241–250 of 330 posts
He’s stuck in the past. In the timeframe of Mars colonization, “human” consciousness (really the successor to it) will be hosted in different body plans that will thrive on Mars.
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Life on Earth didn't leave the ocean and ventured onto land because the ocean became uninhabitable. It was still a good idea. Expanding beyond Earth is something we must do eventually. If we can do it now, why wait? We risk that we are unable to do it later.
Life expanded because there were resources and opportunities on land. Plants grew there because there were no predators and then some animals managed to go eat them and benefited because there was little competition, I don't see a real analog there for Mars. [0] I think an actual Mars colony is centuries out just due to the amount of things left to invent to make it viable. We still haven't really even retried a clos…
More importantly, there just isn’t enough reason to bother doing it aside from satisfying the Edmund Hillary “because it’s there” urge.
If you want more space to live, you’d be better off investing in women’s health and education so long run population trends can go down here in Earth.
If you want natural resources, you’d be better off figuring out how to mine asteroids so you don’t need to contend with overcoming a planetary gravity well to get them home.
If you want to push the envelope with terraforming, you’d be better off focusing on ambitious plans for carbon sequestration on Earth.
If you want to engineer us out of the “all our eggs in one planetary basket” problem, you probably want to first build permanent stations in outer space that are as self-sustaining as possible since those technologies will be foundational for both a Mars colony AND for building generation ships.
Basically, there are much more useful and generalizable technologies you can throw money at than a pointless Mars colony. I don’t get the obsession with that over everything else.
Perhaps it might have been possible in some long distant past to underestimate Elon Musk and write him off as a crazy person. That time is gone. If Musk appears to be doing something crazy you've not understood it. > It’s crazy, completely crazy. Elon Musk has read too much science fiction. He got carried away with it. If I were in his position, I would not waste my fortune on colonizing Mars. And all they would lear…
I'm gonna take the risk of being extremely unpopular and I'll say that Musk is completely overrated. I think he's nowhere near the level of people that we usually think of as geniuses. In certain ways he's good at marketing and hyping things up, but a lot of his ideas, especially the Mars one, are nonsensical. Just try to think about this: how bad do the conditions on Earth have to get before it makes sense to try to…
It’s amazing to me that people don’t see the parallels, the silver spoon childhood under a ruthless father breeding an unbounded narcissism and entitlement that must be fed with marketing spectacles, social media battles, and young women.
I guess people love them both because it’s all so quintessentially American.
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> So the more nonsensical he makes it sound, the greater the return when it actually happens. I agree, but this is true only when things actually happen. How about his idea of using rockets instead of planes for long haul flight ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LENvGRsr7Q )? Or how about the hyperloop - any real progress on that? Or his idea of a submersible to save those kids trapped in a cave - was it good that h…
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 ha…
If at least the hyperloop project manages to get off the ground (pun sort of intended) that would still be a nice contribution to human progress.
I'm not at all sure about the long-haul rockets though. I think having rockets near population centers is extremely dangerous to begin with.
Secondly, I'm not sure the cost-benefit ratio makes sense. Transport aboard a rocket must be extremely expensive, but if you take the trip to/from the rocket-port into account the door-to-door time won't be spectacularly shorter than it is now.
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It's kind of sad that you consider land being left in it's natural state as a waste. We have more then enough land for crops and everything else, we can just let some of it exist.
Not all of the federal lands are national parks. I'm not advocating for their dissolval. Only talking about the parts that are literally barren. You could e.g. put solar farms there that generate H2 or methane and fix the renewable energy problem. If you check the satellite photographs, so many parts of earth are yellow. I want them to be green and teeming with life, just like the other parts.
Perhaps it might have been possible in some long distant past to underestimate Elon Musk and write him off as a crazy person. That time is gone. If Musk appears to be doing something crazy you've not understood it. > It’s crazy, completely crazy. Elon Musk has read too much science fiction. He got carried away with it. If I were in his position, I would not waste my fortune on colonizing Mars. And all they would lear…
I'm gonna take the risk of being extremely unpopular and I'll say that Musk is completely overrated. I think he's nowhere near the level of people that we usually think of as geniuses. In certain ways he's good at marketing and hyping things up, but a lot of his ideas, especially the Mars one, are nonsensical. Just try to think about this: how bad do the conditions on Earth have to get before it makes sense to try to…
I agree Elon is backed by incredibly smart and possibly overworked people and that contributes to his own reputation undeservedly, but he’s driven a company that has made more space progress than most of humanity. Let’s give him some credit on that front and let him spill his own cash on the crazy ideas at least. “Completely overrated” is a bit too far.
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I agree, earth orbit is great for deploying tech that helps us on the surface. The moon may prove useful if there's something of sufficient value to bring back. Mars is pure 'human endeavour', putting it kindly. Some individuals with large egos and wallets are pursuing it just because they can. Any sense in which Mars could be 'colonised' is indeed fantasy unless we are talking over a hundreds-to-thousands-of-years t…
> the military would be the first to occupy What's your reasoning here? The purpose of the military is to defend valuables from others. Deploying military to Mars is as likely as deploying military to the Antarctic. Scientists will be the first and probably last to occupy. Difficult to imagine it will ever expand much beyond research missions. The Antarctic environment is far less harsh than Mars and no-one maintains…
That's completely incorrect. While a lot of the workers in the Antarctic program (I wintered over in 2016 as a station Network Engineer) go on to work at NASA, because of environmental similarities to space/Mars/etc, many countries maintain permanent research stations in Antarctica. The personnel switch out every season, but the bases are permanent.
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Not only that, but the cynic in my says... what SHOULD you be spending your billions on? Carefully grabbing more billions and political influence/power so you can have more influence/power? Or, you know, try to make humanity better?
It gets more clear when you steel-man the "make humanity better" on earth and find out that the powers-that-be will fight you if you try to objectively make life better for the billions here because you will need to disrupt various power structures to do so. Mars is an aspirational, asymptotic ideal that could get more people in space/lunar and possibly also prove to be wildly profitable in some applications - while…
According to Hans Rosling the world has already changed dramatically for the better, you just didn't notice.
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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 ha…
Thanks for the comprehensive reply :D If at least the hyperloop project manages to get off the ground (pun sort of intended) that would still be a nice contribution to human progress. I'm not at all sure about the long-haul rockets though. I think having rockets near population centers is extremely dangerous to begin with. Secondly, I'm not sure the cost-benefit ratio makes sense. Transport aboard a rocket must be ex…
But SpaceX intends to pursue fully and rapidly reusable rockets, which at least theoretically have the possibility of solving that problem by lowering launch prices by orders of magnitude, allowing greater improvement in reliability by returning the vehicles, and increasing the flight rates enough that you can prove out safety. I'm thinking probably a history of thousands or even tens of thousands of launches are necessary before the first point-to-point crewed launches (for specialized purposes, emergencies, charters) are feasible with reasonable safety, and maybe 100,000 or even a million launches before mass transit usage. Here's an article where a SpaceX representative addresses your exact point, i.e. safety of in-land launches of Starship and how many launches may be necessary to get to that point: https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-one-million-starship-...
As far as door-to-door time, IMO, you would need to use like a seaplane or maybe an electric VTOL vehicle (or, heh, a Hyperloop) to get to the launch pad quick enough for the trip to be worth it.
As far as energy usage, such long-haul rocket flights may be roughly comparable to Concorde flights by my calculation (if they fill the vehicle up with high capacity seating... which may be a challenge if the tickets are business class prices), and the fuel is planned to eventually be made with the same carbon-neutral solar-to-gas technology (electrolysis of water, then the Sabatier Reaction) that is required for Starship on Mars (which, of course, has no natural gas deposits or free oxygen).
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I'm gonna take the risk of being extremely unpopular and I'll say that Musk is completely overrated. I think he's nowhere near the level of people that we usually think of as geniuses. In certain ways he's good at marketing and hyping things up, but a lot of his ideas, especially the Mars one, are nonsensical. Just try to think about this: how bad do the conditions on Earth have to get before it makes sense to try to…
The nonsensical ideas can sometimes be iterated on until they are sensical. Not every idea has to be perfect upon conception. I agree Elon is backed by incredibly smart and possibly overworked people and that contributes to his own reputation undeservedly, but he’s driven a company that has made more space progress than most of humanity. Let’s give him some credit on that front and let him spill his own cash on the c…
Benefiting from open-sourced research that was publicly funded (https://www.inverse.com/article/15272-nasa-releases-rocket-a...) probably also helped a little :))
Also don't forget that the US federal government is an important SpaceX client.