5 ms·

> It's a shame that this guy is the figure that will take humanity to Mars That's just more BS from him. He'll just keep kicking the can, resuming the project

by frollo 4y ago

> It's a shame that this guy is the figure that will take humanity to Mars That's just more BS from him. He'll just keep kicking the can, resuming the project with some spectacular stunt every time he needs it. Everything Musk does or says is just a performance to manipulate the markets.

ceejayoz 4y ago
I think the Mars stuff is the least likely to be BS. There's been ongoing, real advancement towards the goal for over a decade now, advancement serious enough that NASA's picked them to land their astronauts on the Moon with their Mars rocket. A permanent colony seems like the sort of thing he'd get bored with, though.
- bckr 4y ago
  Except that Mars is a terrible location for a settlement in the next 100 years. Bezos has the right idea, leaning into O'Neil cylinders.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    Bezos needs to learn to crawl before he runs a marathon.
    - iab 4y ago
      Books -> 1-click shopping -> AWS —> Dyson Sphere
      - bckr 4y ago
        You missed the most important step: "???"
  - kamaal 4y ago
    The hard part is getting significant amounts of material into space. Once you do that you can do anything there. Go to Mars, build O'Neil cylinders or even make your own asteroid mining factories up there.
    - bckr 4y ago
      I recommend checking out O'Neill's book The High Frontier where he lays out a plan for how to do this. Keyword: regolith Mars is at least 10x harder. The path to space settlement is in our own backyard.
  - mkr-hn 4y ago
    The only catch is you have to build five of them.
- frollo 4y ago
  Establishing a colony on another planet is going to require a monstrous amount of money, time and resources. I doubt a single country could manage it (look at what it takes to run the ISS, and that's a joke comparse to Mars), but there are zero chances a single man, no matter how rich, is going to do more than a dent in that enormous task. Solving the technology problem is just the tip of the iceberg.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    > there are zero chances a single man, no matter how rich, is going to do more than a dent in that enormous task... Solving the technology problem is just the tip of the iceberg. Agreed, but enabling folks to get there makes it possible. Musk doesn't have to build the colony to have made it possible, and it seems to be the thing his attention is genuinely invested in.
    - chx 4y ago
      > Agreed, but enabling folks to get there makes it possible. It doesn't. Getting a few people to Mars alive does not a colony make. And even that sentence is misleading because while getting to Mars orbit is certainly challenging but that's something I can see humanity capable of overcoming with current technology. Although we never kept humans in space for 2-3 years before which is just the travel there so we don't really have any idea what will happen to them but let's pretend. Landing very fragile humans on Mars, however, is a much, much formidable challenge. The heaviest object we have managed to soft land on Mars, so far, is the 1025kg Perseverance rover. The Apollo Lunar Module carried two people and was 4280kg dry weight. Of course, you don't need to ascend -- getting those people back to Earth is not even considered by anyone sane -- but still, it shows there's a problem here. And that was two people. And you need everything for them to live on the surface, including air and water and that's even more weight that you can't just slam those into surface at the ~20 000 km/h the spacecraft will approach either. It would be just about infinitely better if he tried to show off with climate change combat projects. If you want to show off, a vast forest would be much better, much easier to achieve and so much cheaper. He could build storage for renewable energy, these are also sufficiently massive to be good for showing off. And so forth. There are easy but significant things one such as him could do. For a more formidable challenge, elevate the Brazilian people so they don't need to burn the Amazon. We already have a terraformed planet but the climate is changing in a way which is incompatible with the way humanity currently exists. It would be prudent to change both -- while the change is inevitable it could be slowed and humanity could change too. Once we bought time, we can wait until material and other sciences make space elevators possible and then we can send robots to Mars to build a space elevator too and then we can begin to think about colonizing Mars.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  Someone's going to get people on Mars, but it's not going to be Elon Musk.
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    Nobody else is making a serious try.

by frollo 4y ago

ceejayoz 4y ago

I think the Mars stuff is the least likely to be BS. There's been ongoing, real advancement towards the goal for over a decade now, advancement serious enough that NASA's picked them to land their astronauts on the Moon with their Mars rocket. A permanent colony seems like the sort of thing he'd get bored with, though.

bckr 4y ago
Except that Mars is a terrible location for a settlement in the next 100 years. Bezos has the right idea, leaning into O'Neil cylinders.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  Bezos needs to learn to crawl before he runs a marathon.
  - iab 4y ago
    Books -> 1-click shopping -> AWS —> Dyson Sphere
    - bckr 4y ago
      You missed the most important step: "???"
- kamaal 4y ago
  The hard part is getting significant amounts of material into space. Once you do that you can do anything there. Go to Mars, build O'Neil cylinders or even make your own asteroid mining factories up there.
  - bckr 4y ago
    I recommend checking out O'Neill's book The High Frontier where he lays out a plan for how to do this. Keyword: regolith Mars is at least 10x harder. The path to space settlement is in our own backyard.
- mkr-hn 4y ago
  The only catch is you have to build five of them.
frollo 4y ago
Establishing a colony on another planet is going to require a monstrous amount of money, time and resources. I doubt a single country could manage it (look at what it takes to run the ISS, and that's a joke comparse to Mars), but there are zero chances a single man, no matter how rich, is going to do more than a dent in that enormous task. Solving the technology problem is just the tip of the iceberg.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  > there are zero chances a single man, no matter how rich, is going to do more than a dent in that enormous task... Solving the technology problem is just the tip of the iceberg. Agreed, but enabling folks to get there makes it possible. Musk doesn't have to build the colony to have made it possible, and it seems to be the thing his attention is genuinely invested in.
  - chx 4y ago
    > Agreed, but enabling folks to get there makes it possible. It doesn't. Getting a few people to Mars alive does not a colony make. And even that sentence is misleading because while getting to Mars orbit is certainly challenging but that's something I can see humanity capable of overcoming with current technology. Although we never kept humans in space for 2-3 years before which is just the travel there so we don't really have any idea what will happen to them but let's pretend. Landing very fragile humans on Mars, however, is a much, much formidable challenge. The heaviest object we have managed to soft land on Mars, so far, is the 1025kg Perseverance rover. The Apollo Lunar Module carried two people and was 4280kg dry weight. Of course, you don't need to ascend -- getting those people back to Earth is not even considered by anyone sane -- but still, it shows there's a problem here. And that was two people. And you need everything for them to live on the surface, including air and water and that's even more weight that you can't just slam those into surface at the ~20 000 km/h the spacecraft will approach either. It would be just about infinitely better if he tried to show off with climate change combat projects. If you want to show off, a vast forest would be much better, much easier to achieve and so much cheaper. He could build storage for renewable energy, these are also sufficiently massive to be good for showing off. And so forth. There are easy but significant things one such as him could do. For a more formidable challenge, elevate the Brazilian people so they don't need to burn the Amazon. We already have a terraformed planet but the climate is changing in a way which is incompatible with the way humanity currently exists. It would be prudent to change both -- while the change is inevitable it could be slowed and humanity could change too. Once we bought time, we can wait until material and other sciences make space elevators possible and then we can send robots to Mars to build a space elevator too and then we can begin to think about colonizing Mars.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
Someone's going to get people on Mars, but it's not going to be Elon Musk.
- FeepingCreature 4y ago
  Nobody else is making a serious try.