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I'm not so sure Musk's vision is so exciting. I think he just sees the writing on the wall and wants to become king on Mars while Earth goes down the drain. Loo

I'm not so sure Musk's vision is so exciting. I think he just sees the writing on the wall and wants to become king on Mars while Earth goes down the drain. Look at all the stories surrounding Tesla employee treatment. Musk is not much different than Bezos.

adrianN 6y ago
Mars can't be independent from Earth for generations until we have set up the necessary industry there to manufacture literally everything locally. I'm pretty sure Elon knows this.
- Teever 6y ago
  Why does that need to take generations? Why can't it be done in one generation, or less?
  - adrianN 6y ago
    Because building infrastructure on Earth takes forever and I don't think that it goes faster on Mars. Supply chains for even trivial things are terribly long. It's a lot of work to build replacements off-world. I mean, just having the life support to sustain a sufficient population to run and maintain the machines for simple steel production is a huge task in itself. And then you also need chemical manufacturing (without the benefit of having oil), semiconductors, electronics... modern civilization is hard.
    - harperlee 6y ago
      > building infrastructure on Earth takes forever China has built cities basically from scratch in few years, and big infrastructure very quickly, as a counterpoint.
      - WJW 6y ago
        Yes, but only after they spent decades on building out their construction industry with lots of imported equipment from elsewhere. Mars will not be able to construct big roads and buildings until they bootstrap a concrete industry and they can't do that without a steel industry, and they can't do that without mining sites, which need vehicles and mining equipment, etc etc etc. All these things will need either large amounts of people (and thus food) or large amounts of automation (and thus microchips etc) and Mars will not be able to bootstrap either without billions and billions of investment from Earth.
        Teever 6y ago
        What's the minimum amount of mass/volume of equipment needed to bootstrap, and what is the doubling rate of this infrastructure?
        WJW 6y ago
        Yes yes, we all know that exponential growth is pretty cool. But take into account that you can't explode outwards in the Martian environment like some algae growing in a food rich environment, every new person and every piece of infrastructure will need (a lot of) maintenance and that slows down doubling rate by a lot. You also can't use a lot of Earth-based shortcuts either, since there is no oxygen for fossil fuels and you won't be able to grow food in open atmosphere. Big industrial equipment is really heavy btw, so you could fit at most 1 or 2 pieces of big equipment in the 100 ton payload of a Starship rocket. It could easily be a few hundred launches just to get a proper scale foundry going on mars, if you take into account all the required auxiliary equipment like ore scrubbers, cranes and forklifts. Don't forget all the solar panels and/or nuclear plants for power generation too. It would probably be at least tens of billions of support from Earth. All in all, I would think that 5-10% growth rate is already pretty ambitious, leading to a doubling rate of 7 to 14 years. If you start your colony with about 50 people, it would rise to a thousand people in a little over 50 years.
    - revscat 6y ago
      Indeed. I look at the effort required to get a teeny tiny solar powered helicopter to Mars, and while the achievement itself is noteworthy the difficulty in doing so is illuminating. Dreams of human colonization of Mars are largely coping mechanisms to help with the fears that arise when considering the very real apocalypse humanity faces.
  - arethuza 6y ago
    Most likely reason is that there is no clear return on investment for throwing resources at building a colony on Mars - so what politician is going to choose to spend money to make life possible on Mars when it could be spent (or the taxes not raised) down here? NB I don't think private capital would ever be enough to get a self sufficient colony started.
  - tsimionescu 6y ago
    Imagine what it will take to go from space rock to underground chip factories. If we started today, it will take a thousand years or more to have a fully independent Mars colony (one that could survive indefinitely if the Earth were hit by a gamma-ray burst, let's say). The sheer population needed to run a complete supply chain for high-technology (on which Mars would be entirely dependent for basic life-support) is staggering. Having the entire thing built and operated underground would be an engineering and social feat of unprecedented scale in humanity's history. Iamgining doing it in a generation is simply impossible. Its more likely to happen by quantum fluctuation in a second than by humanity's efforts in a generation with current technology.
    - tim333 6y ago
      Singularity, robots... Not certain to happen but a fair bit more than your quantum fluctuation.
    - _nalply 6y ago
      A gamma-ray burst killing Earth could also kill Mars. I don't know but perhaps the death ray could be as wide as several sun systems.
      - tsimionescu 6y ago
        Sure, my point was only the idea of a Mars colony surviving with 0 resources from Earth.
        _nalply 6y ago
        Of course I understand that, only the example with the gamma ray burst is not really useful here.
        tsimionescu 6y ago
        Well, one point I didn't make here but that made me pick that example is that, with the exception of a gamma ray burst, there is no tragedy that could realistically affect the Earth in such a way as to make it even CLOSE to how uninhabitable Mars is. Global warming, nuclear winter, asteroid hit, massive solar flare, supervolcano, plate tectonics - anything we care to imagine will leave the Earth much closer to being habitable than Mars.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    Mars is colder than Antarctica, drier than the Sahara desert, and has lower air pressure than the top of Mt Everest, and the air is notably lacking in both oxygen (for us) and nitrogen (for plants). Making an independent colony on Mars in one generation basically needs us to invent von Neumann machines — not impossible, but a larger economic change than the entire industrial revolution, and even then we might need to use that economic power to crash-land some comets on the red planet to give it useful quantities of nitrogen and water (that said, TIL Curiosity found 1100 ppm nitrates in the soil: https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/mars-nitrogen/ https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/mars-nitrogen/).
    - adwn 6y ago
      > the air is notably lacking in both oxygen (for us) and nitrogen (for plants) Minor nitpick: There are only very few plants that are able to extract nitrogen from the air. That's because N2 is a very stable molecule and it takes a lot of energy to use it chemically. Almost all plants are dependent on other nitrogen compounds they extract using their roots. [That's the reason why the invention of the Haber-Bosch process, which fixes the N2 from the air into NH3 (ammonia), was such a big deal. It is estimated that 50% of the nitrogen atoms in your body once passed through the Haber-Bosch process.] There's probably plenty of nitrogen in various minerals on Mars. Just not in the atmosphere.
      - ben_w 6y ago
        Good point. I was thinking about nitrogen-fixing bacteria etc., but even with that, your point is sufficient.
    - Gravityloss 6y ago
      One thing that I only learned recently is that a lot of terraforming is very destructive. So you would NOT want to colonize a planet first and then terraform it. Instead you would terraform it first. Terraforming Mars for example could involve sending a large number of comets to crash to the planet. If there were existing colonies on the planet, they might be destroyed by the impacts or be inundated by the torrential rains. Isaac Arthur has some thought provoking videos about this.
  - vladTheInhaler 6y ago
    First ask yourself how quickly you could build a self-sustaining society deep in the Sahara, or at the south pole. Then realize that both of those places are waaay more habitable than the surface of Mars, since they both have a breathable atmosphere and a notable lack of perchlorates in the soil.
- cheschire 6y ago
  It's a matter of who controls the logistics. Until governments figure out how to enforce toll roads in space, mars can be completely privatized. By the time the government is able to assert force on mars, it may already be owned completely by companies. edit: To be clear, I am interpreting the word "independent" in parent post to mean non-government controlled, as opposed to the interpretation of "self sufficient".
  - KineticLensman 6y ago
    > It's a matter of who controls the logistics. Until governments figure out how to enforce toll roads in space Well, the government could just blockade / close the launch sites on Earth.
    - cheschire 6y ago
      That makes me wonder how feasible ocean based launches are.
      - adrianN 6y ago
        Ocean based launches that are resilient to angry governments sending a warship to your launching pad are probably quite expensive.
- chii 6y ago
  why does mars need independence? Why can't mars trade for goods and services, the same way countries trade today? After all, it used to be that ocean voyages took ages. So space travel is the new ocean voyages. And planets, the new country!
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    What resources does it have that would justify the expense?
brodo 6y ago
However evil Elon Musk may be, he is a high priest of the religion of progress. Many people (especially highly educated liberals) are not very religious. Scientific and technical progress is the thing they dedicate their lives to like a religious person would dedicate themselves to god.
- ovi256 6y ago
  > people (especially highly educated liberals) are not very religious There is a growing recognition in sociology and anthropology that whatever beliefs in how to lead a good life are left after you remove facts and knowledge about the world, are equivalent to religious doctrine, even if non-deist. Most people, including highly educated liberals, have such strong beliefs.
  - fnord123 6y ago
    This is an interesting idea. Got any further reading on the topic? I'm guessing you didn't explain "after you remove facts and knowledge about the world" very well because removing facts would indeed leave you with beliefs in non-factual stuff by definition.
    - ohduran 6y ago
      Well, this makes perfect sense. Why on Earth does someone go to university? Because there's a strongly held belief that the sacrifices made are worth the rewards in a future state of being. That is not too far from believing in the afterlife, if you come to think of it.
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        > That is not too far from believing in the afterlife, if you come to think of it. It’s extremely far. One has a chain of reasoning and supporting data. The other does not. They’re both assumptions, since everything about the future is an assumption. But some assumptions are “better” than others, for lack of a better word.
one2three4 6y ago
Elon Musk's vision. Sure. I'll just leave next phrase summarizing it here: "We'll coup wherever we want, deal with it"
- arethuza 6y ago
  Just another variation on: "...the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" Thucydides
- astrange 6y ago
  That was some kind of joke (he tweets on Ambien so the quality is pretty low.) People regularly accuse him of doing Bolivian coups for lithium or other things they just made up.
  - one2three4 6y ago
    There is fire to that smoke though. Bolibian rare earths was the main reason for the coup.
    - astrange 6y ago
      There was probably some of that in the financing of the coup, but what little I saw of the actual people doing it sounded more like culture war - they wanted to suppress indigenous culture and bring back Christianity, things like that. Note lithium isn't a rare earth element, it's actually pretty common but some sources are cheaper than others. As for Tesla, I believe they don't get lithium from Bolivia and have upcoming chemistries that don't use cobalt at all. Not sure about other EV or phone companies.
prova1 6y ago
me gusta
optimiz3 6y ago
Yet now we have reusable rockets, electric cars, and a more credible path towards carbon neutral transit. Maybe those are hard enough problems that you just can't tolerate employees not pulling their weight.
- the-dude 6y ago
  Our milkman had an electric vehicle in the 70ies.
  - optimiz3 6y ago
    What a useless anecdote.
    - the-dude 6y ago
      You are welcome nonetheless.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Musk takes away with the other hand: by backing Bitcoin and the large-scale waste of not-yet-zero-carbon electricity. https://www.ft.com/content/a9bd5b42-272e-465c-9284-9fe2a7906f48 https://www.ft.com/content/a9bd5b42-272e-465c-9284-9fe2a7906...
  - optimiz3 6y ago
    Tesla isn't mining it. Bitcoin costs nothing to hold. It's a hedge against inflation given TSLA's massive cash reserves.
    - ben_w 6y ago
      Governments try to keep inflation in a narrow range; they avoid high inflation for obvious reasons, they avoid low inflation precisely so people don’t sit on massive cash reserves, because it is bad for everyone when that happens.
    - 6y ago
midasuni 6y ago
Musk is 50, he’ll be 60 before the first martian settlement and 70 before it starts to pull its own weight. Hell of a way to retire. U.K. his shoes id have taken his billions and bought a nice remote island off a fairly stable country to retire. I’d have bought a few to hedge my bets. Full respect to him.
- dmos62 6y ago
  > Full respect to him. I somehow feel like this last line isn't well suited for this audience. Anyway, noone is doubting the impressiveness of his particular suite of skills or his business achievements. Thing is that as a leader he's a mixed bag. He gets impressive things done, but he has an occassionaly repulsive world view. What I personally like about him is that he picks projects that have social potential and at the same time are low hanging enough to be doable within a matter of decades. Power to him for that, but let's not idolize him.
chriswarbo 6y ago
> I think he just sees the writing on the wall and wants to become king on Mars while Earth goes down the drain. That's a false dichotomy. We could explore and colonise space while also improving conditions on Earth. The same way we could shelter the homeless and feed the hungry; or build rockets/cars and treat employees respectfully. > I'm not so sure Musk's vision is so exciting. As an ineffectual prole, without PayPal/emerald money or political connections, I'm happy to watch someone kick the space industry back to life (after ULA & co. turned it into a pork barrel/cash-cow). I'm also happy to call out Musk's poor labour practices (and other crap, like pedogate), for whatever little good my tiny voice will have. If nothing else, I'm also happy to watch giant fuel tanks exploding and crash landing on YouTube. > Musk is not much different than Bezos. Of course. Probably worth pointing out Bezos has his own space company too (although I hear he's more focused on space habitats rather than other planets)
Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
It's not, though Thiels vision might be worse. https://www.salon.com/2019/04/13/why-some-in-silicon-valley-are-advocating-for-monarchy/ https://www.salon.com/2019/04/13/why-some-in-silicon-valley-...

adrianN 6y ago

Mars can't be independent from Earth for generations until we have set up the necessary industry there to manufacture literally everything locally. I'm pretty sure Elon knows this.

Teever 6y ago
Why does that need to take generations? Why can't it be done in one generation, or less?
- adrianN 6y ago
  Because building infrastructure on Earth takes forever and I don't think that it goes faster on Mars. Supply chains for even trivial things are terribly long. It's a lot of work to build replacements off-world. I mean, just having the life support to sustain a sufficient population to run and maintain the machines for simple steel production is a huge task in itself. And then you also need chemical manufacturing (without the benefit of having oil), semiconductors, electronics... modern civilization is hard.
  - harperlee 6y ago
    > building infrastructure on Earth takes forever China has built cities basically from scratch in few years, and big infrastructure very quickly, as a counterpoint.
    - WJW 6y ago
      Yes, but only after they spent decades on building out their construction industry with lots of imported equipment from elsewhere. Mars will not be able to construct big roads and buildings until they bootstrap a concrete industry and they can't do that without a steel industry, and they can't do that without mining sites, which need vehicles and mining equipment, etc etc etc. All these things will need either large amounts of people (and thus food) or large amounts of automation (and thus microchips etc) and Mars will not be able to bootstrap either without billions and billions of investment from Earth.
      - Teever 6y ago
        What's the minimum amount of mass/volume of equipment needed to bootstrap, and what is the doubling rate of this infrastructure?
        WJW 6y ago
        Yes yes, we all know that exponential growth is pretty cool. But take into account that you can't explode outwards in the Martian environment like some algae growing in a food rich environment, every new person and every piece of infrastructure will need (a lot of) maintenance and that slows down doubling rate by a lot. You also can't use a lot of Earth-based shortcuts either, since there is no oxygen for fossil fuels and you won't be able to grow food in open atmosphere. Big industrial equipment is really heavy btw, so you could fit at most 1 or 2 pieces of big equipment in the 100 ton payload of a Starship rocket. It could easily be a few hundred launches just to get a proper scale foundry going on mars, if you take into account all the required auxiliary equipment like ore scrubbers, cranes and forklifts. Don't forget all the solar panels and/or nuclear plants for power generation too. It would probably be at least tens of billions of support from Earth. All in all, I would think that 5-10% growth rate is already pretty ambitious, leading to a doubling rate of 7 to 14 years. If you start your colony with about 50 people, it would rise to a thousand people in a little over 50 years.
  - revscat 6y ago
    Indeed. I look at the effort required to get a teeny tiny solar powered helicopter to Mars, and while the achievement itself is noteworthy the difficulty in doing so is illuminating. Dreams of human colonization of Mars are largely coping mechanisms to help with the fears that arise when considering the very real apocalypse humanity faces.
- arethuza 6y ago
  Most likely reason is that there is no clear return on investment for throwing resources at building a colony on Mars - so what politician is going to choose to spend money to make life possible on Mars when it could be spent (or the taxes not raised) down here? NB I don't think private capital would ever be enough to get a self sufficient colony started.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  Imagine what it will take to go from space rock to underground chip factories. If we started today, it will take a thousand years or more to have a fully independent Mars colony (one that could survive indefinitely if the Earth were hit by a gamma-ray burst, let's say). The sheer population needed to run a complete supply chain for high-technology (on which Mars would be entirely dependent for basic life-support) is staggering. Having the entire thing built and operated underground would be an engineering and social feat of unprecedented scale in humanity's history. Iamgining doing it in a generation is simply impossible. Its more likely to happen by quantum fluctuation in a second than by humanity's efforts in a generation with current technology.
  - tim333 6y ago
    Singularity, robots... Not certain to happen but a fair bit more than your quantum fluctuation.
  - _nalply 6y ago
    A gamma-ray burst killing Earth could also kill Mars. I don't know but perhaps the death ray could be as wide as several sun systems.
    - tsimionescu 6y ago
      Sure, my point was only the idea of a Mars colony surviving with 0 resources from Earth.
      - _nalply 6y ago
        Of course I understand that, only the example with the gamma ray burst is not really useful here.
        tsimionescu 6y ago
        Well, one point I didn't make here but that made me pick that example is that, with the exception of a gamma ray burst, there is no tragedy that could realistically affect the Earth in such a way as to make it even CLOSE to how uninhabitable Mars is. Global warming, nuclear winter, asteroid hit, massive solar flare, supervolcano, plate tectonics - anything we care to imagine will leave the Earth much closer to being habitable than Mars.
- ben_w 6y ago
  Mars is colder than Antarctica, drier than the Sahara desert, and has lower air pressure than the top of Mt Everest, and the air is notably lacking in both oxygen (for us) and nitrogen (for plants). Making an independent colony on Mars in one generation basically needs us to invent von Neumann machines — not impossible, but a larger economic change than the entire industrial revolution, and even then we might need to use that economic power to crash-land some comets on the red planet to give it useful quantities of nitrogen and water (that said, TIL Curiosity found 1100 ppm nitrates in the soil: https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/mars-nitrogen/ https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/mars-nitrogen/).
  - adwn 6y ago
    > the air is notably lacking in both oxygen (for us) and nitrogen (for plants) Minor nitpick: There are only very few plants that are able to extract nitrogen from the air. That's because N2 is a very stable molecule and it takes a lot of energy to use it chemically. Almost all plants are dependent on other nitrogen compounds they extract using their roots. [That's the reason why the invention of the Haber-Bosch process, which fixes the N2 from the air into NH3 (ammonia), was such a big deal. It is estimated that 50% of the nitrogen atoms in your body once passed through the Haber-Bosch process.] There's probably plenty of nitrogen in various minerals on Mars. Just not in the atmosphere.
    - ben_w 6y ago
      Good point. I was thinking about nitrogen-fixing bacteria etc., but even with that, your point is sufficient.
  - Gravityloss 6y ago
    One thing that I only learned recently is that a lot of terraforming is very destructive. So you would NOT want to colonize a planet first and then terraform it. Instead you would terraform it first. Terraforming Mars for example could involve sending a large number of comets to crash to the planet. If there were existing colonies on the planet, they might be destroyed by the impacts or be inundated by the torrential rains. Isaac Arthur has some thought provoking videos about this.
- vladTheInhaler 6y ago
  First ask yourself how quickly you could build a self-sustaining society deep in the Sahara, or at the south pole. Then realize that both of those places are waaay more habitable than the surface of Mars, since they both have a breathable atmosphere and a notable lack of perchlorates in the soil.
cheschire 6y ago
It's a matter of who controls the logistics. Until governments figure out how to enforce toll roads in space, mars can be completely privatized. By the time the government is able to assert force on mars, it may already be owned completely by companies. edit: To be clear, I am interpreting the word "independent" in parent post to mean non-government controlled, as opposed to the interpretation of "self sufficient".
- KineticLensman 6y ago
  > It's a matter of who controls the logistics. Until governments figure out how to enforce toll roads in space Well, the government could just blockade / close the launch sites on Earth.
  - cheschire 6y ago
    That makes me wonder how feasible ocean based launches are.
    - adrianN 6y ago
      Ocean based launches that are resilient to angry governments sending a warship to your launching pad are probably quite expensive.
chii 6y ago
why does mars need independence? Why can't mars trade for goods and services, the same way countries trade today? After all, it used to be that ocean voyages took ages. So space travel is the new ocean voyages. And planets, the new country!
- emodendroket 5y ago
  What resources does it have that would justify the expense?

brodo 6y ago

However evil Elon Musk may be, he is a high priest of the religion of progress. Many people (especially highly educated liberals) are not very religious. Scientific and technical progress is the thing they dedicate their lives to like a religious person would dedicate themselves to god.

ovi256 6y ago
> people (especially highly educated liberals) are not very religious There is a growing recognition in sociology and anthropology that whatever beliefs in how to lead a good life are left after you remove facts and knowledge about the world, are equivalent to religious doctrine, even if non-deist. Most people, including highly educated liberals, have such strong beliefs.
- fnord123 6y ago
  This is an interesting idea. Got any further reading on the topic? I'm guessing you didn't explain "after you remove facts and knowledge about the world" very well because removing facts would indeed leave you with beliefs in non-factual stuff by definition.
  - ohduran 6y ago
    Well, this makes perfect sense. Why on Earth does someone go to university? Because there's a strongly held belief that the sacrifices made are worth the rewards in a future state of being. That is not too far from believing in the afterlife, if you come to think of it.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      > That is not too far from believing in the afterlife, if you come to think of it. It’s extremely far. One has a chain of reasoning and supporting data. The other does not. They’re both assumptions, since everything about the future is an assumption. But some assumptions are “better” than others, for lack of a better word.

one2three4 6y ago

Elon Musk's vision. Sure. I'll just leave next phrase summarizing it here: "We'll coup wherever we want, deal with it"

arethuza 6y ago
Just another variation on: "...the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" Thucydides
astrange 6y ago
That was some kind of joke (he tweets on Ambien so the quality is pretty low.) People regularly accuse him of doing Bolivian coups for lithium or other things they just made up.
- one2three4 6y ago
  There is fire to that smoke though. Bolibian rare earths was the main reason for the coup.
  - astrange 6y ago
    There was probably some of that in the financing of the coup, but what little I saw of the actual people doing it sounded more like culture war - they wanted to suppress indigenous culture and bring back Christianity, things like that. Note lithium isn't a rare earth element, it's actually pretty common but some sources are cheaper than others. As for Tesla, I believe they don't get lithium from Bolivia and have upcoming chemistries that don't use cobalt at all. Not sure about other EV or phone companies.

prova1 6y ago

me gusta

optimiz3 6y ago

Yet now we have reusable rockets, electric cars, and a more credible path towards carbon neutral transit. Maybe those are hard enough problems that you just can't tolerate employees not pulling their weight.

the-dude 6y ago
Our milkman had an electric vehicle in the 70ies.
- optimiz3 6y ago
  What a useless anecdote.
  - the-dude 6y ago
    You are welcome nonetheless.
pjc50 6y ago
Musk takes away with the other hand: by backing Bitcoin and the large-scale waste of not-yet-zero-carbon electricity. https://www.ft.com/content/a9bd5b42-272e-465c-9284-9fe2a7906f48 https://www.ft.com/content/a9bd5b42-272e-465c-9284-9fe2a7906...
- optimiz3 6y ago
  Tesla isn't mining it. Bitcoin costs nothing to hold. It's a hedge against inflation given TSLA's massive cash reserves.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    Governments try to keep inflation in a narrow range; they avoid high inflation for obvious reasons, they avoid low inflation precisely so people don’t sit on massive cash reserves, because it is bad for everyone when that happens.
  - 6y ago

midasuni 6y ago

Musk is 50, he’ll be 60 before the first martian settlement and 70 before it starts to pull its own weight. Hell of a way to retire. U.K. his shoes id have taken his billions and bought a nice remote island off a fairly stable country to retire. I’d have bought a few to hedge my bets. Full respect to him.

dmos62 6y ago
> Full respect to him. I somehow feel like this last line isn't well suited for this audience. Anyway, noone is doubting the impressiveness of his particular suite of skills or his business achievements. Thing is that as a leader he's a mixed bag. He gets impressive things done, but he has an occassionaly repulsive world view. What I personally like about him is that he picks projects that have social potential and at the same time are low hanging enough to be doable within a matter of decades. Power to him for that, but let's not idolize him.

chriswarbo 6y ago

> I think he just sees the writing on the wall and wants to become king on Mars while Earth goes down the drain. That's a false dichotomy. We could explore and colonise space while also improving conditions on Earth. The same way we could shelter the homeless and feed the hungry; or build rockets/cars and treat employees respectfully. > I'm not so sure Musk's vision is so exciting. As an ineffectual prole, without PayPal/emerald money or political connections, I'm happy to watch someone kick the space industry back to life (after ULA & co. turned it into a pork barrel/cash-cow). I'm also happy to call out Musk's poor labour practices (and other crap, like pedogate), for whatever little good my tiny voice will have. If nothing else, I'm also happy to watch giant fuel tanks exploding and crash landing on YouTube. > Musk is not much different than Bezos. Of course. Probably worth pointing out Bezos has his own space company too (although I hear he's more focused on space habitats rather than other planets)

Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago

It's not, though Thiels vision might be worse. https://www.salon.com/2019/04/13/why-some-in-silicon-valley-are-advocating-for-monarchy/ https://www.salon.com/2019/04/13/why-some-in-silicon-valley-...