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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 usua

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.)?
  - Robotbeat 7y ago
    The rockets for long haul flight is still a goal of SpaceX's. They are pursuing that as a kind of secondary market (which would have a LOT more demand than Mars missions) for their Mars rocket. In fact, they're more serious about that now than ever. Hyperloop is making progress. It wasn't a priority for Musk; he didn't start a Hyperloop company, but open-sourced the idea and let others run with it. Those companies have kind of petered out for the most part. He did also start a student competition for Hyperloop, which IS continuing. There's a mile-long prototype vacuum tube outside SpaceX's headquarters where students tested pods going hundreds of miles per hour for several years (including 2019). He is now having a 10 kilometer long tube (with a turn) built to continue the competition and test speeds comparable to the original concept. He did start The Boring Company to try to address one of the main problems with Hyperloop (the extreme cost of boring tunnels), and that IS making progress. They're on-track (heh) for completion of tunnels in May for a mass transit system using pods (but at atmospheric pressure) based on stretched Tesla vehicles that will serve the Las Vegas convention center. Currently has dug about 3000ft of the first tunnel which is to be a bit more than a mile long. The cave bit was embarrassing to Musk, he made some gross mistakes, and while the submersible folk were definitely trying to help (like NASA had developed capsules to rescue trapped miners in past disasters), the feedback of crazy between Musk and the media was more a liability than a help. He lost a lot of credibility with the name-calling, even though I definitely think he had been trying to help. Musk is chief engineer at SpaceX, so he does similar systems engineering work as you'd expect for someone in his position. If you talk to people who have worked with him, they will tell you he has a good understanding and a deep technical involvement in both companies (especially SpaceX). Although that's hardly unique. I think the main strength is pursuing goals that are both important and challenging and empowering his employees to execute quickly on these challenges (and part of the reason he can empower them to act quickly is because he has enough technology knowledge to make command decisions on key technical questions which otherwise could end up in "analysis by paralysis" or even worse, continuing down a technical dead end just due to organizational inertia).
    - leto_ii 7y ago
      Thanks for the comprehensive reply :D If at least the hyperloop project manages to get off the ground (pun sort of intended) that would still be a nice contribution to human progress. I'm not at all sure about the long-haul rockets though. I think having rockets near population centers is extremely dangerous to begin with. Secondly, I'm not sure the cost-benefit ratio makes sense. Transport aboard a rocket must be extremely expensive, but if you take the trip to/from the rocket-port into account the door-to-door time won't be spectacularly shorter than it is now.
- dwild 7y ago
  > And he leans into the craziness a bit beforehand by choosing to describe stuff in a way that sounds a bit unbelievable He did was able to build a car company and a rocket company. Sure you found example that are less crazy than what he said, but you forget the actual crazy stuff he did.
buzzerbetrayed 7y ago
The comment you are responding to is the perfect response to your comment. GP basically references your line of thinking in it, and you didn’t really refute anything they said.
- leto_ii 7y ago
  Well, the truth is my comment doesn't directly attack the GP. It was more my take on Musk in general. That being said, the GP doesn't actually provide any evidence, hence there's not much to refute.
martythemaniak 7y ago
It is not that he is a one-in-a-billion kind of genius, no. He is probably in the 99.99th percentile of engineers, but that still means there's many many thousands of engineers as smart as he is. However, he is also in the 99th percentile for marketing, 99.9th percentile in leadership, 99th percentile of celebrity, etc. No, he is not special on any single dimension, but it is extremely rare to find this distribution, which is what he actually is and all these dimensions were used to make his companies successful.
- spectrum1234 7y ago
  You are exactly right
enraged_camel 7y ago
>>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? Your question is premature because you're comparing the Earth of today to the Mars of today. The short-term goal (short in the grand scheme of things, that is) is to build a colony on Mars that can satisfy the first level of Maslow's hierarchy: air, food, water, shelter. After that, moving to Mars will be a much more attractive prospect to a non-negligible number of people.
- leto_ii 7y ago
  > The short-term goal (short in the grand scheme of things, that is) What is the timescale you have in mind? Hundreds, thousands of years? If this is the case, it makes more sense focusing on keeping Earth livable. I think Kim Stanley Robinson had a nice take on this in "Aurora" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(novel)). Without giving too much away, one of the core ideas of the novel is that there really is no place like home. > After that, moving to Mars will be a much more attractive prospect to a non-negligible number of people. Hmm, what makes you think that? Again, how bad should Earth get before living in a place where you can't go outside is a better option?
  - njarboe 7y ago
    It is just a novel. His ideas on ecosystems are as much science fiction as traveling to other solar systems. Not scientific truth. We really will have to try living on other planets before we know how it works.
Tepix 7y ago
Life on Earth didn't leave the ocean and ventured onto land because the ocean became uninhabitable. It was still a good idea. Expanding beyond Earth is something we must do eventually. If we can do it now, why wait? We risk that we are unable to do it later.
- leto_ii 7y ago
  > If we can do it now, why wait? Sure. But does it make sense to rely on this as a realistic Plan B to an Earth destroyed by global warming?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Tepix 7y ago
    Noone is saying let's colonize Mars because Global Warming. On the contrary, every single proponent of space exploration is emphasizing how important it is to preserve Earth. One does not rule out the other.
- rtkwe 7y ago
  Life expanded because there were resources and opportunities on land. Plants grew there because there were no predators and then some animals managed to go eat them and benefited because there was little competition, I don't see a real analog there for Mars. [0] I think an actual Mars colony is centuries out just due to the amount of things left to invent to make it viable. We still haven't really even retried a closed circuit environment here on Earth where it's easier to ship in base requirements like additional nitrogen. [1] [0] Beyond that I'm increasingly skeptical of any attempts to draw parallels or inferences from evolution about humans today because so much like evo-psych turns into unfounded garbage. Once a species gets to the point it can manipulate it's own environment and mortality evolution gets shaky as a framework. [1] Simpler atomic components and resources could be mined on Mars where they couldn't in space so I'm allowing for some basic supplements extracted on Mars.
  - 7y ago
rtkwe 7y ago
> 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. I agree, any scenario where people are able to survive long term on Mars the same techniques should work on Earth given enough resources dedicated to implementing them. The main reason surviving Mars might be easier than a ravaged Earth is just the number of people, it'll be much harder on Earth because even if one particular country manages to setup something they'll be in competition with every other country for the resources to do it and the scale required will be bigger because of the number of people it would have to support. There is one other reason to colonize Mars that isn't 'running away from a burning planet' and that's just as a kind of civilization backup against crazy civilization ending events (super-bug, meteor strike, complete climate collapse, etc.), note none of these need to completely wipe out human life to want an 'independent backup' civilization. Modern life can seem pretty fragile when you think about the long supply chains from raw material to finished product and the intricate machines/techniques that go into even relatively simple products. I think it's the kind of thinking that partially comes from exposure to a lot of scifi and also the fact that very few things threaten billionaires beyond death (which I'm a little surprised more aren't pouring money into senescence research) and the break down of modern life. They're pretty secure against most everything else.
tathougies 7y ago
> 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? LOL. If the New World is any indication, as soon as there's money to be made or persecution to escape (which we are not out of).
- leto_ii 7y ago
  True. That's actually an interesting point. But is there money to be made on Mars (that could not be made with robots)? Also, I suspect that the people who are currently being persecuted (e.g. Uyghurs in China) won't be in a position to leave Earth any time soon (e.g. in the next 100 years). Still, even if both things end up happening, this is still not the same as having Mars as a plan B for Earth.
  - tathougies 7y ago
    > Also, I suspect that the people who are currently being persecuted (e.g. Uyghurs in China) won't be in a position to leave Earth any time soon (e.g. in the next 100 years). I think you again need to look to the example of the New World. The Pilgrims were not persecuted like the Uyghurs. They were relatively well off English folk living in the Netherlands who felt that their laws were overly restrictive and prevented the free practice of their religion. Thus, groups highly likely to colonize Mars would be traditionalist Catholics, evangelical Christians, and maybe some new age movements. These feel like the current system is persecuting them, but still have enough werewithal and freedom to be able to choose to move. That, and their respective philosophies encourage exploration. It is highly unlikely that any group that decided to move because of persecution would be a racial or ethnic one.
ta999999171 7y ago
You're forgetting about mining.
claudeganon 7y ago
He’s literally just Donald Trump for millennial men. It’s amazing to me that people don’t see the parallels, the silver spoon childhood under a ruthless father breeding an unbounded narcissism and entitlement that must be fed with marketing spectacles, social media battles, and young women. I guess people love them both because it’s all so quintessentially American.
- Hypx 7y ago
  Agreed. His ability is to generate hype for insecure men. Nothing else he’s done suggest any real genius. And his tweeting habits show him as surprisingly ignorant much of the time.
vsareto 7y ago
The nonsensical ideas can sometimes be iterated on until they are sensical. Not every idea has to be perfect upon conception. I agree Elon is backed by incredibly smart and possibly overworked people and that contributes to his own reputation undeservedly, but he’s driven a company that has made more space progress than most of humanity. Let’s give him some credit on that front and let him spill his own cash on the crazy ideas at least. “Completely overrated” is a bit too far.
- leto_ii 7y ago
  > he’s driven a company that has made more space progress than most of humanity Benefiting from open-sourced research that was publicly funded (https://www.inverse.com/article/15272-nasa-releases-rocket-and-aircraft-patents-for-spacex-and-blue-origin-to-sink-teeth-into https://www.inverse.com/article/15272-nasa-releases-rocket-a...) probably also helped a little :)) Also don't forget that the US federal government is an important SpaceX client.
  - KiwiJohnno 7y ago
    I read the article, the patent release was 2016. Yes, its probably going to be helpful to Musk going forward but the company wasn't built on these patents by any stretch of the imagination. By 2016 SpaceX were already landing boosters. And yes, Nasa (and the DOD) are probably the most important customers of SpaceX... So? Its not like SpaceX are getting free money there. They are providing a service to the government, and getting paid for it - And providing that service at a lower cost than the government would bear if they did it themselves, and a lower cost than their competitors (I'm looking at Boeing - They are getting paid 60% more than SpaceX per seat for commercial crew flights to the ISS) Also look into the Raptor engine SpaceX have developed. Its a key plank for their future mars ambitions. Its the most advanced rocket engine ever developed and SpaceX funded its development themselves.
CrazyStat 7y ago
>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. The point of colonizing Mars (for Musk) is not to move there when Earth becomes inhabitable. It's too remove the single point of failure for the species that Earth currently represents. With a self-sustainable (even if harsh) Mars colony, a nuclear war on Earth no longer necessarily means the end of humanity.
- leto_ii 7y ago
  > The point of colonizing Mars (for Musk) is not to move there when Earth becomes inhabitable. It's too remove the single point of failure for the species that Earth currently represents. Fair point. However it's sad to think that as a species we're so petty and narrow-minded that we need a backup in case we fuck this planet up ourselves. Maybe I'm too harsh, but I almost feel that we don't even deserve a backup if we can't avoid a nuclear holocaust or environmental collapse here on Earth.
  - dfcowell 7y ago
    The backup is not necessarily against a man-made catastrophe. A stray asteroid in the right place at the wrong time is perfectly capable of fucking up Earth without our assistance.
    - ryandvm 7y ago
      Surviving even a Cretaceous–Tertiary sized extinction event on Earth would be a hell of a lot easier than trying to terraform and permanently colonize a planet like Mars that is missing its magnetic shield.
      - DarthGhandi 7y ago
        In a Lagrange point it's actually quite trivial to create a man made magnetic field to protect the planet. Dr Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA worked on it and fleshed out the details, it's viable and would actually restore a lot of the atmosphere stripped away constantly. As far as colonisation problems go the magnetic field is far down the list. There's a lot of work being done in this field. https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmosphere.html https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmo...
freeopinion 7y ago
> 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? Fort Bridger, Wyoming has a population of 345[0]. California has a population of nearly 40 million[1]. Should those crazy people of the 19th century never have bothered with Fort Bridger? Inhabiting a habitable planet outside our solar system is so far beyond our current capabilities that there is no point putting any money in to it. Any kind of foothold on a second planet within our solar system would change that reality. Routine travel between Earth and Mars would provide heaps and heaps of experience and capability. It would make any discussion of colonizing outside our solar system much more reasonable than it is today. Inhabiting Mars was never the end goal. It just happens to be the most practical one in a much much much larger picture. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Bridger,_Wyoming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Bridger,_Wyoming 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- leoh 7y ago
  You can breathe and find sustenance in Fort Bridger if you have human skills that have existed for dozens of millenia.
  - freeopinion 7y ago
    To be pedantic, evidence indicates that humans have not existed (on Earth) for dozens of millenia. Human skills to breathe and find sustenance below the ocean surface have been common enough for 70+ years. Do you really require that we wait millenia before we try it on another planet?
    - evgen 7y ago
      To be pedantic right back, you dropped an 'n' in the word and a 'millennia' is 1000 years. Yes, humans have existed on earth for dozens of millennia and in fact we have evidence of early civilizations from around a dozen millennia ago.
skuthus 7y ago
Do you really think that the only reason to 'go to mars' to colonization?
trhway 7y ago
>how bad do the conditions on Earth have to get they have already got very bad - the conservative anti-progress people are running the show more and more, and by means of SpaceX and Tesla Musk is saving our civilization from the main danger for a technological civilization, the danger of being completely overtaken by the conservative anti-progress people.
Jach 7y ago
Why did pilgrims voyage the dangerous seas from Europe to the Americas when they could have stayed put? In the Americas, why did groups (the Mormon pioneers easily come to my mind but there were many others) set out west into mostly uninhabited territory, with many dying on the way and when they finally stopped to settle, instead of trying to make things work where they were? How bad could the conditions have been? Understand those motivations and you'll understand why in the current century nowhere on Earth is as appealing as Mars for satisfying the needs that previously could have been satisfied by going a bit further west. The environmental challenges of the journey and the destination will be great, yes, but the payoff will be indescribably (if you don't understand those motivations at an emotional level) worth it for those who meet the challenges.
somesortofsystm 7y ago
One day, hopefully not soon, Earth may be as inhospitable as Mars. Earth may be really, really uninhabitable within 100 years or so, if we are not careful as a species. We must manage this planet, or it is the end of our time in the universe. Going to Mars makes a lot of sense to some fairly capable folk. Getting there, and sustaining life, is going to be hard. But, we will make it easier eventually. I can think of a way we could turn Earth into a recovering paradise, full of natural wonder, and it would definitely involve using Mars to fix it.

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.)?
- Robotbeat 7y ago
  The rockets for long haul flight is still a goal of SpaceX's. They are pursuing that as a kind of secondary market (which would have a LOT more demand than Mars missions) for their Mars rocket. In fact, they're more serious about that now than ever. Hyperloop is making progress. It wasn't a priority for Musk; he didn't start a Hyperloop company, but open-sourced the idea and let others run with it. Those companies have kind of petered out for the most part. He did also start a student competition for Hyperloop, which IS continuing. There's a mile-long prototype vacuum tube outside SpaceX's headquarters where students tested pods going hundreds of miles per hour for several years (including 2019). He is now having a 10 kilometer long tube (with a turn) built to continue the competition and test speeds comparable to the original concept. He did start The Boring Company to try to address one of the main problems with Hyperloop (the extreme cost of boring tunnels), and that IS making progress. They're on-track (heh) for completion of tunnels in May for a mass transit system using pods (but at atmospheric pressure) based on stretched Tesla vehicles that will serve the Las Vegas convention center. Currently has dug about 3000ft of the first tunnel which is to be a bit more than a mile long. The cave bit was embarrassing to Musk, he made some gross mistakes, and while the submersible folk were definitely trying to help (like NASA had developed capsules to rescue trapped miners in past disasters), the feedback of crazy between Musk and the media was more a liability than a help. He lost a lot of credibility with the name-calling, even though I definitely think he had been trying to help. Musk is chief engineer at SpaceX, so he does similar systems engineering work as you'd expect for someone in his position. If you talk to people who have worked with him, they will tell you he has a good understanding and a deep technical involvement in both companies (especially SpaceX). Although that's hardly unique. I think the main strength is pursuing goals that are both important and challenging and empowering his employees to execute quickly on these challenges (and part of the reason he can empower them to act quickly is because he has enough technology knowledge to make command decisions on key technical questions which otherwise could end up in "analysis by paralysis" or even worse, continuing down a technical dead end just due to organizational inertia).
  - leto_ii 7y ago
    Thanks for the comprehensive reply :D If at least the hyperloop project manages to get off the ground (pun sort of intended) that would still be a nice contribution to human progress. I'm not at all sure about the long-haul rockets though. I think having rockets near population centers is extremely dangerous to begin with. Secondly, I'm not sure the cost-benefit ratio makes sense. Transport aboard a rocket must be extremely expensive, but if you take the trip to/from the rocket-port into account the door-to-door time won't be spectacularly shorter than it is now.
dwild 7y ago
> And he leans into the craziness a bit beforehand by choosing to describe stuff in a way that sounds a bit unbelievable He did was able to build a car company and a rocket company. Sure you found example that are less crazy than what he said, but you forget the actual crazy stuff he did.

buzzerbetrayed 7y ago

The comment you are responding to is the perfect response to your comment. GP basically references your line of thinking in it, and you didn’t really refute anything they said.

leto_ii 7y ago
Well, the truth is my comment doesn't directly attack the GP. It was more my take on Musk in general. That being said, the GP doesn't actually provide any evidence, hence there's not much to refute.

martythemaniak 7y ago

It is not that he is a one-in-a-billion kind of genius, no. He is probably in the 99.99th percentile of engineers, but that still means there's many many thousands of engineers as smart as he is. However, he is also in the 99th percentile for marketing, 99.9th percentile in leadership, 99th percentile of celebrity, etc. No, he is not special on any single dimension, but it is extremely rare to find this distribution, which is what he actually is and all these dimensions were used to make his companies successful.

spectrum1234 7y ago
You are exactly right

enraged_camel 7y ago

>>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? Your question is premature because you're comparing the Earth of today to the Mars of today. The short-term goal (short in the grand scheme of things, that is) is to build a colony on Mars that can satisfy the first level of Maslow's hierarchy: air, food, water, shelter. After that, moving to Mars will be a much more attractive prospect to a non-negligible number of people.

leto_ii 7y ago
> The short-term goal (short in the grand scheme of things, that is) What is the timescale you have in mind? Hundreds, thousands of years? If this is the case, it makes more sense focusing on keeping Earth livable. I think Kim Stanley Robinson had a nice take on this in "Aurora" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(novel)). Without giving too much away, one of the core ideas of the novel is that there really is no place like home. > After that, moving to Mars will be a much more attractive prospect to a non-negligible number of people. Hmm, what makes you think that? Again, how bad should Earth get before living in a place where you can't go outside is a better option?
- njarboe 7y ago
  It is just a novel. His ideas on ecosystems are as much science fiction as traveling to other solar systems. Not scientific truth. We really will have to try living on other planets before we know how it works.

Tepix 7y ago

Life on Earth didn't leave the ocean and ventured onto land because the ocean became uninhabitable. It was still a good idea. Expanding beyond Earth is something we must do eventually. If we can do it now, why wait? We risk that we are unable to do it later.

leto_ii 7y ago
> If we can do it now, why wait? Sure. But does it make sense to rely on this as a realistic Plan B to an Earth destroyed by global warming?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Tepix 7y ago
  Noone is saying let's colonize Mars because Global Warming. On the contrary, every single proponent of space exploration is emphasizing how important it is to preserve Earth. One does not rule out the other.
rtkwe 7y ago
Life expanded because there were resources and opportunities on land. Plants grew there because there were no predators and then some animals managed to go eat them and benefited because there was little competition, I don't see a real analog there for Mars. [0] I think an actual Mars colony is centuries out just due to the amount of things left to invent to make it viable. We still haven't really even retried a closed circuit environment here on Earth where it's easier to ship in base requirements like additional nitrogen. [1] [0] Beyond that I'm increasingly skeptical of any attempts to draw parallels or inferences from evolution about humans today because so much like evo-psych turns into unfounded garbage. Once a species gets to the point it can manipulate it's own environment and mortality evolution gets shaky as a framework. [1] Simpler atomic components and resources could be mined on Mars where they couldn't in space so I'm allowing for some basic supplements extracted on Mars.
- 7y ago

rtkwe 7y ago

> 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. I agree, any scenario where people are able to survive long term on Mars the same techniques should work on Earth given enough resources dedicated to implementing them. The main reason surviving Mars might be easier than a ravaged Earth is just the number of people, it'll be much harder on Earth because even if one particular country manages to setup something they'll be in competition with every other country for the resources to do it and the scale required will be bigger because of the number of people it would have to support. There is one other reason to colonize Mars that isn't 'running away from a burning planet' and that's just as a kind of civilization backup against crazy civilization ending events (super-bug, meteor strike, complete climate collapse, etc.), note none of these need to completely wipe out human life to want an 'independent backup' civilization. Modern life can seem pretty fragile when you think about the long supply chains from raw material to finished product and the intricate machines/techniques that go into even relatively simple products. I think it's the kind of thinking that partially comes from exposure to a lot of scifi and also the fact that very few things threaten billionaires beyond death (which I'm a little surprised more aren't pouring money into senescence research) and the break down of modern life. They're pretty secure against most everything else.

tathougies 7y ago

> 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? LOL. If the New World is any indication, as soon as there's money to be made or persecution to escape (which we are not out of).

leto_ii 7y ago
True. That's actually an interesting point. But is there money to be made on Mars (that could not be made with robots)? Also, I suspect that the people who are currently being persecuted (e.g. Uyghurs in China) won't be in a position to leave Earth any time soon (e.g. in the next 100 years). Still, even if both things end up happening, this is still not the same as having Mars as a plan B for Earth.
- tathougies 7y ago
  > Also, I suspect that the people who are currently being persecuted (e.g. Uyghurs in China) won't be in a position to leave Earth any time soon (e.g. in the next 100 years). I think you again need to look to the example of the New World. The Pilgrims were not persecuted like the Uyghurs. They were relatively well off English folk living in the Netherlands who felt that their laws were overly restrictive and prevented the free practice of their religion. Thus, groups highly likely to colonize Mars would be traditionalist Catholics, evangelical Christians, and maybe some new age movements. These feel like the current system is persecuting them, but still have enough werewithal and freedom to be able to choose to move. That, and their respective philosophies encourage exploration. It is highly unlikely that any group that decided to move because of persecution would be a racial or ethnic one.

ta999999171 7y ago

You're forgetting about mining.

claudeganon 7y ago

He’s literally just Donald Trump for millennial men. It’s amazing to me that people don’t see the parallels, the silver spoon childhood under a ruthless father breeding an unbounded narcissism and entitlement that must be fed with marketing spectacles, social media battles, and young women. I guess people love them both because it’s all so quintessentially American.

Hypx 7y ago
Agreed. His ability is to generate hype for insecure men. Nothing else he’s done suggest any real genius. And his tweeting habits show him as surprisingly ignorant much of the time.

vsareto 7y ago

The nonsensical ideas can sometimes be iterated on until they are sensical. Not every idea has to be perfect upon conception. I agree Elon is backed by incredibly smart and possibly overworked people and that contributes to his own reputation undeservedly, but he’s driven a company that has made more space progress than most of humanity. Let’s give him some credit on that front and let him spill his own cash on the crazy ideas at least. “Completely overrated” is a bit too far.

leto_ii 7y ago
> he’s driven a company that has made more space progress than most of humanity Benefiting from open-sourced research that was publicly funded (https://www.inverse.com/article/15272-nasa-releases-rocket-and-aircraft-patents-for-spacex-and-blue-origin-to-sink-teeth-into https://www.inverse.com/article/15272-nasa-releases-rocket-a...) probably also helped a little :)) Also don't forget that the US federal government is an important SpaceX client.
- KiwiJohnno 7y ago
  I read the article, the patent release was 2016. Yes, its probably going to be helpful to Musk going forward but the company wasn't built on these patents by any stretch of the imagination. By 2016 SpaceX were already landing boosters. And yes, Nasa (and the DOD) are probably the most important customers of SpaceX... So? Its not like SpaceX are getting free money there. They are providing a service to the government, and getting paid for it - And providing that service at a lower cost than the government would bear if they did it themselves, and a lower cost than their competitors (I'm looking at Boeing - They are getting paid 60% more than SpaceX per seat for commercial crew flights to the ISS) Also look into the Raptor engine SpaceX have developed. Its a key plank for their future mars ambitions. Its the most advanced rocket engine ever developed and SpaceX funded its development themselves.

CrazyStat 7y ago

leto_ii 7y ago
> The point of colonizing Mars (for Musk) is not to move there when Earth becomes inhabitable. It's too remove the single point of failure for the species that Earth currently represents. Fair point. However it's sad to think that as a species we're so petty and narrow-minded that we need a backup in case we fuck this planet up ourselves. Maybe I'm too harsh, but I almost feel that we don't even deserve a backup if we can't avoid a nuclear holocaust or environmental collapse here on Earth.
- dfcowell 7y ago
  The backup is not necessarily against a man-made catastrophe. A stray asteroid in the right place at the wrong time is perfectly capable of fucking up Earth without our assistance.
  - ryandvm 7y ago
    Surviving even a Cretaceous–Tertiary sized extinction event on Earth would be a hell of a lot easier than trying to terraform and permanently colonize a planet like Mars that is missing its magnetic shield.
    - DarthGhandi 7y ago
      In a Lagrange point it's actually quite trivial to create a man made magnetic field to protect the planet. Dr Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA worked on it and fleshed out the details, it's viable and would actually restore a lot of the atmosphere stripped away constantly. As far as colonisation problems go the magnetic field is far down the list. There's a lot of work being done in this field. https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmosphere.html https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmo...

freeopinion 7y ago

> 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? Fort Bridger, Wyoming has a population of 345[0]. California has a population of nearly 40 million[1]. Should those crazy people of the 19th century never have bothered with Fort Bridger? Inhabiting a habitable planet outside our solar system is so far beyond our current capabilities that there is no point putting any money in to it. Any kind of foothold on a second planet within our solar system would change that reality. Routine travel between Earth and Mars would provide heaps and heaps of experience and capability. It would make any discussion of colonizing outside our solar system much more reasonable than it is today. Inhabiting Mars was never the end goal. It just happens to be the most practical one in a much much much larger picture. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Bridger,_Wyoming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Bridger,_Wyoming 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California

deleted 7y ago
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leoh 7y ago
You can breathe and find sustenance in Fort Bridger if you have human skills that have existed for dozens of millenia.
- freeopinion 7y ago
  To be pedantic, evidence indicates that humans have not existed (on Earth) for dozens of millenia. Human skills to breathe and find sustenance below the ocean surface have been common enough for 70+ years. Do you really require that we wait millenia before we try it on another planet?
  - evgen 7y ago
    To be pedantic right back, you dropped an 'n' in the word and a 'millennia' is 1000 years. Yes, humans have existed on earth for dozens of millennia and in fact we have evidence of early civilizations from around a dozen millennia ago.

skuthus 7y ago

Do you really think that the only reason to 'go to mars' to colonization?

trhway 7y ago

>how bad do the conditions on Earth have to get they have already got very bad - the conservative anti-progress people are running the show more and more, and by means of SpaceX and Tesla Musk is saving our civilization from the main danger for a technological civilization, the danger of being completely overtaken by the conservative anti-progress people.

Jach 7y ago

Why did pilgrims voyage the dangerous seas from Europe to the Americas when they could have stayed put? In the Americas, why did groups (the Mormon pioneers easily come to my mind but there were many others) set out west into mostly uninhabited territory, with many dying on the way and when they finally stopped to settle, instead of trying to make things work where they were? How bad could the conditions have been? Understand those motivations and you'll understand why in the current century nowhere on Earth is as appealing as Mars for satisfying the needs that previously could have been satisfied by going a bit further west. The environmental challenges of the journey and the destination will be great, yes, but the payoff will be indescribably (if you don't understand those motivations at an emotional level) worth it for those who meet the challenges.

somesortofsystm 7y ago

One day, hopefully not soon, Earth may be as inhospitable as Mars. Earth may be really, really uninhabitable within 100 years or so, if we are not careful as a species. We must manage this planet, or it is the end of our time in the universe. Going to Mars makes a lot of sense to some fairly capable folk. Getting there, and sustaining life, is going to be hard. But, we will make it easier eventually. I can think of a way we could turn Earth into a recovering paradise, full of natural wonder, and it would definitely involve using Mars to fix it.