891–900 of 1001 posts
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Once you get there, what do you do? Just go back?
I assume different people do different things... Tourism would be an obvious sustainable Moon industry. That does fit your description :)
SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qo78R_yYFA
Why do they launch the passengers first? Passengers eat and shit and breathe while they wait. They're also liable to be more upset if their mission is aborted, due to a failed tanker launch, while they're in orbit.
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"No ground in reality"? Sure, the plan is extremely ambitious. But it relies on no fundamentally new technology and comes from someone with a proven track record in the field. They're talking at almost seven years before the first Mars launch with this system. I'll remind you that seven years before Apollo 11, this was the state of the art for American spaceflight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_LV-3B Further, M…
The technology to put people on Mars is not fundamentally new. The technology to make such a colony self sustaining is. We've never built any habitat which is entirely self sufficient even just in food, water, and air. Even the ISS needs resupply to generate breathable air. Even simple problems like "how do we replace failed bolts" will require resupply from earth for a long time. I'm also dubious of the economics of…
SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qo78R_yYFA
Why do they launch the passengers first? Passengers eat and shit and breathe while they wait. They're also liable to be more upset if their mission is aborted, due to a failed tanker launch, while they're in orbit.
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…
Same place that made a reality show from the election of one of the most powerful political positions on the planet.
The 21st century.
It's comedy night at the time traveller's agency.
I created an account just to post this. The Q&A was the worst Q&A I have ever seen. Truly awful. I usually am a pretty calm person but watching that made my blood boil. This venture could well be one of the most important things to happen to humanity, and those were the questions that people asked. The questions were awful at all levels. Featured self promotion, ignorance and plain stupidity. I just needed to get thi…
Absolutely. I was watching it live and couldn't believe how bad that Q&A section was. Felt bad for Musk standing there, having to somehow respond politely to all that stupidity.
> Send Michael Sera to mars because we don't want him back >> Elon talks about the importance of offering return trips
> Where do we put the shit on mars with no water >> Elon talks about how the critical shortage is power, not water.
> Are you thinking about interstellar travel >> Creating a colony on mars creates the incentives to spur us to create the dramatic improvements in space travel that will one day give rise to interplanetary travel
While I understand the frustration, including the general public in this discussion in critical to build the support and good will needed for this project to succeed. We need more people to be willing to address questions like this.
The only time I felt bad for Musk was when that girl asked him if she could take him upstairs and give him a kiss. He mumbled something like "I don't have that here" and moved on.
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> failing to appreciate the subtleties in how progress is made What are these subtleties? Why is it better to invest energy into space instead of sustainability? It's just heartbreaking that we can't remotely get as excited about sustainability as we can about romantic memes of curiosity and history books. Is the 'subtlety' that we just got to accept this as a fact about human nature and hope for sustainability as a…
There seems to be plenty of excitement when big announcements are made for things like solar power, nuclear energy, energy storage, non-hydrocarbon transportation, and other such things. Lots of work is going into those things already, a big chunk of it being done by the same guy pushing Mars here.
Paraphrasing: "I see two paths for the human species, extinction event or multi-planetary species." Then Elon shows the picture of the O2 tank: "and this is the size of the payload we could deliver to anywhere on Earth in 45 minutes, please fund us." Well played Musk, well played.
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Oh it's progress, no doubt. There's no question about that. What me and other skeptics argue against is these kinds of overly futuristic announcements that have no ground in reality, yet have people praising them like they are some kind of achievement by themselves. Elon Musk grandly announces: I'm going to make humans an interplanetary species. This is such a grand and far reaching goal that were it to be achieved i…
Re: hyperloop: I think he specifically said he didn't have the time/energy/money/focus necessary to work on an implementation. Musk is a visionary, and I think we need people like that. He said of Tesla and SpaceX that he went in with a fatalistic view: that there was a 10% chance of success. In his talk yesterday, he repeated a phrase he used before, about moving the ball forward as far as he can. So I'm an Elon Mus…
Yeah, he did make that claim. I think the specific claim was meant to ONLY cover getting the initial transportation system running, not the cost of setting up an initial colony there. He is focused on the transportation problem and wants other people to figure out how to support human life there.
I was also particularly impressed by the assertion that they would start sending some vehicle in every transit window to mars. Regular cargo flights to mars will be crucial to getting started on the science required to support the initial colony.
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Agree, I wrote a medium article about exactly this phenomenon partly inspired by you: https://medium.com/@Jernfrost/the-crab-people-and-space-expl... I've been annoyed by this attitude for quite some time now. You see it all the time. Same deal with Tesla an Model S. Because not everybody can afford it, and because not all power is renewable an electric car like Tesla Model S seems like some sort of terrible crime. W…
Oh it's progress, no doubt. There's no question about that. What me and other skeptics argue against is these kinds of overly futuristic announcements that have no ground in reality, yet have people praising them like they are some kind of achievement by themselves. Elon Musk grandly announces: I'm going to make humans an interplanetary species. This is such a grand and far reaching goal that were it to be achieved i…
I think you and Musk probably have pretty similar views on his chances for success. He mentions that this is precisely why he likes the name "Heart of Gold" for the first one of these ships he sends to Mars: It is extremely improbable and the Heart of Gold ran on an improbability drive.
edit: typo