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Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

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Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#901

Post by varjag »

hacker42 wrote: post #897
mikeash wrote: post #877

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am not seeing it. People are following the super stimuli of rockets, history etc. while further contributing to pollution and resource depletion. We need a culture that is satisfied with much less, one that overcomes the tragedy of the commons. Tesla might contribute a bit in that regard, but SpaceX is outright opposed to it. If you want to convince people of the future, there are more effective and reliable ways o…

Cryonics requires constant power to the fridges for years, its carbon footprint is terrible.

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#902

Post by XorNot »

gravypod wrote: post #889
mikeash wrote: post #148

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 going to go one step further. If there is any private space exploration company who ever needs a programmer/engineer for long-term in-space missions, I'll do it. I doubt that you would find any candidates but I'd like to volunteer anyway. I don't think I can do anything as valuable to humanity here on earth as I can by even helping space missions. Even if there is a 50% chance some system fails and I'll die in sp…

Augmented reality for spacecraft operations is probably one of the more immediately likely things for us to do. Filling those things with as many location sensors as possible so you can get context information of what's around you at all times would be a big important help, especially with how space messes with a lot of our normal 3D visual cues.

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#903

Post by shkkmo »

dudus wrote: post #277

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…

Honestly? Get over it. This sort of attitude smacks of elitism. You probably would have had a bunch of more technically interesting questions to ask.

However, Musk knows that in order for his vision to succeed, he needs support and engagement from more than just rocket scientists. He needs the engagement of the kind of people who ask these sorts of questions. He needs the interest of people who see something (of self interest) to gain from being associated with this project.

I'm really glad that Musk did a good job of taking some of the lower brow questions and turning them into informative and interesting answers.

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#904

Post by XorNot »

dreamling wrote: post #566
sAuronas wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I hear him talk about Mars (placing it before curing cancer), I think "if only he had grown up wanting to eradicate poverty." Still...rather than think ill of his idea - and work - we should celebrate his innovation and the way he will inspire others. As I thought about how he is perfecting rocket technology, I wandered off on a tangential rocket technology (thought) that would tract nuclear rockets launch…

how many things were invented as byproducts of the space race? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies

This is also a thing I think we don't explain very well, because a frequent response is "oh those things would've been invented anyway" (with the implication they would've been invented more cheaply).

Which is not how it works.

The cost of the actual raw materials to build almost anything is a tiny tiny tiny 1% fraction of the cost of what the thing actually costs to build. Rocket fuel, titanium etc. are all cheap compared to the cost of actual rockets. So the question of course is, where does all that extra money though? And the answer of course is: into people, process and technology.

The cost of rocketry, or particle accelerators or fundamental science, is correctly viewed as a massive sponsorship and investment into people and tools to improve how they do something so they can do it better.

And that is why "spin-off technology" actually happens in the first place - because large projects mean that we have now skilled up, tooled up and improved the capability of vast numbers of people, companies and fields of trade - which is what makes new innovations possible, or changes the market dynamics so things become economical and then profitable.

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#905

Post by XorNot »

fsloth wrote: post #375
pharrington wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alot of people react negatively to overt emotional manipulation. Musk's live stream is called "Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species." The only actual information in his talk was about the new line of rockets he's building. Transportation is certainly Musk's specialty, but with the information given combined with what we already know about the man's companies, he cannot even begin to address the scope of the opening…

Having a sustainable transport scheme is a necessity in moving to Mars. I don't think anyone is naive enough to think that in practice transport is the hardest problem. But it's psychologically important - without transport there is nowhere to go. Either we become multiplanetary or not - I don't know - but if we become multiplanetary then transport is a necessary step. Building the transport scheme from economically…

Well also, once the cost gets low enough, a lot of other space ventures suddenly go from impossible to practical.

Sending multiple tons of robotic drilling equipment to Europa to look for life under the ice for example...

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#906

Post by gauto »

craigds wrote: post #808
gauto wrote: post #531

It's really starting to feel like we "live in the future" more and more everyday. The stuff we used to dream about as kids is becoming reality. Amid all the doom and gloom that seems to pervade the news cycle, stories like this are so refreshing. Simply amazing. It seems like in the longer term, it would be more efficient to take a shuttle to orbit, and then dock with at a space station to get on the interplanetary s…

What's a WESTPAC? Googling it only finds the Australian bank for the first three pages.

Yeah, that wasn't clear at all. I should have just said "deployment on Navy ship".

If you are curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expeditionary_Strike_Group https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_expeditionary_unit#The_...

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#907

Post by XorNot »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #245
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's actually not a bad way to put it! Think about it this way. What if there was an uninhabited island out in the Pacific that was hard to get to. What makes it worth trying to get to? There isn't anything any more special there than here. In fact from all we've seen so far it's much less special. Same goes for Mars. What is the value in being "multi-planetary?" I mean the idea that this is a hedge against some ex…

Equating Mars to "an uninhabited island in the Pacific" is disingenuous at least. Mars is the largest unexplored area of land potentially available to humans since we left Africa. Ditto for saying we haven't seen anything special out there, considering that we've barely even started looking (and every time someone proposes looking, a whole bunch of boring people show up to go, "why bother?"). A massive ELE asteroid i…

I'm also a big believer in the general effects that zeitgeist has on societal development (and think everyone should be: advertising, democracy and raising awareness of issues is all about manipulating it).

Recontextualizing 21st century issues is key to us actually solving them, but that means we do in fact need to do things which has emotional impact on large populations. The moon-landings captured the imagination of, conservatively, half the planet, if only briefly. Mars-landings are likely to be similar. And an ongoing Martian colonization would be another one.

A Martian colonization effort is kind of interesting in this regard: because once you send enough people (and ideally, bring enough of them back as well) then 6 degrees of separation starts to take hold if they're distributed within the population. Start building up the quorum of people who've been, have gone, are there now and suddenly that context is leaking back into your general population. People know people who know a returned Martian colonizer. Projects and processes are compared to "this works on Mars, it'll work here" in the same way that everyone on this site who doesn't work at Google probably has said something like "well Google do ...".

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#908

Post by jandrese »

k__ wrote: post #849

Cost of a medium sized house? I see Red Faction happening here.

For what it is worth, his costs look outrageously low to me. We don't even know what we don't know on building manned interplanetary reusable spacecraft and making indefinite term extra-planetary habitats.

Musk's promises that they'll travel in comfort sounds too close to what the Jamestown colony residents were promised. Life on Mars is going to be a hardscrabble existence where you have to solve problems that you don't have on Earth. Probably a mostly subterranean existence.

Musk's video seemed to imply that people would terraform Mars, but we aren't even close to attempting that yet. We can't even keep the atmosphere of Earth in balance. Elon Musk's biggest problem may be that he was born 100 years too early.

Re: Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]

#909

Post by oli5679 »

Why is the plan to start off with so many fragile, resource-greedy people before the planet is improved? Wouldn't it be better to send a robot factory capable of building more robot factories using materials available on Mars and minimal operating oversight (possibly combined with some plants and bacteria)? People could possibly move there much later after we've mastered the really complicated mining, geoengineering and farming problems needed to sustain people there.
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