James Lovelock: 'I Would Not Waste My Fortune on Colonizing Mars'

True. That's actually an interesting point.

But is there money to be made on Mars (that could not be made with robots)? Also, I suspect that the people who are currently being persecuted (e.g. Uyghurs in China) won't be in a position to leave Earth any time soon (e.g. in the next 100 years).

Still, even if both things end up happening, this is still not the same as having Mars as a plan B for Earth.

If a 100 km asteroid hit earth tomorrow, then all known intelligent life in the universe would cease to exist.

Why not allocate 0.00..001% of our resources to ensure that the only intelligent life we know of in the entire universe, has a life insurence.

I agree with your views. I think there's far more to gain, at many levels, from going to the moon and getting good at it. NASA's Artemis project is a bold and interesting proposal for our return to the moon (full disclosure, I might soon be neck-deep in a project connected to Artemis).

One thing people who are not exposed to the realities of aerospace don't understand is just how difficult and improbable this stuff can be.

As complex as it is, going to the ISS is child's play when compared to the moon and beyond. For one thing, the earth's magnetic field and atmosphere provide valuable protection in near space. Once you leave that protective blanket, as I like to say, everything out there is trying to kill you and drill holes into you at the speed of light.

I think we can, with effort and investment, achieve regular missions to the moon and slowly build-up our knowledge as well as a solid base of operations. In, perhaps, 25 years or more, we could consider launching into deeper space from the moon.

I just don't see the value of risking so much just to set foot on Mars. People are far more likely to die a horrible death due to our hubris than anything else. The risk would reduce substantially if we could prove we are capable of reliable and safe missions to the moon. There is no way I would want to send people to mars without first demonstrating exceptional capabilities and safety on the moon.

The rockets for long haul flight is still a goal of SpaceX's. They are pursuing that as a kind of secondary market (which would have a LOT more demand than Mars missions) for their Mars rocket. In fact, they're more serious about that now than ever.

Hyperloop is making progress. It wasn't a priority for Musk; he didn't start a Hyperloop company, but open-sourced the idea and let others run with it. Those companies have kind of petered out for the most part. He did also start a student competition for Hyperloop, which IS continuing. There's a mile-long prototype vacuum tube outside SpaceX's headquarters where students tested pods going hundreds of miles per hour for several years (including 2019). He is now having a 10 kilometer long tube (with a turn) built to continue the competition and test speeds comparable to the original concept. He did start The Boring Company to try to address one of the main problems with Hyperloop (the extreme cost of boring tunnels), and that IS making progress. They're on-track (heh) for completion of tunnels in May for a mass transit system using pods (but at atmospheric pressure) based on stretched Tesla vehicles that will serve the Las Vegas convention center. Currently has dug about 3000ft of the first tunnel which is to be a bit more than a mile long.

The cave bit was embarrassing to Musk, he made some gross mistakes, and while the submersible folk were definitely trying to help (like NASA had developed capsules to rescue trapped miners in past disasters), the feedback of crazy between Musk and the media was more a liability than a help. He lost a lot of credibility with the name-calling, even though I definitely think he had been trying to help.

Musk is chief engineer at SpaceX, so he does similar systems engineering work as you'd expect for someone in his position. If you talk to people who have worked with him, they will tell you he has a good understanding and a deep technical involvement in both companies (especially SpaceX). Although that's hardly unique. I think the main strength is pursuing goals that are both important and challenging and empowering his employees to execute quickly on these challenges (and part of the reason he can empower them to act quickly is because he has enough technology knowledge to make command decisions on key technical questions which otherwise could end up in "analysis by paralysis" or even worse, continuing down a technical dead end just due to organizational inertia).