlandish his statements are is not a good indicator of how likely he is to be wrong.
- Supermancho 7y ago
  > It's that how outlandish his statements are is not a good indicator of how likely he is to be wrong. What someone considers outlandish, is subjective. By my observation (of topics I think are interesting), he's wrong all the time. Same as Nostradamus, although Musk probably isn't as crazy.
keanzu 7y ago
> You're literally talking about Musk like he's a god or something. There's absolutely the risk, probably already too late for some, of getting into hero worship of Musk. We should definitely steer away from that type of erroneous thinking. If you are playing Kasparov at chess and he appears to have made a beginner blunder so stupid you think him crazy then you are not seeing the full picture. Kasparov makes mistakes and loses matches but never one so serious he could be called "crazy" in the sense that any fool can see the error. Elon Musk is a regular guy, not some kind of superman: he makes mistakes, has limited understanding, and is often wrong - but never would he commit a blunder so severe as to earn the description: "crazy". Something else is going on if it appears crazy, look closer.

rriepe 7y ago

> Musk is marketing, that's his core skill. Yeah, he's not obsessed with sci-fi, he's getting other people obsessed with sci-fi.

awb 7y ago

> If Musk appears to be doing something crazy you've not understood it. Even geniuses make mistakes. We can celebrate him and question him at the same time. We don't need a hero or a fairytale ending to be able to appreciate the impact his companies are having and could have on the world.

keanzu 7y ago
"It's not that he's never wrong. It's that how outlandish his statements are is not a good indicator of how likely he is to be wrong." -SuoDuanDao https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22225597 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22225597

bryanrasmussen 7y ago

Quote from 1945: Perhaps it might have been possible in some long distant past to underestimate Howard Hughes and write him off as a crazy person. That time is gone. If Hughes appears to be doing something crazy you've not understood it. I do however agree that Mars is a sales pitch for SpaceX, but the idea that Musk is not crazy may also be headed for a turnaround.

snarf21 7y ago

It will be interesting to see how this plays out but one thing has always confounded me. We haven't even started to figure out how to build a self-sustaining base of operations on the moon. We've been there, it is close but we don't know what years of low gravity will do to our bodies. If we can't figure that out, how could we ever go to Mars to set up a permanent colony.

zionic 7y ago
I don't get this "we don't know how to do it" mindset. We know exactly how to do it, we're just not spending the money on it.

leto_ii 7y ago

I'm gonna take the risk of being extremely unpopular and I'll say that Musk is completely overrated. I think he's nowhere near the level of people that we usually think of as geniuses. In certain ways he's good at marketing and hyping things up, but a lot of his ideas, especially the Mars one, are nonsensical. Just try to think about this: how bad do the conditions on Earth have to get before it makes sense to try to move to a planet that is essentially uninhabitable? Where even in the best scenarios we would live really harsh lives after a long and dangerous voyage.

Robotbeat 7y ago
Musk's skill is not pure genius. He's relatively smart, but nothing Earth-shattering. And he's also not particularly good at marketing... What he's good at is executing on ideas that people think are absolutely crazy. And he leans into the craziness a bit beforehand by choosing to describe stuff in a way that sounds a bit unbelievable ("hoverslam onto a droneship" = land under constant deceleration on a barge with station-keeping thrusters... "bioweapon defense mode" = good air filters, "autopilot" = good lane-keeping like an airplane's autopilot), drawing scoffs from a lot of intelligent, serious people. ...which pays off in spades when the thing succeeds. So maybe that's a bit of marketing instinct, but not in the traditional sense. So the more nonsensical he makes it sound, the greater the return when it actually happens. He gets the scoffers to do his marketing for him.
- leto_ii 7y ago
  > So the more nonsensical he makes it sound, the greater the return when it actually happens. I agree, but this is true only when things actually happen. How about his idea of using rockets instead of planes for long haul flight (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LENvGRsr7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LENvGRsr7Q)? Or how about the hyperloop - any real progress on that? Or his idea of a submersible to save those kids trapped in a cave - was it good that he hyped that up? Remember when he started calling people pedophiles without proof? I'm also curious if you have more details on his technical contributions to Tesla and SpaceX. Do you know to what extent he's actually involved in the work (design, engineering etc.)?

adamsea 7y ago

What then, is Elon Musk marketing? Space? For whom? In what fashion, and for what purpose? Exactly how many people, in the best possible scenario, would we have the capacity to transport to Mars, or even simply into space? What happens to everybody else? There are billions of people on the planet. Does Elon Musk plan to send even 1/10 of them to Mars? So yeah if one's goal is helping preserve the human race, unless you're ready to write off the planet and everyone on it as totally fucked, not sure how Mars is a solution. You can make an argument about the _technologies_ developed in the space application process having value for the planet, but, that's a different argument.

yongjik 7y ago

Linus Pauling received two Nobel Prizes. Later, he advocated for "mega-vitamin therapies," which wasn't backed up by science. Elon Musk could be exceptionally brilliant and crazy at the same time. (Probably not as brilliant as Pauling, though.)

DraftDodger67 7y ago

The advantage of space colonisation is that you can control everything - the microbes, the infrastructure, the laws, the people. There are no environmental regulations, no taxes, no diversity policies, and with appropriate screening, no human, plant or animal diseases. To put it simply: imagine a space colony of a thousand of the best and brightest men and women Earth had to offer, where gonorrhea, AIDS, chlamydia, the common cold just didn't exist? Where one could work without the tax burden of paying for a huge welfare state? This is something that Earth cannot offer. Even in the most remote desert you will have to deal with the local tribes and the United Nations. Space colonies could developer free of the burden of socialism.

UnFleshedOne 7y ago
Interesting take. The Red Mars trilogy explored something along those lines extensively and believably arrived to what you'd call Socialism. :)

viburnum 7y ago

This is the way people in cults talk.

vraivroo 7y ago

Yeah, he's definitely playing 4-dimensional chess. Complete with the insane Twitter outbursts.

mnm1 7y ago

Getting people to invest money in crazy ideas that have no hope of working was also Elizabeth Holmes' gift. It's not rare or even that difficult. Now Musk has had previous successes, but I'd hardly call electric cars or even rockets and satellites genius or novel. The sad thing is that while he focuses on this, he's not only wasting his money and time, he's wasting the time and money of all the fools who believe that's it's possible and desirable, diverting what could be resources for fixing our own planet. That is the exact opposite of genius and that's why he rightly gets criticised for this insane idea. This Mars idea is no different than Theranos' product. In fact, it's a lot less likely to ever happen.

UnFleshedOne 7y ago
"fixing our own planet" is not a problem of resources. It is a problem of politics. Most of the people working on space (Musk included) are not that good at politics. They are working on hard problems instead of impossible ones.

malux85 7y ago

I know right?! > "You can't breathe the air, the pressure of the atmosphere is a tiny fraction of what we have on Mount Everest" Well, thank you professor science. An observation that my 8 year old nephew could have told me. The benefit of colonizing mars is all of the ancillary technologies that come along with it. Reusable rockets will give us Starlink, Easier Space Travel and asteroid mining. Making a habbitat on mars will force us to invest interplanetary internet protocols. It will force us to make better catalysis research for air, water, waste processing and synthesis. Uninhabitability will force us to increase automation capabilities so robots can build the base structures before we arrive. Going multiplanetary will give our species apocalypse redundancy. I'm sure I only touched on 5% of the reality because my imagination is so limited, but anyone who's done a tiny amount of reading on the subject can see the insane benefits, including commercial opportunities that exist here. But James Lovelock "wouldn't waste his fortune" on these endeavours - isn't it good we don't live in a world of pessimists like him who would hoard their future, secure in the knowledge that, when the planet finishing asteroid hits us, at least he can be vaporised with his pile of money, and it wouldn't have been "wasted"