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Elon Musk argues that putting a million people on Mars ensures humanity's future

322 points by todayiamme 12y ago

hughdbrown 12y ago
You first. I am not relocating to Mars and trying to raise my kids in non-existent school districts. Or: Earth has a lot of advantages over Mars. Why would you totally diminish your life's possibilities and leave?
- danielweber 12y ago
  This isn't about moving everyone to Mars. This is about colonization, which always happens with an extremely small fraction of the original population.
  - hughdbrown 12y ago
    I'm not negating that proposition. I am saying that people have alternatives in life and I can't imagine a life on Earth that is so bad that moving somewhere that has no water, no atmosphere, no food, no anything would be better. Chance of dying -- high. Chance of having children -- low. This is not rocket science, as they say.
    - lotsofmangos 12y ago
      Not many people become polar explorers either. For some people the challenge is worth almost any risk, look at nutters like the wingsuit proximity flyers, for instance. If there is a rocket to Mars you will have no problem filling it. For certain people you will have problems sending them away. I suspect a team of people may have to physically restrain Brian Blessed from invading the launch site to try and stow away on board if he isn't among those selected.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  I would imagine that any kids in a mars colony would have access to the most in depth schooling imaginable. The average educational level of the population there is going to have to be extremely high initially, and it is very hard to skip class. So if all you cared about you child's welfare was the quality of schooling, Mars wouldn't be a bad idea. Of course there are other risks and to take kids along on the first few ships would probably be considered bad parenting.
  - hughdbrown 12y ago
    Here is the conversation in every household where this comes up: Would-be colonizer: I am thinking of relocating the family to Mars for the stunning education opportunities the kids will have -- high average education level in the population, ... Spouse of would-be colonizer: You make one move to relocate the kids to Mars and you will divorced before your intergalactic shuttle lifts off.
bikamonki 12y ago
Define 'future'. A million years? What when the Sun has swallowed the Earth and Mars? I don't think biological humans will colonize space, not even the Moon, digital humans will. The Singularity is coming, hopefully within our lifespan.
jabberwock 12y ago
It seems like we have a long way to go when we're still struggling with servers that can handle a few hundred requests per second. Edit: Drats, I spoke too soon. The server seems to up now.
- loceng 12y ago
  Distribution and management of resources, it's still a problem we have here on Earth.
- mychaelangelo 12y ago
  We landed on the moon with computers no more powerful than a pocket calculator.
- Igglyboo 12y ago
  Really i/o bandwith probably isn't the issue here, latency will be an issue for communications between mars and earth but as far as getting to the colony and sustaining it will be a lot of hard math problems and impressive calculations. Oh and node can easily do millions of connections and lighttpd beat the 10k problem a long time ago.
  - jabberwock 12y ago
    My comment was made in jest, the site was initially returning 500 status codes. To their credit they got it back up within half an hour.
CPLX 12y ago
Did he mention anything about telephone sanitizers and account executives?
- aruggirello 12y ago
  Well, before boarding the ship, make sure they have enough lemon-soaked paper napkins aboard, or expect a delay...
bilalhusain 12y ago
server is throwing a 500 Here's link to Google cache: http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/the-elon-musk-interview-on-mars/ http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http://aeon.co/magazine...
macspoofing 12y ago
Ok sure. Let's try tackling immediate issues that have huge implications on our survival like climate change, before we make plans to send thousands of people to a place more inhospitable than Antarctica. Colonization is a pipe-dream in our immediate future.
- kiba 12y ago
  If we don't do it now, we may never do it. In the past 20 or 30 years or so, at least until the advent of SpaceX and competitors, we had lost or stagnated in human spaceflight capability. Besides, climate change won't kill humanity. We'll adapt, even as climate change makes life on Earth difficult.
- bsbechtel 12y ago
  He's probably doing more to tackle climate change than anyone else on this planet (Tesla). There is no 'we' making plans to colonize Mars, there is Elon Musk making plans.
  - cwal37 12y ago
    No, he's not doing more to tackle climate change than anyone on this planet. Let's say 25,000 sales in 2013 and 35,000 sales in 2014 [1]. That's 60,000 cars. Now let's take the numbers for electric GHG emissions vs. conventional emissions from this 2006 paper[2]. This is more of a reference, I'm not trying to say this paper is the unassailable truth. Also a disclaimer, these numbers will obviously be rough, again, just trying to paint a picture. These numbers have 3 scenarios, all fairly optimistic: Conventional (gasoline) emissions are 19.9 kg GHG emissions per 100 km. 1. Electricity is produced from renewables and nuclear 1a. Electric emissions are 0.343 kg/100km 2. 50% electricity from renewables, and 50% from natural gas with a 40% efficiency 2a. Electric emissions are 5.21 kg/100km 3. All electricity from natural gas with a 40% efficiency 3a. Electric emissions are 10.1kg/100km At this point, I should note that burning natural gas has roughly half the emissions associated with burning coal in terms of CO2 equivalency. Let's run with the middle scenario, which is still totally not representative of the country as a whole[3]. And we need some mileage, thankfully there are statistics on that. I'll use the 35-54 age group, which I'm guessing are the most likely to own Teslas, so 15,291 miles a year[4], which becomes 24,608km. Aright, so we have 60,000 electric cars that we're gonna assume are straight-up replacing 60,000 conventional cars. Each car would replace 14.69(24608/100) = 3614.9152kg/year(60,000 cars) = 216,894,912kg. This is the annual grossly simplified reduction in emissions of replacing 60k conventional cars (using numbers from that paper for what a conventional car means) based on that idealized generation mix. In 2012, our emissions were 6,526 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent[5]. Scaled down to our kilograms, it becomes 6,526,000,000,000kg. That amount displaced up above would account for 0.00332% of total emissions in 2012 based on those numbers. For some other perspective, Ford F-series sales have been up significantly the past two years[6] post-ish recession, and 16 mpg seems like a reasonable average for that line of vehicles[7]. More perspective, the MIT study "The Future of Coal"[8] pegged an average 500MW coal plant as producing 3 million tons of CO2 a year (although it ranged up to 4.5 or so million tons in other literature). That presents a range of 2,722,000,000 - 4,082,000,000 kg. Although not all of that is necessarily emitted in every case. So, displacing one 500MW coal plant with say, a large wind farm, would displace 12.5x what those 60k cars would do annually. Basically, what I'm getting at is that researchers and policy makers involved with utilities, DOE initiatives, and state governments (via RPS, no overarching federal clean energy policy[although the PTC obviously has a huge effect]) are probably all doing more to tackle climate change than Elon Musk. Not to crap on him, I would love to own a Tesla, I just like energy topics. Links 2 and 8 are pdfs. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Motors#Model_S http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Motors#Model_S [2] https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~sabrash/110/Chem%20110%20Spring%202014%20Articles/Economic_and_environmental_comparison%20of%20conventional.pdf https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~sabrash/110/Chem%20110%20... [3] http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/topic/0?agg=2,0,1&fuel=vvg&geo=g&sec=g&linechart=ELEC.GEN.ALL-US-99.M~ELEC.GEN.COW-US-99.M~ELEC.GEN.NG-US-99.M~ELEC.GEN.NUC-US-99.M~ELEC.GEN.HYC-US-99.M~ELEC.GEN.AOR-US-99.M&columnchart=ELEC.GEN.ALL-US-99.M~ELEC.GEN.COW-US-99.M~ELEC.GEN.NG-US-99.M~ELEC.GEN.NUC-US-99.M~ELEC.GEN.HYC-US-99.M&map=ELEC.GEN.ALL-US-99.M&freq=M&start=200101&end=201407&ctype=linechart&ltype=pin&rtype=s&pin=&rse=0&maptype=0 http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/topic/0?agg=2,... [4] http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm [5] http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/sources.html http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/sources.html [7] http://www.fuelly.com/car/ford/f-150 http://www.fuelly.com/car/ford/f-150 [8] http://web.mit.edu/coal/The_Future_of_Coal.pdf http://web.mit.edu/coal/The_Future_of_Coal.pdf
x1798DE 12y ago
I think this is a good long-term goal, but one thing that's missing from this analysis is the urgency of the thing. Right now, we've never even put one person on Mars, and keeping any significant Martian population alive would be a considerable expense. The cost in human labor and materials would certainly have to be diverted from other enterprises, as is the case with all economic actions. Given that we are on an exponential growth curve both in terms of technology and wealth, it seems likely to me that by the natural course of things 100 years from now maintaining an extraplanetary base on Mars would be much cheaper and easier, and would disrupt our growth rates much less, if at all. It may be that by acting now, it would take us 200 years to create a self-sustaining population on Mars, whereas if we wait 100 years, we'll be able to get something up and running in just an additional 50 years, thus better insulating us from disaster (consider that until the Mars colony is completely self-sufficient, it will likely be wiped out by any disaster on Earth, even disasters that aren't a real threat to our species, as long as we don't have enough surplus wealth to sustain an expensive Mars colony).
- loceng 12y ago
  I think the goal requires many technologies that aren't mass produced at the moment but which such technologies would be highly valuable and required to reaching a sustainable environment here on Earth.
  - danielweber 12y ago
    Yep. Europe didn't wait for ocean-liners to start colonizing the rest of the world. The ocean-liners came about because of the colonization efforts.
- tomp 12y ago
  The opposing viewpoint is that since we're decelerating our technological progress and achieving new wealth by pursuing more and more trivial enterprises (come on, it's a messaging app!), a new kind of space race that inspires generations to come might exponentially accelerate our progress, just like the last space race did!
api 12y ago
This is an example of an actual "first world problem." Other first world problems include: * Decarbonizing energy and achieving a sustainable energy and transportation infrastructure. (Not coincidentally Elon's also doing work in that area.) * Curing the diseases of aging and achieving significant life extension. * Augmenting and enhancing human intelligence. * Closing natural resource cycles to achieve a much higher rate of recycling and lower overall resource consumption. * Discovering new positive-sum solutions to the conflict between economic liberty and economic fairness / wealth distribution. These problems are probably game theoretic in nature and will probably require thinking at that level. * Unifying quantum mechanics with general relativity and unlocking a comprehensive and coherent understanding of ultimate physical reality. * Achieving a true holistic comprehension of the language of genetics and inheritance that goes far beyond "a gene for X" correlation-fishing.
mironathetin 12y ago
Colonizing Mars is a cool project, no doubt. But in order to let humanity survive, I personally would focus on earth. We must develop ways to live in balance with nature. And we should have started yesterday. WWF just released its annual report. Shocking. http://www.worldwildlife.org/publications http://www.worldwildlife.org/publications
- kiba 12y ago
  What kind of ecological disaster would kill off humanity? As far as I know, humanity is dependent on several crops and a few animals(cows, pigs, and chickens) for our survival.
  - mironathetin 12y ago
    "As far as I know, humanity is dependent on several crops and a few animals(cows, pigs, and chickens) for our survival." Indeed, missing knowledge is most dangerous. That's why education is so important. Start by reading the WWf report ;o).
- maneesh 12y ago
  Have you flown a plane in the last year? Because then you've used up more than your CO2 share as a human being. It's almost impossible to live in balance with nature in today's society
  - user24 12y ago
    > It's almost impossible to live in balance with nature in today's society To me, that is an indication that we need to change today's society, not a justification for doing nothing.
    - simonh 12y ago
      Even our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn't live in balance with nature. They laid waste to continent sized forests (mostly using fire strip hunting - set fires to force game into a kill zone), wiped out hundreds of species of mega-fauna with over-hunting, created deserts through over-grazing. Even retreating into the wilderness and living off the land just makes a big artificial farm-shaped hole in the wilderness.
diydsp 12y ago
As humans, we tend to see things through our own lenses. I happen to believe that if everyone played music together once a week, humanity's future would be preserved through the effects of mutual cooperation, trust and survival information communicated through music. Clowns probably believe humanity's future is ensured through everyone laughing at squirting flowers and Bill Gates probably believes curing malaria will ensure our future. These are all overly-biased, myopic views which when stretched to the point of determining the fate of the entire human race become equally absurd. They're little more than attention-seeking plays.
- danielweber 12y ago
  You know, I was with you until the end. That guy preserving music or that guy curing malaria or that guy trying to get humans onto another planet? They may be in some sense wrong, but if they all succeed we will have great music playing among the non-malarial population on Mars in a century. I don't see what's not to like.
- kiba 12y ago
  These are all overly-biased, myopic views which when stretched to the point of determining the fate of the entire human race become equally absurd. They're little more than attention-seeking plays. No offense, it sounds like "deep" bullshit. You had yet to explain why Musk's views are myopic. And curing malaria ensuring our future? Do you really expect Bill Gates to believe that? It seems far more likely that he see malaria as unnecessary harm and sought to eliminate it.
  - keenerd 12y ago
    Gates actually has stated what he feels is needed to ensure our future. Eliminate all CO2 production as soon as possible. To that end he's funding TerraPower's traveling wave reactor research. (Personally I feel this has a 50/50 chance of being a boondoggle, probably because it's an IV company.)
- dimillian 12y ago
  I don't agree, or I didn't get your comment. I'm a software engineer and I strongly believe that if every humans on earth worked all together with a single goal in mind, space exploration and conquest, instead of spending millions on wars (as an example) we would already been on Mars, or close to it. I kinda feel ashamed when I think about it, I would prefer to work into something which have a bigger impact on the humanity future, and that what I want to do later in my life. Musicians, clowns, video games, movies, are all entertainments, it adds pleasure into doing things but don't contribute in the to the goal of a greater knowledge of the universe. (you could argue that if X wouldn't have listened to Y song he wouldn't have discovered Z, and I would agree).
thirdtruck 12y ago
Yes. All of the digital backups in the world won't help the species after a global catastrophe unless we have some human operators backed up somewhere offsite.
dosh 12y ago
After reading this and "the everything store," I wonder what Jeff Bezos & Blue Origin (which started in 2000) would feel about Elon's recent endeavors with SpaceX (started in 2002), considering his highly competitive character.
- SuperChihuahua 12y ago
  They are not competitors. I don't know what Bezos said about it, but Elon Musk said: "Every time I see Jeff, I ask him why he's not doing more in space." "Our [SpaceX] competitors are not Paul Allen and Richard Branson, but Boeing, Lockheed, and the big aerospace companies. I'm really glad to see all the activity in entrepreneurial space and hopefully this heralds a new era of space exploration with price and quality improvements similar to other technology arenas."
  - dasmoth 12y ago
    Note that they're going to be competing a little more in the future. It was announced a couple of weeks ago that Blue Origin will be supplying engines to ULA (the joint venture of LockMart and Boeing that operates the Atlas V and Delta IV rockets).
throwaway_yy2Di 12y ago
What sort of existential risk is this supposed to protect against? The articles' examples are all wrong (these aren't Musk's examples): "A billion years will give us four more orbits of the Milky Way galaxy, any one of which could bring us into collision with another star, or a supernova shockwave, or the incinerating beam of a gamma ray burst. We could swing into the path of a rogue planet, one of the billions that roam our galaxy darkly, like cosmic wrecking balls. Planet Earth could be edging up to the end of an unusually fortunate run." Rogue planets are categorically not a threat to earth [0] -- the "cosmic wrecking ball" is pure fiction. And you get no risk reduction from supernovas / GRBs by spreading out across planets -- even collimated GRB "beams" are several degrees wide [1], a spot size light-years across (inner solar system is merely light-minutes across). Actually, those things aren't existential risks to a very advanced earth: their strongest effect is severe damage to the ozone layer [2], which other planets don't have in the first place.. (I'm not at all dismissing exotic existential risks. But is this a solution, or is it "We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.") [0] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/05/19/are-we-in-danger-from-a-rogue-planet/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/05/19/ar... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst#Energetics_and_beaming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst#Energetics_and... [2] http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.4710 http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.4710
- mrspeaker 12y ago
  Maybe Musk is convinced by the doomsday argument[0] (or unconvinced by the rebuttals), and sees this as a way to skew the probabilities. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- modeless 12y ago
  How about environmental disaster, asteroid strikes, nuclear war, and biological warfare. All of those would leave a self sustaining Mars colony unscathed even if they caused extinction on Earth. Also, at least one offworld colony is a prerequisite for the interstellar colonization that could actually protect against the threats described in your quote.
davidy123 12y ago
OK, he can go first.
- danielweber 12y ago
  You say that like he's trying to shove you in the rocket.
Thiz 12y ago
Plus another million on the moon. Just in case.
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
This is one of the only articles I have read that keeps Musk's Mars vision in check with doses of reality throughout: On Mars, the best we can expect is a crude habitat, erected by robots...US colonies from Roanoke to Jamestown suffered similar social breakdowns, in environments that were Edenic by comparison...For all we know, revolutions in energy, artificial intelligence and materials science could be imminent. Any one of them would make human spaceflight a much easier affair. The only thing that makes me feel better is that Musk seems to not be thinking through it all the way...and I mean that in the best way possible. At this point, from what I can tell he's still an evangelist and isn't putting resources to solving the minutiae of how to live on Mars. He is so laser focused on the logistics that he likely wants to leave practicalities of the biology problem to someone else.
- kiba 12y ago
  He is so laser focused on the logistics that he likely wants to leave practicalities of the biology problem to someone else. The only way we're going to start colonizing Mars is that someone focuses on making rocket cheaper. We can wait, but we had waited for several decades after the Apollo landing. Since then, in some way, technology had stagnated.
  - Shivetya 12y ago
    It is not just the cost of rockets holding us back, if we are going to do it right and safely we will be years in sending robots there to make it ready for people. Being so far away the habitat needs to be guaranteed before launch of the colonist. It would take some serious advancements in robotics, construction, and understanding of Mars geology, to make it happen. We cannot ship all of if there, we can send the building blocks then use those to mine, process, and construct, what is needed. A viable colony must operated independently and not rely on Earth for its survival
    - kiba 12y ago
      It is not just the cost of rockets holding us back, if we are going to do it right and safely we will be years in sending robots there to make it ready for people. With current limitation in AI and robotics, sending robots is not really good use of resources. They are inflexible and if something broke, it may be difficult to fix on the spot. Don't forget that teleoperation from Earth takes minutes, and by then, situation would have changed entirely. You're better off sending a shit ton of materials to Mars, with many redundancies so that a colonist can survive for years without going home, until the next resupply point. Teleoperation with the colonist nearby is a good idea though.
jimktrains2 12y ago
To the nay-sayers here: “What if Columbus had been told, ‘Chris, baby, don’t go now. Wait until we’ve solved our number one priorities — war and famine; poverty and crime; pollution and disease; illieracy and racial hatred—and Queen Isabella’s own personal brand of ‘interal security’‘” – W.I.E. Gates Humans are capable of doing multiple things at once. Some people working on space travel doesn't preclude others from working to slow (can we even reverse at this point) climate change.
- lukeschlather 12y ago
  He might not have started Europe on a 3-century adventure in genocide and enslavement of other peoples?
  - bikamonki 12y ago
    Hopefully there is no slaves or gold on Mars ;)
    - theklub 12y ago
      Hopefully there is a ton of gold, that'll get us there really quick.
      - DanBC 12y ago
        Gold is heavy. How expensive would it be to send enough fuel to Mars to have enough fuel to return the gold to Earth? Or do we get fuel on Mars?
        mikeyouse 12y ago
        I don't know the math offhand, but the return trip from Mars would take far less fuel than the initial trip. The atmosphere is almost non-existent and Mars' gravity is about 2/5 of Earth's. Similar to our experience on the moon, it took a Saturn V to get to the moon, but the Lunar Lander + CSM were enough to get back to earth from there.
kibwen 12y ago
Every time that this argument is made, I can't help but wonder if the mere existence of a sustainable off-world colony would cause humans on Earth to give even less of a damn about maintaining a habitable planet. A sort of moral hazard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard) on an interplanetary scale. Which is to ask, could colonizing other worlds actually accelerate the destruction of human civilization, rather than ensure it? As an alternative to possibly engendering environmental apathy, imagine a scenario akin to the Cold War, except that one of the superpowers has a million citizens on Mars, and the other doesn't. Does MAD still apply, or does the interplanetary superpower suddenly becoming all the more willing to watch the world burn?
- scj 12y ago
  >As an alternative to possibly engendering environmental apathy, imagine a scenario akin to the Cold War, except that one of the superpowers has a million citizens on Mars, and the other doesn't. Does MAD still apply, or does the interplanetary superpower suddenly becoming all the more willing to watch the world burn? Or do you just get a third superpower less invested in the fate of home planet?
  - freehunter 12y ago
    I have no doubt that given enough time and enough people born on Mars, the population of Mars will become more and more uninterested in the politics of Earth. We've seen it happen so often in colonization around the planet, there's no doubt that if a Mars colony is successful that we will see the same thing. No one born on Mars is going to have any reason to care about what happens on Earth any more than the people of one continent care about the day-to-day life of people on another continent.
    - celticninja 12y ago
      however the people on mars would have been supported significantly more by people from earth, both in getting to Mars and maintaining a colony before it became self sufficient. So it would take a generation or two after full sustainability for this sort of mindset to come into play in the younger generations, perhaps 4th and 5th generation martians.
deleted 12y ago
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oskarth 12y ago
To all the naysayers and party poopers in this thread, I would like to bring to your attention the following excerpt: Calling multi-planetary life an insurance policy “for life as we know it,” the 40-year-old physicist/entrepreneur/inventor warned that catastrophic natural or man-made disasters -- such as the planetoid collision that wiped out the dinosaurs eons ago or nuclear holocaust or climate change -- could someday wipe out humankind. Space exploration “is the next natural step” in the 3.8-billion year evolution of life on earth, he said. Musk suggested that .25% of the nation's gross domestic product would be an “appropriate” expenditure by the United States on space exploration, which he said is roughly the percentage an individual spends on life insurance. Space exploration spending, he said, should be "much less than we spend on health care, but maybe more than we spend on lipstick." (http://press.org/news-multimedia/news/space-exploration-critical-human-survival-spacex-entrepreneur-elon-musk-says http://press.org/news-multimedia/news/space-exploration-crit...) Now, before you start complaining about climate change, gamma rays and comparing him to a disillusioned clown, answer the question: is it reasonable for us to spend more money on space exploration than lipstick? EDIT: Talk about people missing the point. Keep on hating, just let Musk and people like him do their thing. Luckily, online comments have very little influence on the world.
- cwyers 12y ago
  > is it reasonable for us to spend more money on space exploration than lipstick? Like, if really rich people like Musk want to spend that kind of money on it, fine. But otherwise? No, it's not really reasonable to spend more on exploring space than on lipstick, and it's a pretty damn condescending question to even ask.
  - twoodfin 12y ago
    Besides being condescending and bordering on the nonsensical, the U.S. spends way, way more on space exploration than lipstick. Lipstick & lip gloss sales are ~$500M annually[1], while NASA's budget averages around $15B in constant 2007 dollars[2]. [1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304459804577281392370554560 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230445980... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
Datsundere 12y ago
its better to habitat earth like planets.
rottyguy 12y ago
I find an interesting intersection with his Tesla efforts (and perhaps more grand, the battery plant in Nevada)that can potentially provide mechanical autonoma on said colony without the need for fossil fuels and their high initial investment costs. Is he picking his earth bound investments in a manner that could carry forward into space?
chc 12y ago
All this talk of sending people to Mars seems like putting the cart before the horse. If you have the technogy to not die on Mars, why not start with, say, underwater cities on Earth? At least there you'd have a ready supply of several life-supporting elements that would be absent on Mars. As it is, we've never tried to ensure anybody's long-term survival under conditions anywhere near as harsh as Mars — no air, no nitrogen, no readily available water, no indigenous animals to hunt, no fossil fuels, no geothermal energy, no hydro or windmills. I never see plans to get around this with real-world technology — it's always just hand-waved as something we'll figure out. But it seems like the "letting people live natural lives under utterly inhospitable conditions" part has a lot more to do with ensuring humanity's survival than the Mars part.
- danielweber 12y ago
  why not start with, say, underwater cities on Earth? Because they don't want to live on underwater cities on Earth. They want to live on Mars.
  - philwelch 12y ago
    Who wants to live on Mars?
    - novalis78 12y ago
      I want to live on Mars
    - dasmoth 12y ago
      "I think it would be great to be born on Earth and to die on Mars. Just hopefully not at the point of impact." http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/elon-musk-and-the-giving-pledge-2012-05-21#quote_-304447912 http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/elon-musk-and-the-giving-...
    - kibwen 12y ago
      This is a legitimate question, so I don't think downvotes are warranted. Elon Musk may want to live on Mars (and in fact I have at least one friend who would abandon everything and take a one-way ticket to Mars in a heartbeat), but the sentiment expressed here of using a Martian population as insurance against an Earthborne cataclysm requires a functioning, self-sufficient civilization composed of more than just a cadre of explorers and thrill-seekers. You'll need to find a way entice doctors, farmers, miners, and other specialized professions to leave everything behind and consign themselves to death on a dark and barren rock. Historically, colonists have been motivated to such lengths for religious and political reasons. For example, perhaps libertarians will flock to Mars for freedom from oppressive governments. (Hey Bioshock developers: hint hint.)
ilitirit 12y ago
The site is down, but does he mention why thought ought to be 1 million is enough? Why not 100000? Why not 5000?
- seanflyon 12y ago
  People cannot survive (self sufficiently) on Mars without an industrial base and we don't have that clear of an idea how many people that will take. It has never been done with anywhere near as few as 1 million, but we are getting better at it so maybe we could reduce that number even further.
tslug 12y ago
If you take the work involved in keeping a closed, armored, pressurized habitat viable on Mars and instead direct it to create a closed, armored, pressurized habitat viable underwater or underground on Earth, you should get the same insurance policy at a considerably lower cost.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  We've done that. It's called a nuclear bunker.
- celticninja 12y ago
  not neceesarily, any event that was significant enough to wipe out the land based populationw oudl probably mess up the entire ecology of the planet, no reason being at the bottom of the ocean will save you.
kokey 12y ago
I'm somewhat taken by surprise by the negative comments on here. I couldn't agree with him more.
billiam 12y ago
I hate to say it, but I am well and truly tired of this flim flam man. This latest gambit is surely the most cynical plot of them all. He really is the latest Steve Jobs, whose marketing genius was imagining a never-ending string of products that define a superior class of people. The Musk M.O: 1. Identify industry with big inefficiencies that depends on huge government subsidies. That's cars, commercial space vehicles, mass transit and now: colonizing another planet with the 0.1%. 2. Convince the media and envious government officials you are Tom Swift, boy inventor. Have these governments fight over how many billions to give you to build your space car factory. 2. Use these taxpayer dollars and gigantic tax breaks to create iconic products and services for the elite class, effectively transferring huge dollars from the poor to the rich. 3. Rinse and repeat. I see no evidence at all that Musk cares any more about technologies to enable several billion of us to live together without slaughtering each other than he does about money
- informatimago 12y ago
  I wonder. Elon Musk is not an idiot. Then why did he say that to go to Alpha Century you needed 40 years? Why does he participate to this world wide disinformation? Since 1904, we know that to go to Alpha Century, if you can accelerate to a non negligeable fraction of the speed of light, then you need a time that below the distance, and non negligeably close to zero. In clear terms, to go to a star that is 4 light years away, with a 1 g constant accelleration, you need to travel for about 2 years. If you put in space a nuclear reactor (that can produce energy for more than ten years), and if you can use that energy to produce constantly a 1g accelleration, then you can easily go to Alpha Century, in 2 years, spend 2 years there, and come back in 2 years, for a total travel of 6 years. Now tell me we can't with the current technology build a space ship that can work safely for 6 years! Of course, when you come back to Earth, 82 years will have passed on Earth. I hope you put your saving in a good investment fund. Anyways, I'm wondering why Elon Musk, amongst all others, is propagating this lie? It looks like quite a confirmation for a complot theorist...
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    You are massively overestimating the time dilation on that trip. You need to be getting into the 90%c range before you start getting into decent amounts of time dilation and then you start hitting into the increase in energy required for the same acceleration, as your nuclear power plant or whatever has also slowed down along with you, while you are increasing in effective mass. edit - also, it is Alpha Centauri
iand 12y ago
Someone needs to introduce him to http://www.mars-one.com/ http://www.mars-one.com/
deleted 12y ago
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al2o3cr 12y ago
Technically, I suspect we could improve humanity's chances by launching a million-person mission to the Sun. The tricky bit is figuring out which million people to put in the rocket...
- nabla9 12y ago
  >The tricky bit is figuring out which million people to put in the rocket. Humanity attempts to answer this question using trial and error method. From the previous attempts we now know that the correct answer is not: - the proletariat, - Jews, - Circassians - Armenians - American Indians or indigenous peoples in general.
mNemoN 12y ago
Well, this is phantasmagory. The mars has actually very low magnetic shield and almost no atmosphere. The core of mars, which should generate this kind of field, as earth do, is burned out. There is no way how to create and sustain a sufficient atmosphere to colonize this planet. What worse the earth come to this point soon or later and solar wind flush all atmosphere and vegetation and there will be another mars on solar orbit. Humankind should focus to leave this world and transcend to another form of life :))))
- keenerd 12y ago
  > There is no way how to create and sustain a sufficient atmosphere to colonize this planet. A magnetic field is not necessary for an atmosphere. Venus also has no magnetic field, four times the solar wind pressure and somehow ends up with 90x more atmosphere than Earth. True, any atmosphere we put on Mars will slowly bleed away but we'll be able to top it off faster than it leaks out. edit: It also depends on the gas. For example, Earth's CO2 levels are only 4x higher than Mars's. It is possible that very hardy (probably engineered) plants could grow in an unpressurized greenhouse.
scottjad 12y ago
Hi, my name is Elon, and I have a great idea! We should tax Americans $42 billion/year indefinitely and pay much of that money to my company SpaceX. We'll build something on Mars, eventually, if possible. Let's have the US Congress fund this because as we all know they, like me, have no conflicts of interest, make decisions based purely on the science, have a very low time preference, are good stewards and very wise spenders, and plan for the future. And if Congress funds it then Americans must be willing to pay for it because, ta da, democracy! I'm pleased to announce that I have made a personal and very generous contribution of $10 million to increase public awareness about the need for this project. You're welcome humanity.
- deleted 12y ago
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- random28345 12y ago
  > We should tax Americans $42 billion/year indefinitely and pay much of that money to my company SpaceX. Sounds like a better use of taxpayer dollars than spending trillions to bomb brown people on the other side of the planet. And it will cost me less personally to fund a trip to Mars than I pay for a trip to Starbucks, so it's quite the bargain.
  - scottjad 12y ago
    Almost no one who advocates for government spending makes it conditional on eliminating other government spending. This would be in addition to the current military spending. Also, he wants 0.25% of US GDP indefinitely, so ignoring all the complexities of taxes maybe an approximation would be 0.25% of your gross income, every year for the rest of your working life, or like, maybe 10,000 times the the cost of a trip to Starbucks.
rcyn 12y ago
I think it was Saramago who said "Either we are blind or we are mad," sending people into space rather than fixing problems here. Humanity should face its mistakes.
UltraMagnus 12y ago
So, Musk is doing PR for the new Chris Nolan movie, now? I don't remember seeing it in the trailers for Interstellar, but did the rockets have the SpaceX logo on them? "to ensure humanity's future" This guy...unbelievable.
cyphunk 12y ago
How I read this: Man argues that because we cant get away from the competitive nature of the male dominance that pushes society into its gluttony for growth ("Get that GDP up!") we have no alternate but to find new sources to exploit for growth. While I admire Musk for his accomplishments this is no reason for us to follow his lead in ignoring the core of the problem. I'm all for absurdity masked as "vision" except when it distracts from serious problems. This is not really a critique of musk. His push for electric cars shows clearly he's both concerned as much with saving this environment as he is with leaving it. I'm just not sure great attention from the public to this idea of Mars inspires that same balance. Finally, to entertain the idea of a colony on Mars is pretty much tantamount acknowledging you're lineage is going to die off. You do notice he said 1 million people. So I ask the proponents, are you really worried about the survival of humanity or does this issue touch some other motives? Perhaps just the novelty of it. Perhaps the relief it gives you from not having to waste as many neurons on thinking about ecological complexity and the economic complexity it carries. In the same manner that Musk would say "fuck Earth" why can't we just say "fuck civilisation". I'm certain microbes and life on earth will continue onward long after we are gone.
- cyphunk 12y ago
  here is a better idea, develop self sufficient AI that will miss us enough when we all die out on earth that they will make sure the development of life here eventually produces new human friends a billion years later after earth heals from our mess. what do we call this?
msoad 12y ago
Elon Mask is really smart. He know how to keep his name in headlines all the time. This kind of arguments are nothing but tools for gaining more publicity
- general_failure 12y ago
  Totally. I am kind of surprised all this is generating so much discussion. Saying this is semi-meaningless given we don't have the needed technology. It's not even a nice vision. I don't know anyone how would want to live in Mars.
bayesianhorse 12y ago
The money/resources necessary to put one million people on Mars with a self-sustainable industrial base would be better spent trying to stave off disaster on our home world. It's easier, cheaper and faster to detect and deflect asteroids than building that colony... Not that building colonies in space wouldn't be a good idea for other reasons.
dxbydt 12y ago
I asked my wife "do you want to go to Mars?" She was in the other room with my noisy kid and she yelled back "No let's go in April" Took me a while to process that:) The comments here seem to have the same sort of disconnect from what Mr. Musk is actually proposing. One gentleman suggests the only thing that's holding him back is the lack of a suitable Martian school district. Forget Martian teachers, or even a single Martian school - he wants an entire Martian district of schools so he can A/B test his way to the best one for his kid. Well, more power to him! At this rate, forget Mars, going to Mountain View for the 90 day yc gig seems a formidable exploration - what are you going to do about the school district there?
Vadoff 12y ago
Or we could just limit people to having 2 kids, and most of our population/environmental problems are gone.
whiteshadow 12y ago
They say things like, “Nature is so wonderful; things are always better in the countryside where there are no people around.” They imply that humanity and civilisation are less good than their absence. But I’m not in that school,’ he said. ‘I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness, to make sure it continues into the future.’ Agreed that humanity can have a more positive impact of the world/universe, but this seemed to be a statement that humanity is above all things, including nature. Nature should be respected and we should have our boundaries. It is dangerous to think that human can play god, or have some kind of superior ownership of the universe.

322 points by todayiamme 12y ago

You first. I am not relocating to Mars and trying to raise my kids in non-existent school districts. Or: Earth has a lot of advantages over Mars. Why would you totally diminish your life's possibilities and leave?

danielweber 12y ago
This isn't about moving everyone to Mars. This is about colonization, which always happens with an extremely small fraction of the original population.
- hughdbrown 12y ago
  I'm not negating that proposition. I am saying that people have alternatives in life and I can't imagine a life on Earth that is so bad that moving somewhere that has no water, no atmosphere, no food, no anything would be better. Chance of dying -- high. Chance of having children -- low. This is not rocket science, as they say.
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    Not many people become polar explorers either. For some people the challenge is worth almost any risk, look at nutters like the wingsuit proximity flyers, for instance. If there is a rocket to Mars you will have no problem filling it. For certain people you will have problems sending them away. I suspect a team of people may have to physically restrain Brian Blessed from invading the launch site to try and stow away on board if he isn't among those selected.
lotsofmangos 12y ago
I would imagine that any kids in a mars colony would have access to the most in depth schooling imaginable. The average educational level of the population there is going to have to be extremely high initially, and it is very hard to skip class. So if all you cared about you child's welfare was the quality of schooling, Mars wouldn't be a bad idea. Of course there are other risks and to take kids along on the first few ships would probably be considered bad parenting.
- hughdbrown 12y ago
  Here is the conversation in every household where this comes up: Would-be colonizer: I am thinking of relocating the family to Mars for the stunning education opportunities the kids will have -- high average education level in the population, ... Spouse of would-be colonizer: You make one move to relocate the kids to Mars and you will divorced before your intergalactic shuttle lifts off.

bikamonki 12y ago

Define 'future'. A million years? What when the Sun has swallowed the Earth and Mars? I don't think biological humans will colonize space, not even the Moon, digital humans will. The Singularity is coming, hopefully within our lifespan.

jabberwock 12y ago

It seems like we have a long way to go when we're still struggling with servers that can handle a few hundred requests per second. Edit: Drats, I spoke too soon. The server seems to up now.

loceng 12y ago
Distribution and management of resources, it's still a problem we have here on Earth.
mychaelangelo 12y ago
We landed on the moon with computers no more powerful than a pocket calculator.
Igglyboo 12y ago
Really i/o bandwith probably isn't the issue here, latency will be an issue for communications between mars and earth but as far as getting to the colony and sustaining it will be a lot of hard math problems and impressive calculations. Oh and node can easily do millions of connections and lighttpd beat the 10k problem a long time ago.
- jabberwock 12y ago
  My comment was made in jest, the site was initially returning 500 status codes. To their credit they got it back up within half an hour.

CPLX 12y ago

Did he mention anything about telephone sanitizers and account executives?

aruggirello 12y ago
Well, before boarding the ship, make sure they have enough lemon-soaked paper napkins aboard, or expect a delay...

bilalhusain 12y ago

server is throwing a 500 Here's link to Google cache: http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/the-elon-musk-interview-on-mars/ http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http://aeon.co/magazine...

macspoofing 12y ago

Ok sure. Let's try tackling immediate issues that have huge implications on our survival like climate change, before we make plans to send thousands of people to a place more inhospitable than Antarctica. Colonization is a pipe-dream in our immediate future.

kiba 12y ago
If we don't do it now, we may never do it. In the past 20 or 30 years or so, at least until the advent of SpaceX and competitors, we had lost or stagnated in human spaceflight capability. Besides, climate change won't kill humanity. We'll adapt, even as climate change makes life on Earth difficult.
bsbechtel 12y ago
He's probably doing more to tackle climate change than anyone else on this planet (Tesla). There is no 'we' making plans to colonize Mars, there is Elon Musk making plans.
- cwal37 12y ago
  No, he's not doing more to tackle climate change than anyone on this planet. Let's say 25,000 sales in 2013 and 35,000 sales in 2014 [1]. That's 60,000 cars. Now let's take the numbers for electric GHG emissions vs. conventional emissions from this 2006 paper[2]. This is more of a reference, I'm not trying to say this paper is the unassailable truth. Also a disclaimer, these numbers will obviously be rough, again, just trying to paint a picture. These numbers have 3 scenarios, all fairly optimistic: Conventional (gasoline) emissions are 19.9 kg GHG emissions per 100 km. 1. Electricity is produced from renewables and nuclear 1a. Electric emissions are 0.343 kg/100km 2. 50% electricity from renewables, and 50% from natural gas with a 40% efficiency 2a. Electric emissions are 5.21 kg/100km 3. All electricity from natural gas with a 40% efficiency 3a. Electric emissions are 10.1kg/100km At this point, I should note that burning natural gas has roughly half the emissions associated with burning coal in terms of CO2 equivalency. Let's run with the middle scenario, which is still totally not representative of the country as a whole[3]. And we need some mileage, thankfully there are statistics on that. I'll use the 35-54 age group, which I'm guessing are the most likely to own Teslas, so 15,291 miles a year[4], which becomes 24,608km. Aright, so we have 60,000 electric cars that we're gonna assume are straight-up replacing 60,000 conventional cars. Each car would replace 14.69(24608/100) = 3614.9152kg/year(60,000 cars) = 216,894,912kg. This is the annual grossly simplified reduction in emissions of replacing 60k conventional cars (using numbers from that paper for what a conventional car means) based on that idealized generation mix. In 2012, our emissions were 6,526 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent[5]. Scaled down to our kilograms, it becomes 6,526,000,000,000kg. That amount displaced up above would account for 0.00332% of total emissions in 2012 based on those numbers. For some other perspective, Ford F-series sales have been up significantly the past two years[6] post-ish recession, and 16 mpg seems like a reasonable average for that line of vehicles[7]. More perspective, the MIT study "The Future of Coal"[8] pegged an average 500MW coal plant as producing 3 million tons of CO2 a year (although it ranged up to 4.5 or so million tons in other literature). That presents a range of 2,722,000,000 - 4,082,000,000 kg. Although not all of that is necessarily emitted in every case. So, displacing one 500MW coal plant with say, a large wind farm, would displace 12.5x what those 60k cars would do annually. Basically, what I'm getting at is that researchers and policy makers involved with utilities, DOE initiatives, and state governments (via RPS, no overarching federal clean energy policy[although the PTC obviously has a huge effect]) are probably all doing more to tackle climate change than Elon Musk. Not to crap on him, I would love to own a Tesla, I just like energy topics. Links 2 and 8 are pdfs. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Motors#Model_S http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Motors#Model_S [2] https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~sabrash/110/Chem%20110%20Spring%202014%20Articles/Economic_and_environmental_comparison%20of%20conventional.pdf https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~sabrash/110/Chem%20110%20... [3] http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/topic/0?agg=2,0,1&fuel=vvg&geo=g&sec=g&linechart=ELEC.GEN.ALL-US-99.M~ELEC.GEN.COW-US-99.M~ELEC.GEN.NG-US-99.M~ELEC.GEN.NUC-US-99.M~ELEC.GEN.HYC-US-99.M~ELEC.GEN.AOR-US-99.M&columnchart=ELEC.GEN.ALL-US-99.M~ELEC.GEN.COW-US-99.M~ELEC.GEN.NG-US-99.M~ELEC.GEN.NUC-US-99.M~ELEC.GEN.HYC-US-99.M&map=ELEC.GEN.ALL-US-99.M&freq=M&start=200101&end=201407&ctype=linechart&ltype=pin&rtype=s&pin=&rse=0&maptype=0 http://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/#/topic/0?agg=2,... [4] http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm [5] http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/sources.html http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/ghgemissions/sources.html [7] http://www.fuelly.com/car/ford/f-150 http://www.fuelly.com/car/ford/f-150 [8] http://web.mit.edu/coal/The_Future_of_Coal.pdf http://web.mit.edu/coal/The_Future_of_Coal.pdf

x1798DE 12y ago

I think this is a good long-term goal, but one thing that's missing from this analysis is the urgency of the thing. Right now, we've never even put one person on Mars, and keeping any significant Martian population alive would be a considerable expense. The cost in human labor and materials would certainly have to be diverted from other enterprises, as is the case with all economic actions. Given that we are on an exponential growth curve both in terms of technology and wealth, it seems likely to me that by the natural course of things 100 years from now maintaining an extraplanetary base on Mars would be much cheaper and easier, and would disrupt our growth rates much less, if at all. It may be that by acting now, it would take us 200 years to create a self-sustaining population on Mars, whereas if we wait 100 years, we'll be able to get something up and running in just an additional 50 years, thus better insulating us from disaster (consider that until the Mars colony is completely self-sufficient, it will likely be wiped out by any disaster on Earth, even disasters that aren't a real threat to our species, as long as we don't have enough surplus wealth to sustain an expensive Mars colony).

loceng 12y ago
I think the goal requires many technologies that aren't mass produced at the moment but which such technologies would be highly valuable and required to reaching a sustainable environment here on Earth.
- danielweber 12y ago
  Yep. Europe didn't wait for ocean-liners to start colonizing the rest of the world. The ocean-liners came about because of the colonization efforts.
tomp 12y ago
The opposing viewpoint is that since we're decelerating our technological progress and achieving new wealth by pursuing more and more trivial enterprises (come on, it's a messaging app!), a new kind of space race that inspires generations to come might exponentially accelerate our progress, just like the last space race did!

api 12y ago

This is an example of an actual "first world problem." Other first world problems include: * Decarbonizing energy and achieving a sustainable energy and transportation infrastructure. (Not coincidentally Elon's also doing work in that area.) * Curing the diseases of aging and achieving significant life extension. * Augmenting and enhancing human intelligence. * Closing natural resource cycles to achieve a much higher rate of recycling and lower overall resource consumption. * Discovering new positive-sum solutions to the conflict between economic liberty and economic fairness / wealth distribution. These problems are probably game theoretic in nature and will probably require thinking at that level. * Unifying quantum mechanics with general relativity and unlocking a comprehensive and coherent understanding of ultimate physical reality. * Achieving a true holistic comprehension of the language of genetics and inheritance that goes far beyond "a gene for X" correlation-fishing.

mironathetin 12y ago

Colonizing Mars is a cool project, no doubt. But in order to let humanity survive, I personally would focus on earth. We must develop ways to live in balance with nature. And we should have started yesterday. WWF just released its annual report. Shocking. http://www.worldwildlife.org/publications http://www.worldwildlife.org/publications

kiba 12y ago
What kind of ecological disaster would kill off humanity? As far as I know, humanity is dependent on several crops and a few animals(cows, pigs, and chickens) for our survival.
- mironathetin 12y ago
  "As far as I know, humanity is dependent on several crops and a few animals(cows, pigs, and chickens) for our survival." Indeed, missing knowledge is most dangerous. That's why education is so important. Start by reading the WWf report ;o).
maneesh 12y ago
Have you flown a plane in the last year? Because then you've used up more than your CO2 share as a human being. It's almost impossible to live in balance with nature in today's society
- user24 12y ago
  > It's almost impossible to live in balance with nature in today's society To me, that is an indication that we need to change today's society, not a justification for doing nothing.
  - simonh 12y ago
    Even our hunter-gatherer ancestors didn't live in balance with nature. They laid waste to continent sized forests (mostly using fire strip hunting - set fires to force game into a kill zone), wiped out hundreds of species of mega-fauna with over-hunting, created deserts through over-grazing. Even retreating into the wilderness and living off the land just makes a big artificial farm-shaped hole in the wilderness.

diydsp 12y ago

As humans, we tend to see things through our own lenses. I happen to believe that if everyone played music together once a week, humanity's future would be preserved through the effects of mutual cooperation, trust and survival information communicated through music. Clowns probably believe humanity's future is ensured through everyone laughing at squirting flowers and Bill Gates probably believes curing malaria will ensure our future. These are all overly-biased, myopic views which when stretched to the point of determining the fate of the entire human race become equally absurd. They're little more than attention-seeking plays.

danielweber 12y ago
You know, I was with you until the end. That guy preserving music or that guy curing malaria or that guy trying to get humans onto another planet? They may be in some sense wrong, but if they all succeed we will have great music playing among the non-malarial population on Mars in a century. I don't see what's not to like.
kiba 12y ago
These are all overly-biased, myopic views which when stretched to the point of determining the fate of the entire human race become equally absurd. They're little more than attention-seeking plays. No offense, it sounds like "deep" bullshit. You had yet to explain why Musk's views are myopic. And curing malaria ensuring our future? Do you really expect Bill Gates to believe that? It seems far more likely that he see malaria as unnecessary harm and sought to eliminate it.
- keenerd 12y ago
  Gates actually has stated what he feels is needed to ensure our future. Eliminate all CO2 production as soon as possible. To that end he's funding TerraPower's traveling wave reactor research. (Personally I feel this has a 50/50 chance of being a boondoggle, probably because it's an IV company.)
dimillian 12y ago
I don't agree, or I didn't get your comment. I'm a software engineer and I strongly believe that if every humans on earth worked all together with a single goal in mind, space exploration and conquest, instead of spending millions on wars (as an example) we would already been on Mars, or close to it. I kinda feel ashamed when I think about it, I would prefer to work into something which have a bigger impact on the humanity future, and that what I want to do later in my life. Musicians, clowns, video games, movies, are all entertainments, it adds pleasure into doing things but don't contribute in the to the goal of a greater knowledge of the universe. (you could argue that if X wouldn't have listened to Y song he wouldn't have discovered Z, and I would agree).

thirdtruck 12y ago

Yes. All of the digital backups in the world won't help the species after a global catastrophe unless we have some human operators backed up somewhere offsite.

dosh 12y ago

After reading this and "the everything store," I wonder what Jeff Bezos & Blue Origin (which started in 2000) would feel about Elon's recent endeavors with SpaceX (started in 2002), considering his highly competitive character.

SuperChihuahua 12y ago
They are not competitors. I don't know what Bezos said about it, but Elon Musk said: "Every time I see Jeff, I ask him why he's not doing more in space." "Our [SpaceX] competitors are not Paul Allen and Richard Branson, but Boeing, Lockheed, and the big aerospace companies. I'm really glad to see all the activity in entrepreneurial space and hopefully this heralds a new era of space exploration with price and quality improvements similar to other technology arenas."
- dasmoth 12y ago
  Note that they're going to be competing a little more in the future. It was announced a couple of weeks ago that Blue Origin will be supplying engines to ULA (the joint venture of LockMart and Boeing that operates the Atlas V and Delta IV rockets).

throwaway_yy2Di 12y ago

What sort of existential risk is this supposed to protect against? The articles' examples are all wrong (these aren't Musk's examples): "A billion years will give us four more orbits of the Milky Way galaxy, any one of which could bring us into collision with another star, or a supernova shockwave, or the incinerating beam of a gamma ray burst. We could swing into the path of a rogue planet, one of the billions that roam our galaxy darkly, like cosmic wrecking balls. Planet Earth could be edging up to the end of an unusually fortunate run." Rogue planets are categorically not a threat to earth [0] -- the "cosmic wrecking ball" is pure fiction. And you get no risk reduction from supernovas / GRBs by spreading out across planets -- even collimated GRB "beams" are several degrees wide [1], a spot size light-years across (inner solar system is merely light-minutes across). Actually, those things aren't existential risks to a very advanced earth: their strongest effect is severe damage to the ozone layer [2], which other planets don't have in the first place.. (I'm not at all dismissing exotic existential risks. But is this a solution, or is it "We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this.") [0] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/05/19/are-we-in-danger-from-a-rogue-planet/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/05/19/ar... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst#Energetics_and_beaming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma-ray_burst#Energetics_and... [2] http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.4710 http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.4710

mrspeaker 12y ago
Maybe Musk is convinced by the doomsday argument[0] (or unconvinced by the rebuttals), and sees this as a way to skew the probabilities. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
modeless 12y ago
How about environmental disaster, asteroid strikes, nuclear war, and biological warfare. All of those would leave a self sustaining Mars colony unscathed even if they caused extinction on Earth. Also, at least one offworld colony is a prerequisite for the interstellar colonization that could actually protect against the threats described in your quote.

davidy123 12y ago

OK, he can go first.

danielweber 12y ago
You say that like he's trying to shove you in the rocket.

Thiz 12y ago

Plus another million on the moon. Just in case.

AndrewKemendo 12y ago

This is one of the only articles I have read that keeps Musk's Mars vision in check with doses of reality throughout: On Mars, the best we can expect is a crude habitat, erected by robots...US colonies from Roanoke to Jamestown suffered similar social breakdowns, in environments that were Edenic by comparison...For all we know, revolutions in energy, artificial intelligence and materials science could be imminent. Any one of them would make human spaceflight a much easier affair. The only thing that makes me feel better is that Musk seems to not be thinking through it all the way...and I mean that in the best way possible. At this point, from what I can tell he's still an evangelist and isn't putting resources to solving the minutiae of how to live on Mars. He is so laser focused on the logistics that he likely wants to leave practicalities of the biology problem to someone else.

kiba 12y ago
He is so laser focused on the logistics that he likely wants to leave practicalities of the biology problem to someone else. The only way we're going to start colonizing Mars is that someone focuses on making rocket cheaper. We can wait, but we had waited for several decades after the Apollo landing. Since then, in some way, technology had stagnated.
- Shivetya 12y ago
  It is not just the cost of rockets holding us back, if we are going to do it right and safely we will be years in sending robots there to make it ready for people. Being so far away the habitat needs to be guaranteed before launch of the colonist. It would take some serious advancements in robotics, construction, and understanding of Mars geology, to make it happen. We cannot ship all of if there, we can send the building blocks then use those to mine, process, and construct, what is needed. A viable colony must operated independently and not rely on Earth for its survival
  - kiba 12y ago
    It is not just the cost of rockets holding us back, if we are going to do it right and safely we will be years in sending robots there to make it ready for people. With current limitation in AI and robotics, sending robots is not really good use of resources. They are inflexible and if something broke, it may be difficult to fix on the spot. Don't forget that teleoperation from Earth takes minutes, and by then, situation would have changed entirely. You're better off sending a shit ton of materials to Mars, with many redundancies so that a colonist can survive for years without going home, until the next resupply point. Teleoperation with the colonist nearby is a good idea though.

jimktrains2 12y ago

To the nay-sayers here: “What if Columbus had been told, ‘Chris, baby, don’t go now. Wait until we’ve solved our number one priorities — war and famine; poverty and crime; pollution and disease; illieracy and racial hatred—and Queen Isabella’s own personal brand of ‘interal security’‘” – W.I.E. Gates Humans are capable of doing multiple things at once. Some people working on space travel doesn't preclude others from working to slow (can we even reverse at this point) climate change.

lukeschlather 12y ago
He might not have started Europe on a 3-century adventure in genocide and enslavement of other peoples?
- bikamonki 12y ago
  Hopefully there is no slaves or gold on Mars ;)
  - theklub 12y ago
    Hopefully there is a ton of gold, that'll get us there really quick.
    - DanBC 12y ago
      Gold is heavy. How expensive would it be to send enough fuel to Mars to have enough fuel to return the gold to Earth? Or do we get fuel on Mars?
      - mikeyouse 12y ago
        I don't know the math offhand, but the return trip from Mars would take far less fuel than the initial trip. The atmosphere is almost non-existent and Mars' gravity is about 2/5 of Earth's. Similar to our experience on the moon, it took a Saturn V to get to the moon, but the Lunar Lander + CSM were enough to get back to earth from there.

kibwen 12y ago

Every time that this argument is made, I can't help but wonder if the mere existence of a sustainable off-world colony would cause humans on Earth to give even less of a damn about maintaining a habitable planet. A sort of moral hazard (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_hazard) on an interplanetary scale. Which is to ask, could colonizing other worlds actually accelerate the destruction of human civilization, rather than ensure it? As an alternative to possibly engendering environmental apathy, imagine a scenario akin to the Cold War, except that one of the superpowers has a million citizens on Mars, and the other doesn't. Does MAD still apply, or does the interplanetary superpower suddenly becoming all the more willing to watch the world burn?

scj 12y ago
>As an alternative to possibly engendering environmental apathy, imagine a scenario akin to the Cold War, except that one of the superpowers has a million citizens on Mars, and the other doesn't. Does MAD still apply, or does the interplanetary superpower suddenly becoming all the more willing to watch the world burn? Or do you just get a third superpower less invested in the fate of home planet?
- freehunter 12y ago
  I have no doubt that given enough time and enough people born on Mars, the population of Mars will become more and more uninterested in the politics of Earth. We've seen it happen so often in colonization around the planet, there's no doubt that if a Mars colony is successful that we will see the same thing. No one born on Mars is going to have any reason to care about what happens on Earth any more than the people of one continent care about the day-to-day life of people on another continent.
  - celticninja 12y ago
    however the people on mars would have been supported significantly more by people from earth, both in getting to Mars and maintaining a colony before it became self sufficient. So it would take a generation or two after full sustainability for this sort of mindset to come into play in the younger generations, perhaps 4th and 5th generation martians.

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oskarth 12y ago

To all the naysayers and party poopers in this thread, I would like to bring to your attention the following excerpt: Calling multi-planetary life an insurance policy “for life as we know it,” the 40-year-old physicist/entrepreneur/inventor warned that catastrophic natural or man-made disasters -- such as the planetoid collision that wiped out the dinosaurs eons ago or nuclear holocaust or climate change -- could someday wipe out humankind. Space exploration “is the next natural step” in the 3.8-billion year evolution of life on earth, he said. Musk suggested that .25% of the nation's gross domestic product would be an “appropriate” expenditure by the United States on space exploration, which he said is roughly the percentage an individual spends on life insurance. Space exploration spending, he said, should be "much less than we spend on health care, but maybe more than we spend on lipstick." (http://press.org/news-multimedia/news/space-exploration-critical-human-survival-spacex-entrepreneur-elon-musk-says http://press.org/news-multimedia/news/space-exploration-crit...) Now, before you start complaining about climate change, gamma rays and comparing him to a disillusioned clown, answer the question: is it reasonable for us to spend more money on space exploration than lipstick? EDIT: Talk about people missing the point. Keep on hating, just let Musk and people like him do their thing. Luckily, online comments have very little influence on the world.

cwyers 12y ago
> is it reasonable for us to spend more money on space exploration than lipstick? Like, if really rich people like Musk want to spend that kind of money on it, fine. But otherwise? No, it's not really reasonable to spend more on exploring space than on lipstick, and it's a pretty damn condescending question to even ask.
- twoodfin 12y ago
  Besides being condescending and bordering on the nonsensical, the U.S. spends way, way more on space exploration than lipstick. Lipstick & lip gloss sales are ~$500M annually[1], while NASA's budget averages around $15B in constant 2007 dollars[2]. [1] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304459804577281392370554560 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230445980... [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

Datsundere 12y ago

its better to habitat earth like planets.

rottyguy 12y ago

I find an interesting intersection with his Tesla efforts (and perhaps more grand, the battery plant in Nevada)that can potentially provide mechanical autonoma on said colony without the need for fossil fuels and their high initial investment costs. Is he picking his earth bound investments in a manner that could carry forward into space?

chc 12y ago

All this talk of sending people to Mars seems like putting the cart before the horse. If you have the technogy to not die on Mars, why not start with, say, underwater cities on Earth? At least there you'd have a ready supply of several life-supporting elements that would be absent on Mars. As it is, we've never tried to ensure anybody's long-term survival under conditions anywhere near as harsh as Mars — no air, no nitrogen, no readily available water, no indigenous animals to hunt, no fossil fuels, no geothermal energy, no hydro or windmills. I never see plans to get around this with real-world technology — it's always just hand-waved as something we'll figure out. But it seems like the "letting people live natural lives under utterly inhospitable conditions" part has a lot more to do with ensuring humanity's survival than the Mars part.

danielweber 12y ago
why not start with, say, underwater cities on Earth? Because they don't want to live on underwater cities on Earth. They want to live on Mars.
- philwelch 12y ago
  Who wants to live on Mars?
  - novalis78 12y ago
    I want to live on Mars
  - dasmoth 12y ago
    "I think it would be great to be born on Earth and to die on Mars. Just hopefully not at the point of impact." http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/elon-musk-and-the-giving-pledge-2012-05-21#quote_-304447912 http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/elon-musk-and-the-giving-...
  - kibwen 12y ago
    This is a legitimate question, so I don't think downvotes are warranted. Elon Musk may want to live on Mars (and in fact I have at least one friend who would abandon everything and take a one-way ticket to Mars in a heartbeat), but the sentiment expressed here of using a Martian population as insurance against an Earthborne cataclysm requires a functioning, self-sufficient civilization composed of more than just a cadre of explorers and thrill-seekers. You'll need to find a way entice doctors, farmers, miners, and other specialized professions to leave everything behind and consign themselves to death on a dark and barren rock. Historically, colonists have been motivated to such lengths for religious and political reasons. For example, perhaps libertarians will flock to Mars for freedom from oppressive governments. (Hey Bioshock developers: hint hint.)

ilitirit 12y ago

The site is down, but does he mention why thought ought to be 1 million is enough? Why not 100000? Why not 5000?

seanflyon 12y ago
People cannot survive (self sufficiently) on Mars without an industrial base and we don't have that clear of an idea how many people that will take. It has never been done with anywhere near as few as 1 million, but we are getting better at it so maybe we could reduce that number even further.

tslug 12y ago

If you take the work involved in keeping a closed, armored, pressurized habitat viable on Mars and instead direct it to create a closed, armored, pressurized habitat viable underwater or underground on Earth, you should get the same insurance policy at a considerably lower cost.

lotsofmangos 12y ago
We've done that. It's called a nuclear bunker.
celticninja 12y ago
not neceesarily, any event that was significant enough to wipe out the land based populationw oudl probably mess up the entire ecology of the planet, no reason being at the bottom of the ocean will save you.

kokey 12y ago

I'm somewhat taken by surprise by the negative comments on here. I couldn't agree with him more.

billiam 12y ago

I hate to say it, but I am well and truly tired of this flim flam man. This latest gambit is surely the most cynical plot of them all. He really is the latest Steve Jobs, whose marketing genius was imagining a never-ending string of products that define a superior class of people. The Musk M.O: 1. Identify industry with big inefficiencies that depends on huge government subsidies. That's cars, commercial space vehicles, mass transit and now: colonizing another planet with the 0.1%. 2. Convince the media and envious government officials you are Tom Swift, boy inventor. Have these governments fight over how many billions to give you to build your space car factory. 2. Use these taxpayer dollars and gigantic tax breaks to create iconic products and services for the elite class, effectively transferring huge dollars from the poor to the rich. 3. Rinse and repeat. I see no evidence at all that Musk cares any more about technologies to enable several billion of us to live together without slaughtering each other than he does about money

informatimago 12y ago
I wonder. Elon Musk is not an idiot. Then why did he say that to go to Alpha Century you needed 40 years? Why does he participate to this world wide disinformation? Since 1904, we know that to go to Alpha Century, if you can accelerate to a non negligeable fraction of the speed of light, then you need a time that below the distance, and non negligeably close to zero. In clear terms, to go to a star that is 4 light years away, with a 1 g constant accelleration, you need to travel for about 2 years. If you put in space a nuclear reactor (that can produce energy for more than ten years), and if you can use that energy to produce constantly a 1g accelleration, then you can easily go to Alpha Century, in 2 years, spend 2 years there, and come back in 2 years, for a total travel of 6 years. Now tell me we can't with the current technology build a space ship that can work safely for 6 years! Of course, when you come back to Earth, 82 years will have passed on Earth. I hope you put your saving in a good investment fund. Anyways, I'm wondering why Elon Musk, amongst all others, is propagating this lie? It looks like quite a confirmation for a complot theorist...
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  You are massively overestimating the time dilation on that trip. You need to be getting into the 90%c range before you start getting into decent amounts of time dilation and then you start hitting into the increase in energy required for the same acceleration, as your nuclear power plant or whatever has also slowed down along with you, while you are increasing in effective mass. edit - also, it is Alpha Centauri

iand 12y ago

Someone needs to introduce him to http://www.mars-one.com/ http://www.mars-one.com/

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al2o3cr 12y ago

Technically, I suspect we could improve humanity's chances by launching a million-person mission to the Sun. The tricky bit is figuring out which million people to put in the rocket...

nabla9 12y ago
>The tricky bit is figuring out which million people to put in the rocket. Humanity attempts to answer this question using trial and error method. From the previous attempts we now know that the correct answer is not: - the proletariat, - Jews, - Circassians - Armenians - American Indians or indigenous peoples in general.

mNemoN 12y ago

Well, this is phantasmagory. The mars has actually very low magnetic shield and almost no atmosphere. The core of mars, which should generate this kind of field, as earth do, is burned out. There is no way how to create and sustain a sufficient atmosphere to colonize this planet. What worse the earth come to this point soon or later and solar wind flush all atmosphere and vegetation and there will be another mars on solar orbit. Humankind should focus to leave this world and transcend to another form of life :))))

keenerd 12y ago
> There is no way how to create and sustain a sufficient atmosphere to colonize this planet. A magnetic field is not necessary for an atmosphere. Venus also has no magnetic field, four times the solar wind pressure and somehow ends up with 90x more atmosphere than Earth. True, any atmosphere we put on Mars will slowly bleed away but we'll be able to top it off faster than it leaks out. edit: It also depends on the gas. For example, Earth's CO2 levels are only 4x higher than Mars's. It is possible that very hardy (probably engineered) plants could grow in an unpressurized greenhouse.

scottjad 12y ago

Hi, my name is Elon, and I have a great idea! We should tax Americans $42 billion/year indefinitely and pay much of that money to my company SpaceX. We'll build something on Mars, eventually, if possible. Let's have the US Congress fund this because as we all know they, like me, have no conflicts of interest, make decisions based purely on the science, have a very low time preference, are good stewards and very wise spenders, and plan for the future. And if Congress funds it then Americans must be willing to pay for it because, ta da, democracy! I'm pleased to announce that I have made a personal and very generous contribution of $10 million to increase public awareness about the need for this project. You're welcome humanity.

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random28345 12y ago
> We should tax Americans $42 billion/year indefinitely and pay much of that money to my company SpaceX. Sounds like a better use of taxpayer dollars than spending trillions to bomb brown people on the other side of the planet. And it will cost me less personally to fund a trip to Mars than I pay for a trip to Starbucks, so it's quite the bargain.
- scottjad 12y ago
  Almost no one who advocates for government spending makes it conditional on eliminating other government spending. This would be in addition to the current military spending. Also, he wants 0.25% of US GDP indefinitely, so ignoring all the complexities of taxes maybe an approximation would be 0.25% of your gross income, every year for the rest of your working life, or like, maybe 10,000 times the the cost of a trip to Starbucks.

rcyn 12y ago

I think it was Saramago who said "Either we are blind or we are mad," sending people into space rather than fixing problems here. Humanity should face its mistakes.

UltraMagnus 12y ago

So, Musk is doing PR for the new Chris Nolan movie, now? I don't remember seeing it in the trailers for Interstellar, but did the rockets have the SpaceX logo on them? "to ensure humanity's future" This guy...unbelievable.

cyphunk 12y ago

How I read this: Man argues that because we cant get away from the competitive nature of the male dominance that pushes society into its gluttony for growth ("Get that GDP up!") we have no alternate but to find new sources to exploit for growth. While I admire Musk for his accomplishments this is no reason for us to follow his lead in ignoring the core of the problem. I'm all for absurdity masked as "vision" except when it distracts from serious problems. This is not really a critique of musk. His push for electric cars shows clearly he's both concerned as much with saving this environment as he is with leaving it. I'm just not sure great attention from the public to this idea of Mars inspires that same balance. Finally, to entertain the idea of a colony on Mars is pretty much tantamount acknowledging you're lineage is going to die off. You do notice he said 1 million people. So I ask the proponents, are you really worried about the survival of humanity or does this issue touch some other motives? Perhaps just the novelty of it. Perhaps the relief it gives you from not having to waste as many neurons on thinking about ecological complexity and the economic complexity it carries. In the same manner that Musk would say "fuck Earth" why can't we just say "fuck civilisation". I'm certain microbes and life on earth will continue onward long after we are gone.

cyphunk 12y ago
here is a better idea, develop self sufficient AI that will miss us enough when we all die out on earth that they will make sure the development of life here eventually produces new human friends a billion years later after earth heals from our mess. what do we call this?

msoad 12y ago

Elon Mask is really smart. He know how to keep his name in headlines all the time. This kind of arguments are nothing but tools for gaining more publicity

general_failure 12y ago
Totally. I am kind of surprised all this is generating so much discussion. Saying this is semi-meaningless given we don't have the needed technology. It's not even a nice vision. I don't know anyone how would want to live in Mars.

bayesianhorse 12y ago

The money/resources necessary to put one million people on Mars with a self-sustainable industrial base would be better spent trying to stave off disaster on our home world. It's easier, cheaper and faster to detect and deflect asteroids than building that colony... Not that building colonies in space wouldn't be a good idea for other reasons.

dxbydt 12y ago

I asked my wife "do you want to go to Mars?" She was in the other room with my noisy kid and she yelled back "No let's go in April" Took me a while to process that:) The comments here seem to have the same sort of disconnect from what Mr. Musk is actually proposing. One gentleman suggests the only thing that's holding him back is the lack of a suitable Martian school district. Forget Martian teachers, or even a single Martian school - he wants an entire Martian district of schools so he can A/B test his way to the best one for his kid. Well, more power to him! At this rate, forget Mars, going to Mountain View for the 90 day yc gig seems a formidable exploration - what are you going to do about the school district there?

Vadoff 12y ago

Or we could just limit people to having 2 kids, and most of our population/environmental problems are gone.

whiteshadow 12y ago

They say things like, “Nature is so wonderful; things are always better in the countryside where there are no people around.” They imply that humanity and civilisation are less good than their absence. But I’m not in that school,’ he said. ‘I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness, to make sure it continues into the future.’ Agreed that humanity can have a more positive impact of the world/universe, but this seemed to be a statement that humanity is above all things, including nature. Nature should be respected and we should have our boundaries. It is dangerous to think that human can play god, or have some kind of superior ownership of the universe.