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Musk just answered a question that said you can come back if you want to. "The spaceship is coming back anyway, you can get on if you want. Free"
And if the company goes belly-up while you're there?
Some of the comments here make me think of crabs in a pot pulling down the ones who try to climb out. Nobody's making you participate in this venture. If you don't like it, then you're free to go do whatever it is you do like. You might think Musk could better direct his efforts and resources elsewhere, but most other billionaires don't do anything all that interesting, they just invest their money in mundane stuff,…
You're my hero! This attitude is why I quit regularly contributing to this site. Any time any single person does something positive, some armchair "expert" comes out the woodworks to tell you how it won't work or can't work.
Watching live the announcement and presentation by Elon on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1YxNYiyALg Where the hell did they get this audience from? Is this hosted on a frat house with some academic invites? There's a dude jokingly saying that burning man felt like mars with a lot of shit and no water, there's a guy plugging his comic book, there's a guy making a joke on how we should send Michael Cera to Mars, a g…
Yeah, that aspect was cringeworthy. Lesson learned: if you're running a big event with Q&A, always always either restrict it to qualified people or vet the questions before they're asked. Don't allow a general audience to just form a line in front of a microphone. -- If you're an organizer hosting Elon Musk, the heads of the major national space agencies, and the leadership of all major aerospace companies, you don't…
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I just finished reading these books for what seems like the millionth time, and Mr. Musk hasn't even begun to answer the questions they raise. What is the legal structure going to be on the 1MM person colony? Who gets to go? What are the transplants allowed to do there? Who rules? Who do the rulers answer to? Are we going to Terraform Mars? If yes, under whose auspices and with what restrictions? FTR: this is Elon Mu…
> Who gets to go? According to Musk, whoever pays. > Who rules? Not to be flippant, but who cares? The worst case scenario is that we repeat British colonialism and the martians overthrow the despotic earth government in a few generations. Same as always, the colony is too far away for the motherland to effectively maintain control. The important thing is getting humans to Mars; all the short-term stuff is important,…
I'd really like to see us taking space seriously. While I'm still here. One of my earliest strong memories was the last moon landing. This was followed by years of "Tomorrow's World" and "Horizon" telling us about the Moon bases, Mars bases and orbital platforms that would soon follow. We got Skylab and some very interesting probes. I'm a tiny bit disappointed in that. We were meant to be en route to Starfleet Comman…
You can help make it happen. The Planetary society is actively lobbying Congress to increase funding for space research.
Some of the comments here make me think of crabs in a pot pulling down the ones who try to climb out. Nobody's making you participate in this venture. If you don't like it, then you're free to go do whatever it is you do like. You might think Musk could better direct his efforts and resources elsewhere, but most other billionaires don't do anything all that interesting, they just invest their money in mundane stuff,…
> So why are you upset with this one and not all those others? Because most others aren't constantly being worshipped by people on HN and the like. Musk worship was the reason I stopped bothering with the technology subreddit.
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I just finished reading these books for what seems like the millionth time, and Mr. Musk hasn't even begun to answer the questions they raise. What is the legal structure going to be on the 1MM person colony? Who gets to go? What are the transplants allowed to do there? Who rules? Who do the rulers answer to? Are we going to Terraform Mars? If yes, under whose auspices and with what restrictions? FTR: this is Elon Mu…
> I just finished reading these books for what seems like the millionth time, and Mr. Musk hasn't even begun to answer the questions they raise. What is the legal structure going to be on the 1MM person colony? Who gets to go? What are the transplants allowed to do there? Who rules? Who do the rulers answer to? Are we going to Terraform Mars? If yes, under whose auspices and with what restrictions? Musk has basically…
I don't think you get to control all transport to an isolated colony and disclaim all responsibility for the social cohesion of said colony.
Some of the comments here make me think of crabs in a pot pulling down the ones who try to climb out. Nobody's making you participate in this venture. If you don't like it, then you're free to go do whatever it is you do like. You might think Musk could better direct his efforts and resources elsewhere, but most other billionaires don't do anything all that interesting, they just invest their money in mundane stuff,…
I'm not saying it applies to all those commenting negatively, but one commonly held philosophy amongst some of my geek friends is this logic:
"the world is terrible and people are terrible" -> "there's no point trying to improve things" -> "I don't need to improve things"
It's essentially an argument that allows people to live a defeatist (selfish?) life without feeling guilty.
Anyone who stands up and says "we can make things better and I'm going to do it!" is an immediate threat to this philosophical position. If Elon Musk can make the world(s) a better place, then it's much harder for me to maintain that all humans are selfish and evil, and it's harder to justify living a selfish and cynical existence. Hey, maybe I'm wrong about things, maybe I need to mature and learn about the world, which means the stance I've held all my life is incorrect and that is a scary thing to contemplate. It takes great self-awareness to move beyond that position.
I don't know why these thoughts correlate with being a programmer. Perhaps it's somewhat related to seeing things in a very black and white manner: things are good or bad. Elon Musk is a hero or a charlatan or he can't achieve what he says he will and he will fail and therefore it's pointless.
Here's an example I came across recently: "people are individually smart and collectively stupid, therefore we are doomed wrt politics and climate change." But the mature, adult, response is to ask "how can we help people better make collective decisions?"
Overall, this thinking comes across as childlike, failing to appreciate the subtleties in how progress is made, and the reality that nothing is all good or all bad, all failure or all success.
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Some possible reasons; Mars has a c02 atmosphere, water ice, it has a ~24 hour day as opposed to the moons 28 day-day, Earth and Mars have similar sizes.
Dumb question: it can't be coincidence that our days are almost identical in length. Why are they?
We can try to explain solar system formation through mathematical models and simulation (Phobos and Deimos would be clues) but we can't go back in time and find the real explanation. No law of physics mandates that Mars' rotational period should be similar in magnitude to Earth's.