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This made me laugh but also made me think, "...that's it? That's all it takes?"
by NetOpWibby 2y ago
This made me laugh but also made me think, "...that's it? That's all it takes?"
- marcosdumay 2y agoLand on Mars is cheap... But no, I really doubt that's all it takes. Unless you discount all of the R&D costs as SpaceX operational expenses.
- kulahan 2y agoI imagine that's what he's doing. He's willing to put a lot of company money into getting the city on Mars started, because if he's first there, he's gonna set himself (or his dynasty?) up to make hundreds of billions of dollars. Being effectively in control of your own planet? Neat. Scary too.
- linotype 2y agoDoing what exactly? What industry could Mars possibly support profitably?
- VectorLock 2y agoYeah and Mars is a shitty place to live. And will always be a shitty place to live. No amount of fantastical "terraforming" is going to create a magnetosphere.
- mlindner 2y agoWell actually... you can create a magnetic shield in front of the planet by putting a large nuclear reactor powered superconducting magnet at the Sun-Mars L1 point that would fully shield Mars from charged particles from the sun. No new technology is required besides making the thing relatively maintenance free. https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmosphere.html https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmo...
- rafram 2y agoWell, maybe you can.
- sebastianconcpt 2y agoThat sounds bad until you consider all the other alternatives.
- marcosdumay 2y agoMaking a magnetosphere should be easier than terraforming an entire planet. It's just some hundreds of thousands of kilometers of wires, and you can even use the wires while you are at it. He obviously has plans to do neither of those. What makes me question why does he even want to go there... But a magnetosphere strikes me as "earlier infrastructure", while terraforming is "is that even possible?"
- lyu07282 2y agoperhaps the "not dying on earth industry" after climate catastrophy hits
- bee_rider 2y agoWhile I’m convinced we’re going to screw this planet up, the gap between “as bad as we can make Earth” and “as good as we can make Mars” is pretty huge, right? And not in a way that is optimistic for Mars.
- lyu07282 2y agoTrue it's probably easier to survive on earth in some luxury bunker than on Mars no matter how much we destroy earth. Alternative theories: billionaire space tourism, it was never really about mars but about asteroid mining, it was never about mars he just wants the government subsidies
- ben_w 2y ago> True it's probably easier to survive on earth in some luxury bunker than on Mars no matter how much we destroy earth. Definitely, and by a large margin. If I said Mars combines the warmth of Antarctica with the moisture of the Sahara, the air pressure of the peak of Mount Everest, the environmental quality of a superfund cleanup site, the surface illumination after the 1883 Krakatoa explosion and subsequent volcanic winter, and the UV radiation from a completely destroyed ozone layer… …if I said all that, I'd be understating how harsh Mars is. The most positive thing I can say about colonising Mars is that the mere ability to actually do so will mean being able to recover from any possible catastrophe that comes our way.
- dr_kiszonka 2y agoLooking at his ventures, I think he is after power and leverage.
- SaberTail 2y agoThere's no climate scenario in which Mars is more habitable than Earth. Even if a Texas-sized asteroid crashed into Earth, Earth would still be more habitable than Mars.
- sangnoir 2y ago> What industry could Mars possibly support profitably? Government crew and supply launch contracts probably, though these don't need to be "profitable" in the conventional sense for the entity footing the bill. All that's needed to be profitable for the launch provider is to convince Congress that it's in America's interest to establish a public-private project for a moon base and a Mars base. Now more than ever, when framed against a background of an ascendant Chinese Space program that will soon be sole operator of a space station. Once the "Race to Mars" is won, NASA can grow soy-beans, do bone density studies, and any other science shit the NASA nerds can come up with post-hoc, but the main point will just be being there, and having the Stars and Stripes on the first flagpole planted in Martian soil.
- kulahan 2y agoWhy would I need to choose just one? He’s the only person with a serious presence on the planet. He builds a landing pad that works exclusively with his rockets, and ANYTHING that happens on the planet will be going through him. Hell, he can probably convince China or the US to pay to build the habitats if he wants to.
- tsimionescu 2y agoBut nothing will be happening on the planet, except a few rovers, because there is nothing of value whatsoever on Mars that is not literally a thousand times cheaper to find/do on Earth.
- vasco 2y agoExcept Mars. Tourism can make a lot of money.
- ben_w 2y agoEven his cheapest estimates are still in the $100,000 USD range; I don't think you can support enough tourists to colonise Mars when the ticket alone costs that much. I can see plenty of people going to Mars — religious groups, cults, anyone who wants to explore the final frontier, the most extreme preppers (which Musk arguably is given his "multi-planetary" arguments), and anyone who would like to build their own mountain-sized space castle. What I can't figure out what any of those people might sell to Earth such that people on Earth are willing to trade for it, except for information which people on Earth can also produce without paying so much for a ticket.
- tsimionescu 2y agoNot this type of tourism. It might make a small amount of money, but there is no huge market for extremely expensive (think a hundred thousand dollars per trip per person) but 0-comfort exploration of barren wastelands that you can't even see for more than maybe an hour or risk being radiation poisoned. Will there be a trickle of extremely wealthy dare-devils? Sure. But this is neither a Greek island nor Monaco.
- im3w1l 2y agoSolar powered non-urgent batch compute. Mars has a shitton of land to build on and no people whining about you cutting down some rainforest or something to make room for your projects.
- ascorbic 2y agoSpace is a lot bigger and a lot nearer
- im3w1l 2y agoLifting materials into space is very expensive. If you build on a planet (or a moon) then you can mine it for materials reducing the expense.
- ben_w 2y agoOur moon is much closer to both us and, importantly for energy sources, the sun; and getting things off our moon can be done with things like SpinLaunch. SpinLaunch on the moon wouldn't even need the vacuum chamber they use on Earth, but it would still need that on Mars. The biggest down-side of the moon is the long night, but the solution to that is the same as one possible solution to the lack of magnetosphere on Mars: a very, *very* thick wire. (I've not done precise calculations for this, but I have considered the scale needed for "thick wire" on an Earth-scale global power grid, and for that I was getting Earth's magnetic field at a distance of 11 km from a 1.36e6 A current, which in turn meant I had a 1m^2 cross section; naturally this is only going to happen if you have some serious automation for processing lunar/martian regolith into aluminium).
- badsectoracula 2y agoI kinda see him as the Andrew Ryan of Mars' Rapture :-P (if you haven't played Bioshock this probably wont make much sense - but if you have and listened to all the audiologs, i'm sure you'll find a bunch of parallels)
- jobigoud 2y agoTourism?
- ENGNR 2y agoI don’t know how deeply they analysed it, but Kurzgesagt seem to think the Martian moons have particular value as central gravity wells, to then reach further out to mine asteroids https://youtu.be/dqwpQarrDwk?feature=shared https://youtu.be/dqwpQarrDwk?feature=shared
- chrisco255 2y agoHe's already made hundreds of billions of dollars though? A permanent Martian colony is an incredibly ambitious endeavor and even with a trillion dollars there's a reasonable chance the colony fails.
- d0gsg0w00f 2y agoI don't think Elon is driven by money per se. I think he just wants to see expensive cool shit happen in his lifetime.
- polishdude20 2y agoI wish he'd choose to do expensive cool shit that helped people or cured diseases and stuff.
- buzzerbetrayed 2y agoThere are a lot of people doing that expensive cool shit. Not everyone’s expensive cool shit needs to be the same.
- tim333 2y agoHe's working on letting the blind see and stuff like evs and communications. (https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/elon-musk-s-neuralink-device-blindsight-gets-fda-breakthrough-device-designation https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/elon-musk-s-neuralink-de...)
- marcosdumay 2y agoHum... You (or he, or whoever) can't practically be in control of an entire planet.
- kulahan 2y agoBeing first to market matters a lot, is my main point.
- davidw 2y agoHe's high on Ketamine.
- mlindner 2y agoWith a reusable launch vehicle yeah that's ballpark. Depends how you define "city" though.
- niceice 2y agoSpaceX started with a small faction of that, just $100 million.
- Yeul 2y agoLol Apollo took a few percent of America's entire GDP. Also astronauts were willing to risk their life putting the stars and stripes on the moon I doubt that Musk can inspire the same zeal...
- burnte 2y agoOf course not, but Musk habitually underestimates the difficulty of things by about an order of magnitude.