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 learn is how awful it is up there: You can't breathe the air, the pressure of the atmosphere is a tiny fraction of what we have on Mount Everest.
Instead of straw manning Musk and implying he doesn't know about the composition of Mar's atmosphere, try steel manning him and trying to figure out what he's doing.
Musk has captured the imagination of financiers, engineers and the public and gotten them all pulling in the same direction - into space. Musk is marketing, that's his core skill. Mars is the sales pitch that drives SpaceX.
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 move to a planet that is essentially uninhabitable? Where even in the best scenarios we would live really harsh lives after a long and dangerous voyage.
Musk's skill is not pure genius. He's relatively smart, but nothing Earth-shattering. And he's also not particularly good at marketing... What he's good at is executing on ideas that people think are absolutely crazy.
And he leans into the craziness a bit beforehand by choosing to describe stuff in a way that sounds a bit unbelievable ("hoverslam onto a droneship" = land under constant deceleration on a barge with station-keeping thrusters... "bioweapon defense mode" = good air filters, "autopilot" = good lane-keeping like an airplane's autopilot), drawing scoffs from a lot of intelligent, serious people. ...which pays off in spades when the thing succeeds. So maybe that's a bit of marketing instinct, but not in the traditional sense.
So the more nonsensical he makes it sound, the greater the return when it actually happens.
> 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 he hyped that up? Remember when he started calling people pedophiles without proof?
I'm also curious if you have more details on his technical contributions to Tesla and SpaceX. Do you know to what extent he's actually involved in the work (design, engineering etc.)?
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).
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.
Transport aboard rockets could be about the same price as a business class airline ticket over extremely long distances. But you're right about the safety issue. Rockets are just slightly better than Russian Roulette right now (about 98-99% reliable for the good ones). Part of the issue is the low margins, but also the munitions background of many rockets... and the EXTREMELY high costs of expendable rockets, which means flight rates must be low and you can't get the hardware back for inspection.
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).
I think point-to-point launches with people could be happening much quicker than 100,000 launches. He already has a billionaire paying for a moon flyby. Maybe launch 25?
People were signing up to pay $200,000k to go into space on spaceship two. People will pay even more to go on an orbital flight. You can keep up the demand by decreasing the price for quite awhile, I would imagine. Unless the FAA gets in the way and just bans people from flying. Hopefully they won't as it would be purely voluntary and probably way less risky than wing-suit flying.
Sure, but there's a very different barrier between joy rides where they make extremely sure you know the high risk of death (and also your heirs, so they can't sue) and regular, regulated mass transit passenger flights from one spot on the Earth to the other.
I don't doubt that crewed launches will happen before 100,000. But keep in mind that Starship 1) is supposed to be super cheap to fly with fast turnaround, so you can afford a bunch of test flights and 2) will be used for launching a bunch of stuff into orbit already. Falcon 9 will have nearly 100 launches before it launches Dragon Crew, and that one has a launch abort system. 3) Starship has no full abort system like Dragon, so you're going to have to rely on flight history.
Flying people on charter flights may be feasible earlier, as the risk tolerance for general aviation is MUCH higher.
Base jumping has a fatality rate of about 1 in 1000, so to get risk down to 1 in 1000, you're going to need around 500-1000 consecutive successful launches (OR a lot of incredibly expensive mission assurance engineering... honestly might be cheaper just to do hundreds of test launches!). Regular skydiving is MUCH safer at 1 fatality in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000.
I expect the lunar flyby will require a good 25 to 100 consecutive successful launches beforehand. Starlink is supposed to have up to 40,000 satellites eventually. Starship can do about 400 at a time, so that's 100 launches right there. (There's some confusion, there... some say the permit is actually for 12,000 satellites. But Starship is still expected to do a bunch of regular commercial launches, say about 15-20 flights per year in addition to Starlink).
Driving and general aviation (private planes) are much less safe per mile than general aviation. If a Starship flight is 10,000 miles, to be as safe as driving a car, it only needs to get to 1 fatality in 10,000. To get as safe as a private jet (which the rich and famous seem to have no problems using), it's about 1 fatality in 10,000 to 50,000.
If we just have to be as safe as taking a motorcycle for 10,000 miles, that's just 1 in 500, which is pretty doable for Starship.
> 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 don’t agree. We already have maglev, is hyperloop going to be cheaper to build/operate? If not, why would the marginal speed increase prompt governments to invest in this kind of infrastructure vs. traditional rail or maglev? The problem is not that hyperloop won’t work, it’s that it is another gadgetbahn[1] that doesn’t make economic sense in a political climate where infrastructure investment is verboten.
Hyperloop is supposed to be significantly cheaper to build and operate due to reduced diameter, reduced impact on environment from noise (really fast maglev and high speed rail can be an acoustics problem, particularly near tunnel orifices), and increased efficiency particularly at the high end (energy consumption per kilometer at high speeds is proportional to speed squared, and as you approach transonic speeds, it gets worse, so pumping almost all the air out can help dramatically... neglecting air friction, and depending on the exact technology, maglev itself is can actually be MORE efficient per ton-mile at high speeds than low).
Hyperloop's infrastructure cost is hopefully being solved by The Boring Company (although if they make more than incremental progress in tunneling efficiency, all sorts of tunnel projects in the US--which has particularly bad tunnel infrastructure costs--should improve). Also, if Hyperloop succeeds, it might help loosen the political restraints.
Personally, I think The Boring Company is more likely to be successful than Hyperloop itself. There's a lot of really hairy engineering required for super high speeds. BUT the Hyperloop student competition's 10km track could push the state of the art in rail speed, and that may have interesting consequences.
The SpaceX landing pads at Cape Canaveral are 10 miles from populated areas and 50 miles from the large city of Orlando. So we are already landing them near population centers.
With fully reusable rockets, one gets to the point where they are better than airplanes because you can use them more (10 flights per day from Sydney to New York and back instead of the 1/2 round trip per day you currently get with airplanes). They cost similar amounts to build, but can make much more revenue/time. Also for long trips (1/2 way around the world) the fuel used/passenger will also be similar.
This is of course future tech, but could be coming in the next few years. Elon Musk say first orbital tests coming this year.
Hyperloop was an idea he came up with at an interview and immediately pointed out that it wasn’t his intention to pursue it any further.
As fo the Earth-to-Earth Rocket plan, that’s based on Starship which is in development, and you can follow along live in the SpaceX subreddit.
As for calling people pedophiles, I am sure you have said equally terrible things about people who have insulted you or dismissed your work as useless.
> And he leans into the craziness a bit beforehand by choosing to describe stuff in a way that sounds a bit unbelievable
He did was able to build a car company and a rocket company. Sure you found example that are less crazy than what he said, but you forget the actual crazy stuff he did.
> Just try to think about this: how bad do the conditions on Earth have to get before it makes sense to try to move to a planet that is essentially uninhabitable? Where even in the best scenarios we would live really harsh lives after a long and dangerous voyage.
I agree, any scenario where people are able to survive long term on Mars the same techniques should work on Earth given enough resources dedicated to implementing them. The main reason surviving Mars might be easier than a ravaged Earth is just the number of people, it'll be much harder on Earth because even if one particular country manages to setup something they'll be in competition with every other country for the resources to do it and the scale required will be bigger because of the number of people it would have to support.
There is one other reason to colonize Mars that isn't 'running away from a burning planet' and that's just as a kind of civilization backup against crazy civilization ending events (super-bug, meteor strike, complete climate collapse, etc.), note none of these need to completely wipe out human life to want an 'independent backup' civilization. Modern life can seem pretty fragile when you think about the long supply chains from raw material to finished product and the intricate machines/techniques that go into even relatively simple products.
I think it's the kind of thinking that partially comes from exposure to a lot of scifi and also the fact that very few things threaten billionaires beyond death (which I'm a little surprised more aren't pouring money into senescence research) and the break down of modern life. They're pretty secure against most everything else.
It is not that he is a one-in-a-billion kind of genius, no.
He is probably in the 99.99th percentile of engineers, but that still means there's many many thousands of engineers as smart as he is. However, he is also in the 99th percentile for marketing, 99.9th percentile in leadership, 99th percentile of celebrity, etc.
No, he is not special on any single dimension, but it is extremely rare to find this distribution, which is what he actually is and all these dimensions were used to make his companies successful.
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 crazy ideas at least. “Completely overrated” is a bit too far.
I read the article, the patent release was 2016. Yes, its probably going to be helpful to Musk going forward but the company wasn't built on these patents by any stretch of the imagination. By 2016 SpaceX were already landing boosters.
And yes, Nasa (and the DOD) are probably the most important customers of SpaceX... So? Its not like SpaceX are getting free money there. They are providing a service to the government, and getting paid for it - And providing that service at a lower cost than the government would bear if they did it themselves, and a lower cost than their competitors (I'm looking at Boeing - They are getting paid 60% more than SpaceX per seat for commercial crew flights to the ISS)
Also look into the Raptor engine SpaceX have developed. Its a key plank for their future mars ambitions. Its the most advanced rocket engine ever developed and SpaceX funded its development themselves.
>Just try to think about this: how bad do the conditions on Earth have to get before it makes sense to try to move to a planet that is essentially uninhabitable? Where even in the best scenarios we would live really harsh lives after a long and dangerous voyage.
The point of colonizing Mars (for Musk) is not to move there when Earth becomes inhabitable. It's too remove the single point of failure for the species that Earth currently represents.
With a self-sustainable (even if harsh) Mars colony, a nuclear war on Earth no longer necessarily means the end of humanity.
> With a self-sustainable (even if harsh) Mars colony
How realistic is this self-sustainability? Where any moderately complex spare parts can be produced on Mars, instead of having to be supplied from Earth with yet another ultra-expensive supplies mission?
Imho we are talking hundreds of years here. Until then our burning home base Earth remains a single point of failure. Better douse the fire first.
Until then putting some people on Mars as a symbolic gesture to show humanity is still capable of grand achievements may be fine, esp. if that gives us hope we can tackle our other more immediate problems (though for me that is not needed).
So we are already hundreds of years late, aren't we? Let's start right now to make this happen.
> Better douse the fire first.
Here we are again... the good old, well there's something else wrong, lets just fix that other thing wrong and ignore everything else.
Why not working on both? What stop us from working on both? I would be happy to be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that you could do more to "douse the fire". We sadly can't stop doing 100% of what we do to fix everything.
Relying on spare parts from Earth for anything important is impossible, since it takes months to years for a one-way trip depending on where in their orbits the two planets are.
I'm just speculating now, but I think this might be one reason Musk is so interested in robotic manufacturing (e.g. the failed "alien dreadnought" vision for the Model 3 production line). If you have mostly automated, flexible manufacturing systems that can be computer controlled and require minimal human expertise to operate then all you need is the computer files for whatever spare part you need to build. Set up 3-4 of these manufacturing centers at different spots for redundancy and you don't have to worry so much about spare part availability.
The first effort (Model 3 assembly) was a disaster though.
> "With a self-sustainable (even if harsh) Mars colony, a nuclear war on Earth no longer necessarily means the end of humanity."
At least in terms of radiation, living on Mars seems less likely to be survivable than a nuclear war on Earth since fallout decays away but the space-based radiation bathing Mars is moderately high and permanent. See: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/death-on...
> The point of colonizing Mars (for Musk) is not to move there when Earth becomes inhabitable. It's too remove the single point of failure for the species that Earth currently represents.
Fair point. However it's sad to think that as a species we're so petty and narrow-minded that we need a backup in case we fuck this planet up ourselves. Maybe I'm too harsh, but I almost feel that we don't even deserve a backup if we can't avoid a nuclear holocaust or environmental collapse here on Earth.
The backup is not necessarily against a man-made catastrophe. A stray asteroid in the right place at the wrong time is perfectly capable of fucking up Earth without our assistance.
Surviving even a Cretaceous–Tertiary sized extinction event on Earth would be a hell of a lot easier than trying to terraform and permanently colonize a planet like Mars that is missing its magnetic shield.
In a Lagrange point it's actually quite trivial to create a man made magnetic field to protect the planet. Dr Jim Green, director of planetary science at NASA worked on it and fleshed out the details, it's viable and would actually restore a lot of the atmosphere stripped away constantly. As far as colonisation problems go the magnetic field is far down the list. There's a lot of work being done in this field.
>>Just try to think about this: how bad do the conditions on Earth have to get before it makes sense to try to move to a planet that is essentially uninhabitable?
Your question is premature because you're comparing the Earth of today to the Mars of today.
The short-term goal (short in the grand scheme of things, that is) is to build a colony on Mars that can satisfy the first level of Maslow's hierarchy: air, food, water, shelter. After that, moving to Mars will be a much more attractive prospect to a non-negligible number of people.
> The short-term goal (short in the grand scheme of things, that is)
What is the timescale you have in mind? Hundreds, thousands of years? If this is the case, it makes more sense focusing on keeping Earth livable.
I think Kim Stanley Robinson had a nice take on this in "Aurora" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(novel)). Without giving too much away, one of the core ideas of the novel is that there really is no place like home.
> After that, moving to Mars will be a much more attractive prospect to a non-negligible number of people.
Hmm, what makes you think that? Again, how bad should Earth get before living in a place where you can't go outside is a better option?
It is just a novel. His ideas on ecosystems are as much science fiction as traveling to other solar systems. Not scientific truth. We really will have to try living on other planets before we know how it works.
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 closed circuit environment here on Earth where it's easier to ship in base requirements like additional nitrogen. [1]
[0] Beyond that I'm increasingly skeptical of any attempts to draw parallels or inferences from evolution about humans today because so much like evo-psych turns into unfounded garbage. Once a species gets to the point it can manipulate it's own environment and mortality evolution gets shaky as a framework.
[1] Simpler atomic components and resources could be mined on Mars where they couldn't in space so I'm allowing for some basic supplements extracted on Mars.
> I think an actual Mars colony is centuries out just due to the amount of things left to invent to make it viable.
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.
Mars does have some benefits as the main living space over a space station at least. Gravity is gratis for one which really helps with long term health and we don't have to completely redesign our current technology to work if there's gravity where we will in space. And yes the resources for Earth are better found in the asteroid belt but it would probably be easier to mine and extract on Mars again because of gravity and locality. [-1] The atmosphere, thin as it is, is still a convenient source for carbon and oxygen to support the life support cycle and could maybe be a source of nitrogen for growing plants. In those ways it's maybe an easier first long term settlement than space or the moon ignoring the cost of bringing everything there and resupply missions. [0]
I think it may be more likely to happen somewhere with gravity just given how much development still needs to be done to extract materials out of asteroids. There's a lot to work through in being able to refine stuff like metals in micro gravity that hasn't even started yet.
If history is any judge though we'll go to Mars long before it's really viable simply because it's there. Hopefully not too many people get caught up in it.
[0] Unless it's turns out to be viable to bake similar resources out of lunar regolith. I haven't read deeply enough to see if that's just SciFi or a viable source of the basic elementals needed to support a settlement.
[-1] edit: To clarify here I mean on Mars for consumption on Mars of course. Though Mar's much thinner atmosphere would also make some more exotic launch technologies potentially viable. eg: a rail/coil gun launch to a skyhook maybe given the much lower atmospheric drag it would experience.
>Gravity is gratis for one which really helps with long term health and we don't have to completely redesign our current technology to work if there's gravity where we will in space. And yes the resources for Earth are better found in the asteroid belt but it would probably be easier to mine and extract on Mars again because of gravity and locality. The atmosphere, thin as it is, is still a convenient source for carbon and oxygen to support the life support cycle and could maybe be a source of nitrogen for growing plants. In those ways it's maybe an easier first long term settlement than space or the moon ignoring the cost of bringing everything there and resupply missions. [0]
Well, sort of. Most of these aren't as convenient as they sound. Gravity is only about 40% of Earth's IIRC, so if you had humans there you'd still be contending with loss of muscle and bone density. If we're talking about ambitious future technology I think a spinning wheel station is probably a more stable way to keep people healthy. Plus you have to contend with seasons and weather. Wind, dust, wild temperature swings and all the extra wear on materials you will get as a result. . .
It would also take forever to actually thicken up the atmosphere, so you would probably want to be careful how much you go pulling CO2 out of the air to grow plants if long-term viability is your priority. As for mining, locality is a big help, especially if you're going to be remote-controlling drones, but contending with landing/taking-off on a planet is a huge logistical expense. Particularly if you're dealing with lots of heavy machinery for mining.
Yeah I'm not saying it's easy just convenient. Ring stations are a bit tricky because they have to be quite big before you stop experiencing appreciable differences in the 'gravity' between your head and feet which would probably cause some novel medical issues. I was mostly thinking about the long term once we have people living their whole lives in either location having some gravity even at a fraction would make Mars more hospitable for long term living.
In either location the initial construction will be very intensive/expensive in space you need to launch or refine and assemble vast amounts of material where on Mars there's the option of a small starter base while you dig tunnels out for the main living quarters. [0]
Either path is definitely difficult I'm just trying to highlight the ways Mars is less of a leap because it's another planet and we don't have to reinvent the wheel when it comes to things like extracting and refining metals or every single industrial process that makes the modern world tick.
> It would also take forever to actually thicken up the atmosphere, so you would probably want to be careful how much you go pulling CO2 out of the air to grow plants if long-term viability is your priority.
I don't think this is actually a huge concern making the atmosphere livable without a suit will take an incredible amount of engineering and like on Earth while we're talking about raw elemental materials the amount humans can possibly use pales in comparison to the amount available. [1] Any project like that will dwarf anything we've done to date.
[0] With several intermediate steps like building habitats out of processed rocks from the surface for example.
[1] There are rare exceptions I know of like Helium where the main issue is still cheap supply not actually running out.
You're saying there are no resources and opportunities beyond Earth?
It may require some adaption (as you mentioned, we can manipulate our own environment) but the rewards are likely to be substantial eventually.
Noone is saying let's colonize Mars because Global Warming. On the contrary, every single proponent of space exploration is emphasizing how important it is to preserve Earth.
One does not rule out the other.
> how bad do the conditions on Earth have to get before it makes sense to try to move to a planet that is essentially uninhabitable?
Fort Bridger, Wyoming has a population of 345[0]. California has a population of nearly 40 million[1]. Should those crazy people of the 19th century never have bothered with Fort Bridger?
Inhabiting a habitable planet outside our solar system is so far beyond our current capabilities that there is no point putting any money in to it.
Any kind of foothold on a second planet within our solar system would change that reality. Routine travel between Earth and Mars would provide heaps and heaps of experience and capability. It would make any discussion of colonizing outside our solar system much more reasonable than it is today.
Inhabiting Mars was never the end goal. It just happens to be the most practical one in a much much much larger picture.
To be pedantic, evidence indicates that humans have not existed (on Earth) for dozens of millenia.
Human skills to breathe and find sustenance below the ocean surface have been common enough for 70+ years. Do you really require that we wait millenia before we try it on another planet?
To be pedantic right back, you dropped an 'n' in the word and a 'millennia' is 1000 years. Yes, humans have existed on earth for dozens of millennia and in fact we have evidence of early civilizations from around a dozen millennia ago.
You're missing my point. Although attempting to reach Mars may be wise, Fort Bridger is not an effective analogy. By the time we had reached Fort Bridger, humans had already traveled across huge territories and had already learned to live in incredibly adverse environments. Perhaps we ought to strive for Mars precisely because it's so different than anything we've done before. But as far as existing known human capabilities go, it's not going to be as obviously possible as Fort Bridger.
they have already got very bad - the conservative anti-progress people are running the show more and more, and by means of SpaceX and Tesla Musk is saving our civilization from the main danger for a technological civilization, the danger of being completely overtaken by the conservative anti-progress people.
> Just try to think about this: how bad do the conditions on Earth have to get before it makes sense to try to move to a planet that is essentially uninhabitable?
LOL. If the New World is any indication, as soon as there's money to be made or persecution to escape (which we are not out of).
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.
> 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).
I think you again need to look to the example of the New World. The Pilgrims were not persecuted like the Uyghurs. They were relatively well off English folk living in the Netherlands who felt that their laws were overly restrictive and prevented the free practice of their religion.
Thus, groups highly likely to colonize Mars would be traditionalist Catholics, evangelical Christians, and maybe some new age movements. These feel like the current system is persecuting them, but still have enough werewithal and freedom to be able to choose to move. That, and their respective philosophies encourage exploration. It is highly unlikely that any group that decided to move because of persecution would be a racial or ethnic one.
One day, hopefully not soon, Earth may be as inhospitable as Mars. Earth may be really, really uninhabitable within 100 years or so, if we are not careful as a species. We must manage this planet, or it is the end of our time in the universe.
Going to Mars makes a lot of sense to some fairly capable folk. Getting there, and sustaining life, is going to be hard.
But, we will make it easier eventually. I can think of a way we could turn Earth into a recovering paradise, full of natural wonder, and it would definitely involve using Mars to fix it.
Why did pilgrims voyage the dangerous seas from Europe to the Americas when they could have stayed put? In the Americas, why did groups (the Mormon pioneers easily come to my mind but there were many others) set out west into mostly uninhabited territory, with many dying on the way and when they finally stopped to settle, instead of trying to make things work where they were? How bad could the conditions have been?
Understand those motivations and you'll understand why in the current century nowhere on Earth is as appealing as Mars for satisfying the needs that previously could have been satisfied by going a bit further west. The environmental challenges of the journey and the destination will be great, yes, but the payoff will be indescribably (if you don't understand those motivations at an emotional level) worth it for those who meet the challenges.
The comment you are responding to is the perfect response to your comment. GP basically references your line of thinking in it, and you didn’t really refute anything they said.
He’s literally just Donald Trump for millennial men.
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.
Agreed. His ability is to generate hype for insecure men. Nothing else he’s done suggest any real genius. And his tweeting habits show him as surprisingly ignorant much of the time.
JFK sold us on space because "we choose to do these things because they are hard." It was an aspirational exploratory message.
The reality is that we are in space because it is required for great power contests. I'm mired in space as a DoD executive, so I promise you space - at least inside the GEO orbits - is extremely practical. Starlink is honestly amazing.
Mars though? I've steel-manned that one and I don't see it as anything more than what JFK did. Tickling the never-ending exploration/expansion desires of humanity.
I say it frequently: Outside of the sun exploding or the moon crashing into earth, there is no future event that would make earth as uninhabitable as Mars is today.
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 timescale, and you can be sure that it wouldn't be some haven. For one thing, the military would be the first to occupy, and if that was the military of one country you can be sure that they'd be joined by another fairly soon, and then...
Given we seem to struggle with working out how humans will get on okay on earth in the coming decades, we should not be distracting resources (our own and our planet's) until we have solved some more pressing issues. Given most of the 'wealth' that we have today has been created by exploiting fossil fuels (or exists only within financial systems), we have a huge job ahead in transforming society into something more sustainable.
> there is no future event that would make earth as uninhabitable as Mars is today
As I heard someone say recently: while we think about terra-forming Mars, we are busy Mars-forming Earth.
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 a permanent base there.
> The Antarctic environment is far less harsh than Mars and no-one maintains a permanent base there.
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.
> Deploying military to Mars is as likely as deploying military to the Antarctic.
Nobody is suggesting we colonise the Antarctic, because there's nothing much (of current economic value) there. There are a handful of people there to study it and they need a constant supply of resources to sustain them. If that was the point of going to Mars, then you'd really have to question what can be achieved there that warrants such massive cost, especially if any part of that cost is government funded.
Now, if we contrast that with the Arctic, the first sign of a melting ice cap and there's military posturing over who is going to exploit the natural resources being exposed there.
As Antarctica has never been permanently settled by humans, there has historically been little military activity in the Antarctic. Because the Antarctic Treaty, which came into effect on June 23, 1961, bans military activity in Antarctica, military personnel and equipment may only be used for scientific research or any other peaceful purpose (such as delivering supplies) on the continent.
> I don't see it as anything more than what JFK did. Tickling the never-ending exploration/expansion desires of humanity.
I would agree. This is what fuels SpaceX. Aspiration. He's generated excitement and interest in space that rivals what JFK did, it doesn't have to be more. People in my life with no previous interest in the subject now want to hear all about it.
> there is no future event that would make earth as uninhabitable as Mars is today.
Wouldn't that imply if we can make Mars habitable, then we'll be capable of dealing with whatever problems arise here on Earth? Think of it as a nice test run without the immediate fate of humanity's only biosphere at stake.
The costs involved in turning Mars into an experimental environment, call it a "twin", would likely eclipse the sum total of human activity to date (300k years worth) by several orders of magnitude.
That's fine, unless we have something better to do. If it takes 10,000 years or 100,000 years, it doesn't matter, unless the work being done is detracting from more important work. Many people, myself included, would struggle to think of more impactful goals for humanity to accomplish. Feeding, clothing, and housing everyone would be nice, but those things are still far more personal than any project that aims to prolong our very existence as a species.
It's nearly impossible to define 'something better to do.' Solutions to Martian needs could have applicability to problems here on Earth. Feeding, clothing, and housing are definitely problems Martians would have. What lessons might be learned in their relatively small, closed ecosystem that we're completely blind to here with Earth's abundance?
In my personal opinion, if humanity has any purpose or meaning at all, it's to spread Earth life. For all the faux human exceptionalism people like to extol, the one thing we can do that no other life form can do at any scale, is spread Earth life. (Panspermia seems incredibly unlikely to me and probably requires a near-perfect match between initial conditions on the planet and the organism(s) that happen to find themselves there.)
why care about the long-term existence of our species? certainly we should strive to leave a better world for our children, their children, and their children's children, but past a certain point it seems very abstract to me. even 10,000 years is about three times as long as the totality of recorded history. in 100,000 years, our genome may have diverged enough that whatever humans live at that point in the future wouldn't be the same species anyway. why should I, a sentient sack of meat living in the year 2020 care about these things? more to the point: why should I sacrifice improving the lives of any currently living beings for the sake of ones that may live in future millennia?
You can tell that to the Biomaterial Processing Courts when they queue you up for utilization for the betterment of humanity. But for now I don't think anybody asks you to personally care about anything, much less do anything.
Or would you like to ask somebody else to work on things you do care about?
I argue we should be building a more capable and survivable successor to biological intelligence that can survive beyond traditional biological extinction periods (M of years).
It's a bit of a false dichotomy to suggest we have to choose between the two, but...
If we must choose, we should choose to colonize Mars. Statistically speaking, an asteroid impact is inevitable. Time is the relevant variable. The sooner humanity can be a multi-world species, the sooner we are more robust against that threat. The same will be true of our successors who will necessarily have less time than we to spread from Earth. If we manage to spread to other worlds and Earth is destroyed, we will still be around to develop our successors (and will also have a leg up on spreading to ever more worlds). If we manage to create our successors and the Earth is destroyed before we get to other worlds, it's game over.
You're just re-stating the original argument for colinization (an asteroid/event would make the earth less inhabitable than mars is currently) that I disagree with and originally addressed.
I don't think so. For most asteroid impacts, we wouldn't even need to build subterranean shelters for the species to survive. It isn't enough for the species to survive. Our civilization, particularly our very technological civilization, must survive as well. Without such a civilization, we'll be trapped here until the Earth itself dies. Our long term survival depends on the short term survival of our civilization.
The relative habitability of Earth and Mars may actually have a converse effect on the survival of a technological civilization. On Mars, such a civilization would be necessary for continued individual survival for what may be geological time scales. On a recovering Earth, humans may salvage civilization, devolve into a new and indefinite dark ages, or give up on civilization entirely and the species will still go on.
The sum total of human activity in the last 100 years also eclipses the sum total of all human activity prior (300k years worth). Humanity didn't do a lot for a long time.
But yes, Mars would be a mega project. Isaac Arthur does great stuff on Youtube which gives an idea of the magnitude of the works necessary.
> The costs involved in turning Mars into an experimental environment
I think it would be more realistic to say, if we are able to live on Mars instead of making Mars livable. Being able to live on Mars won't require "the sum total of human activity to date (300k years worth)"
> Wouldn't that imply if we can make Mars habitable
We can't (excluding domes etc.). We won't be able to unless we acquire such powerful planetary engineering technology that we could much more easily build enormous orbital cities complete with functioning biospheres.
It may work to live in enclosed environments on Mars, but the scale of actually terraforming it puts it in the realm of fantasy.
I think he wants to be Emperor Elon the first of Mars. It would be convenient for tax purposes, and there's lots of real estate to sell. Mars at ground level may be an uninhabitable dump, but Mars orbit is very strategic. And of course, a rocket that gets you to Mars gets you a lot of places. Like mineral-rich asteroids. Who would probably trans-ship minerals via Mars orbit.
Am not American, am not old. That entire speech at Rice University gives me goosebumps everytime, it's historic and set in motion events that changed the world forever.
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.
Yes it includes all those examples. Humans could endeavor to build many vast underground or undersea habitats (mineshaft gap!) that serve as a protective function for, I dunno 1 millionth(?) the cost of sending a terraform crew Mars with probably a million X more capacity to support humanity, plus the ability to use it and iterate on it right now.
Doesn't sound very sexy though right? Kind of like all the data engineering, infrastructure plumbing I do to help our data scientists and ML folks do the sexy inference work.
I'll do a little pre-buttal here about what kind of science we're "losing out on" by not pursuing more space: Building for underground or undersea habitats has significantly less research put into it than space habitation, so you'd see an equivalent boom in research/technology development that has dual use as we did in the 1950s likely.
> I'll do a little pre-buttal here about what kind of science we're "losing out on" by not pursuing more space: Building for underground or undersea habitats has significantly less research put into it than space habitation, so you'd see an equivalent boom in research/technology development that has dual use as we did in the 1950s likely.
This is so absurd. You aren't losing anything by pursuing more space. What's up with all the binary stuff in theses discussions? Why every time someone talks about no doing something, the argument are that binary?
You know you can do both right? It's not space or water. We don't have a thresold where we have to choose between one or the other. Research into underground and undersea habitats doesn't happen because we are unable to make them happen, not because we love space.
Our society is interested into space, just like you said, it's "sexy". It's also filled with potential, space mining for example is worth trillions. It's also filled with unknown, there's reasons why stars are so much filled with legends, stories and mythology. That's what make space something that sell, unlike underground or undersea.
So the alternative isn't underground or undersea research, it's no research at all.
You can make undeground or undersea research sexy. Go for it! I'll be the first one to support your cause, more research is always better. Please stop arguing for less research....
Mars has a built-in advantage of distance from the hordes of desperate people who would destroy a too-small or half-done habitat if it helps them survive next week (if disaster strikes before you are ready for example). Nobody can blame them, yet it is a valid and expected hazard.
Nuclear winter is probably quite survivable. Its mechanisms are the same as volcanic winters, with the caveat that it requires the assumption that nuclear weapons will result in uncontrollably large fires in cities that are as effective stratospheric soot pumps as volcanoes. And the worst volcanic winter in recorded history was in 1816, and the fact that you probably never learned anything about it in your history class should give you some indication of how close it was to a humanity extinction event.
> Is the argument that it would be easy enough to build on Earth places to survive such events rather than going to Mars?
I'd say the argument is that Mars is currently a (much) less hospitable place for life as we know it than the Earth in any nuclear winter scenario that I know of.
The only thing that I can think of to make Mars a better option than Earth is if Earth is struck by some truly gigantic asteroid. But it would have to be big enough to seriously damage a 1,000 trillion metric ton ball (we'll take it as given that the Earth isn't flat) of iron. Merely stripping the atmosphere wouldn't be enough - you need to fundamentally compromise the structural integrity of the planet to make it as unlivable as Mars.
There could be strategic military advantages to having people on Mars.
Nuclear mutual assured destruction doesn't work if one side has a base on mars, where it would take 6+ months for any fired nuke to arrive.
Having people in spacecraft could be a good place for high-importance leaders - nearly no bunker is nuke-proof, but a spacecraft far away is far harder to hit.
This is a completely surreal comment. "One side"? When we're on Mars you'd hope that there would be two sides: Earth and Mars, from the perspective of someone on Mars their buddies next door are a lot more important than any kind of allegiance to Earth based bits such as nations.
I wonder why this argument doesn't work on earth itself already.
Like when some one is sent from one country to another very far country to fight people. You'd wonder why don't use this logic, we are here, why fight for people thousands of miles away.
That's because throughout human existence, things like Identity, and an expectation of something in return eventually from the home country/society always exists.
The fact that Mars is far doesn't mean anything here, what matters relative time and periods of time people are willing to wait.
Could you please spell out how would nuclear MAD stop working?
The way I see it, the Mars base could be ignored for MAD purposes unless it's self sufficient and large enough to be considered civilizational survival. By the point it can no longer be ignored, the other side will just aim a couple nukes at it - what will the colonists do, move the base in months?
(Also, tangentially, I don't think the whole transit time would apply to something expected to blow up on arrival. It doesn't need to slow down enough to land, just enough to survive plowing trough Mars' thin atmosphere before slamming extra hard on the ground. Heh, for a small enough base the attacker might skip the actual nuclear warhead altogether.)
The 6 months travel time are with current technology, and in a few decades we might be able to have better propulsion systems. It's like saying that keeping the MAD threat alive is expensive because you have to refuel those bombers that circle over the arctic... eventually you find better tech.
Also, once the nuke rocket is near mars, it takes only a signal at light speed to re-direct it at whatever settlement you want to target.
Not sure why you got down voted (feels like some people treat this as reddit), but I think hitting a spacecraft with a missile would probably be easier than reach people in a very deep bunker.
I feel that JFK could give such a rousing speech that touched our spirits because he already had the Soviet threat with which to touch our pocketbooks. I imagine the closest Musk has is the threat of climate disaster?
The US federal government owns roughly a quarter of the US territory and most of it can't really be utilized for something. Technology to terraform it into arable land would unlock tremendous value.
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.
Nothing is literally barren though. They still have life of some kind there, even the desert does. Nature isn't just the stuff that is green and teeming with life.
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?
My reply to thoughts like these are always the same: In the US we spend an insulting amount of money on military and defense. The amount of money Spacex is spending is nothing in comparison. If one is truly interested in helping humanity, then one should be advocating moving funds from the military to any branch of science or social welfare. To nitpick the small difference someone like Musk could make by doing something else is to not have your priorities set.
>Tax money is public property and we should have a say in how it is spent. Musk's money we gave to him freely and is his to dispose of as he sees fit.
A substantial portion of Elon Musk's company's funding comes from "tax money" (Goverment contracts, EV credits, tax breaks, subsidies). This seems to contradict both of your sentences.
And if you don't believe it's substantial: Tesla's EV credit sales alone were on the order of $500 million this quarter. Why is that not tax money that goes to better projects, instead of the bottom line of a company that has set its CEO up for a $350mm payday? Did the public have a say in that?
In times of economic recession, we often blame the government and get rid of them.
We've clearly signaled with our voting patterns what we want and government has delivered on it - a reliable supply of oil to power the economy. But that's not enough we also demand "Big Oil" act as our sin-eater; thus our souls are pure because Shell takes on the stain of our sins.
Have a say in it? Ha. The public CREATED it and drove it. Government are followers of public opinion, not leaders.
There are politicians now who are building their identities and campaigns around green policies like EV credits. This is in response to the expressed desires of the public, it is what wins votes.
However there's no contradiction. What the government spends money on in free market voluntary transactions is absolutely 100% within the purview of the public - right up until the instant the money is spent. After that the money is the property of the market participant who earned it. The public cannot spend the money (through government) and then also try to claw back control of the same money. It was spent, on your behalf certainly, but spent nonetheless.
The tools you'd need on Mars are: Electric mobility and energy storage, launch vehicles to cheaply lift satellite constellations to Earth orbit (which just so happen to heavy lift what you need for a Mars transit), cheap tunnel boring to reduce transportation congestion on Earth, but also to build underground (radiation protected) habitats on Mars.
If you have a hobby you love (go to Mars, die on Mars), it doesn't hurt to get rich building the infra your hobby needs. You will need those funds to buy services from your companies for your hobby.
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 also being somewhat orthogonal to existing terrestrial hegemonies.
Mars is totally inhospitable to humans in multiple ways. And that's precisely why we should go there! We would have forced leaps in technology, habitation, and most importantly for Earth, terraforming.
Yep. I'm Dutch, we've been converting sea to land since the early middle ages. Considering the technology at hand at that time, colonizing Mars is even somewhat comparable.
> If Musk appears to be doing something crazy you've not understood it.
Even geniuses make mistakes. We can celebrate him and question him at the same time. We don't need a hero or a fairytale ending to be able to appreciate the impact his companies are having and could have on the world.
I wouldn’t say marketing is his skill. His skill is getting shit done. The only reason why we listen to his (crazy) words is because he actually does what he sets out to do.
The main contribution is from his employees, not himself. He manages to convince them to work for him with extreme hours for bad pay and without even receiving proper credit (check out how many authors the Neuralink paper listed, then check out the cern paper's authors). How does he convince people to work for him? Marketing. He's a marketing guy.
If you watch his presentations over the years, he has very much shifted towards "this is my team's accomplishment" versus taking the credit for himself. With time comes wisdom; whether it's to further motivate employees or because of how he genuinely feels, can't say, but it's observable.
> I wouldn’t say marketing is his skill. His skill is getting shit done. The only reason why we listen to his (crazy) words is because he actually does what he sets out to do.
This, he is actually a horrible public speaker, and has a knack for going on tangents that often confuse even his biggest proponents.
But, he has the Public's adoration because his insight and vision can bring people like Shotwell (who really runs SpaceX) into the foray and allows for the coordination of a great talent pool to work for extended hours, and what amounts to not much money in a selfless manner and this captivates the imagination of the People and subsequently inspires them to want to be a part of it all.
people buying that car not because of Musk himself, but because finally there is a fun car being produced. And that is what other car manufacturers haven't gotten done in many years.
For getting shit done you need to market your ideas well to right people who work and who give out the capital. If you don't inspire them, you won't get anything done.
> "You can't breathe the air, the pressure of the atmosphere is a tiny fraction of what we have on Mount Everest"
Well, thank you professor science. An observation that my 8 year old nephew could have told me.
The benefit of colonizing mars is all of the ancillary technologies that come along with it. Reusable rockets will give us Starlink, Easier Space Travel and asteroid mining.
Making a habbitat on mars will force us to invest interplanetary internet protocols. It will force us to make better catalysis research for air, water, waste processing and synthesis.
Uninhabitability will force us to increase automation capabilities so robots can build the base structures before we arrive.
Going multiplanetary will give our species apocalypse redundancy.
I'm sure I only touched on 5% of the reality because my imagination is so limited, but anyone who's done a tiny amount of reading on the subject can see the insane benefits, including commercial opportunities that exist here.
But James Lovelock "wouldn't waste his fortune" on these endeavours - isn't it good we don't live in a world of pessimists like him who would hoard their future, secure in the knowledge that, when the planet finishing asteroid hits us, at least he can be vaporised with his pile of money, and it wouldn't have been "wasted"
Perhaps it might have been possible in some long distant past to underestimate Howard Hughes and write him off as a crazy person. That time is gone. If Hughes appears to be doing something crazy you've not understood it.
I do however agree that Mars is a sales pitch for SpaceX, but the idea that Musk is not crazy may also be headed for a turnaround.
Well, I've been trained in Radiation Protection and I think I understand quite well why the crazy parts are just crazy or too crazily expensive to fund.
On the other hand, Elon presenting some rendering across Jupiter's radiation belts doesn't strike me as an example of understanding anything, to be honest.
No, that time is not over. I still underestimate him and think that he often says stupid stuff (for example some of his claims about Hyperloop, self-driving, world as a simulation theory).
Musk is someone who's obsessed about being admired and considered smart.
He's spreading FUD and trying to undermine any kind of mass transport which could negatively impact Tesla's car.
> self-driving
Not sure what the stupid part is here (maybe I've fallen for it!). His cars have some driving assists which he oversells as auto-pilot (it isn't). Straight up marketing.
> world as a simulation theory
Consolidates his image as a great genius ahead of the curve with a certain segment of the population.
Getting people to invest money in crazy ideas that have no hope of working was also Elizabeth Holmes' gift. It's not rare or even that difficult. Now Musk has had previous successes, but I'd hardly call electric cars or even rockets and satellites genius or novel. The sad thing is that while he focuses on this, he's not only wasting his money and time, he's wasting the time and money of all the fools who believe that's it's possible and desirable, diverting what could be resources for fixing our own planet. That is the exact opposite of genius and that's why he rightly gets criticised for this insane idea. This Mars idea is no different than Theranos' product. In fact, it's a lot less likely to ever happen.
"fixing our own planet" is not a problem of resources. It is a problem of politics. Most of the people working on space (Musk included) are not that good at politics. They are working on hard problems instead of impossible ones.
I've been excited by the potential of hyperloop since the first time I heard about it maybe 30-40 years ago. The idea isn't new - there have been pneumatic trains in the 1800s and at least a design for a vacuum train in the early 1900s - it is the engineering challenges that have held it back. I'm sure these challenges would require no less effort to solve than projects like travelling to Mars, but the outcome would benefit more of mankind and would create something truly amazing (until it's been around for a while and then it would seem no more amazing than a laser printer).
What then, is Elon Musk marketing? Space? For whom? In what fashion, and for what purpose?
Exactly how many people, in the best possible scenario, would we have the capacity to transport to Mars, or even simply into space?
What happens to everybody else? There are billions of people on the planet. Does Elon Musk plan to send even 1/10 of them to Mars?
So yeah if one's goal is helping preserve the human race, unless you're ready to write off the planet and everyone on it as totally fucked, not sure how Mars is a solution.
You can make an argument about the _technologies_ developed in the space application process having value for the planet, but, that's a different argument.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out but one thing has always confounded me. We haven't even started to figure out how to build a self-sustaining base of operations on the moon. We've been there, it is close but we don't know what years of low gravity will do to our bodies. If we can't figure that out, how could we ever go to Mars to set up a permanent colony.
> If Musk appears to be doing something crazy you've not understood it.
That's a pretty ridiculous attitude. You're literally talking about Musk like he's a god or something. He's a regular guy, not some kind of superman: he makes mistakes, has limited understanding, and is often wrong.
Sure, but he's been right on enough deeply contrarian bets that the kind of 'common sense' dismissal we'd apply to most people making the kind of claims he's made are clearly the wrong heuristic.
It's not that he's never wrong. It's that how outlandish his statements are is not a good indicator of how likely he is to be wrong.
> It's that how outlandish his statements are is not a good indicator of how likely he is to be wrong.
What someone considers outlandish, is subjective. By my observation (of topics I think are interesting), he's wrong all the time. Same as Nostradamus, although Musk probably isn't as crazy.
> You're literally talking about Musk like he's a god or something.
There's absolutely the risk, probably already too late for some, of getting into hero worship of Musk. We should definitely steer away from that type of erroneous thinking.
If you are playing Kasparov at chess and he appears to have made a beginner blunder so stupid you think him crazy then you are not seeing the full picture. Kasparov makes mistakes and loses matches but never one so serious he could be called "crazy" in the sense that any fool can see the error.
Elon Musk is a regular guy, not some kind of superman: he makes mistakes, has limited understanding, and is often wrong - but never would he commit a blunder so severe as to earn the description: "crazy". Something else is going on if it appears crazy, look closer.
The advantage of space colonisation is that you can control everything - the microbes, the infrastructure, the laws, the people.
There are no environmental regulations, no taxes, no diversity policies, and with appropriate screening, no human, plant or animal diseases.
To put it simply: imagine a space colony of a thousand of the best and brightest men and women Earth had to offer, where gonorrhea, AIDS, chlamydia, the common cold just didn't exist? Where one could work without the tax burden of paying for a huge welfare state?
This is something that Earth cannot offer. Even in the most remote desert you will have to deal with the local tribes and the United Nations. Space colonies could developer free of the burden of socialism.
That rescue worker temporarily had a platform high enough to speak with Musk's typical level of reach and attempted to use it to pull back the curtain and reveal Musk's publicity hound ways.
This is an existential threat to Musk's operation and he reacted rashly and extremely aggressively slinging the nastiest mud which might stick. That type of reputational damage is extremely difficult to recover from.
It also drew the public's eye away from the the "Elon the publicity hound" story to "Elon possible defamation" which is a much less serious problem.
Most of this reads as "this is how it worked for me so it must work like this for everyone".
I understand he "enjoys controversy" but it's hard to take someone seriously who says things like "Oh, politicians should just ignore the protests and keep their minds straight. It will go away. It always does. They’ll find another big issue after a little while and switch to something else.", as if protests have never effected any substantial change.
Or almost worse, that the protests are inconsequential because they are organized and mostly attended by young people.
"I've had 10 cancers in the last few years and it hasn't been very bad. They just appear and grow. If you go to a good oncologist nearby, they'll take it out. It's just unfortunate for people who let it happen and it grows and grows until it's inoperable. I mean, nowadays, I think middle class and fairly wealthy people don't die of cancer."
What in the world?! I understand he is courting controversy, but to do in the most curmudgeon-y way possibly is new to me.
Oh I don't know. I think it's refreshing to hear someone call global warming a serious threat while at the same time dismissing activists as noisy children participating in a fad.
I have so much more respect for these noisy children than the serious adults who have spent millions of dollars lying about this issue and bribing officials to ignore it.
That's nice but -- in democracies at least -- politics is about persuasion and most people find 100 year old scientists more persuasive than schoolchildren.
That may be his confirmation of ignoring the protest. You stop reading and thinking when you hear a trigger you don't like. Making your commentary sort of ...simplistic. I don't claim to be deep. But he's 100 and lived thru 5 cancers. Maybe he knows more... I'm a boomer, read his stuff, was thrilled with SimEarth 30 yrs ago. I believe in climate change, but have worked with climate data on EOS/NASA projects, also saw the political aspect of no emergency means no funding. Also a big believer in nuclear power. You should read up on thorium reactors. Its a big world to change/save/immolate.
I read it as sarcasm and cynicism. For someone at 100 years of age and having been involved in several environmental movements it can be exhausting to think of another protest failing. I suspect he'd like it to work but seems more interested in folks making the politicians pay attention by other means.
I think his point is that if you just follow protests then you are always going to be onto the next thing. Protests are largely fads. He says they should just get their heads straight -- IOW, fight against climate change simply because it's the right thing to do, whether people are protesting about it this year or not.
Mary Ann Cramer: I have to ask you the same question
people back home are asking about space these days. Is it
worth it? Should we just pull back? Forget the whole thing as
a bad idea, and take care of our own problems at home?
Sinclair: No. We have to stay here. And there's a simple
reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the
environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten
different answers. But there's one thing every scientist on
the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years
or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun
will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just
take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and
Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes,
and all of this…all of this…was for nothing. Unless we go to
the stars.
Way before that the carbon cycle will stop and most life on Earth will starve. Yet way before that we'd have evolved into different species that will likely go extinct as they all do (I think the average lifetime is 10My). I don't know where this idea that we might still be here until the death of the Sun came from. I'd worry more about making it to the next glaciation without having poisoned ourselves before.
I don't think it's accurate thinking about space as a physical place out there you can simply go. It's more like jumping from one gravity well to another and what you have to think about is what part of the system you're aboard can do that by means of conservation of momentum. And that's the main reason why I don't think we have the technology nor the energy budget to think about feasible interstellar trips. It's a bit like telling techno fairy tales to children, only it's adults and we have a lot of other adult problems.
He has it wrong. The universe will end and it will be for nothing. Going to the stars does not make life meaningful or preserve anything in the end. Life has no meaning other than what we invent.
I see Mars not so much as a "plan b" or "insurance". That's just a nice side effect.
Humans venturing out into space and establishing colonies is a big step in human evolution. It's a bigger step than when animal life left the oceans and ventured onto land.
If you look at all of life on Earth from far away, there would be only a few achievements you could see. Rather shortly after life began, it changed Earth's atmosphere by producing lots of oxygen.
Right now we are changing the atmosphere again (unintendedly).
When we leave the planet and venture out into the solar system we are taking the first step to establish a presence beyond the planet we started on.
The next big challenges on the same order of magnitude will be to leave the solar system and spread around the galaxy. And then make the jump to other galaxies. It's a long way to go. We don't know how long the window of opportunity remains open. It is open now. We should get moving. That's what Musk is saying and doing.
I think we all underestimate how far apart just solar systems are. In the common projections we take a travel speed of 1-10% speed of light for granted which is insanely hard to achieve with any significant mass. If we indeed make it out of our solar system (and not just once), mankind will eventually spread all over the Milky Way.
He may be a smart dude, but this answer is out there:
> "DER SPIEGEL: Cancer is a silent killer that might get diagnosed long after the exposure, when it is too late.
> Lovelock: I've had 10 cancers in the last few years and it hasn't been very bad. They just appear and grow. If you go to a good oncologist nearby, they'll take it out. It's just unfortunate for people who let it happen and it grows and grows until it's inoperable. I mean, nowadays, I think middle class and fairly wealthy people don't die of cancer."
>Barrie R. Cassileth, the chief of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's integrative medicine department,[172] said, "Jobs's faith in alternative medicine likely cost him his life.... He had the only kind of pancreatic cancer that is treatable and curable.... He essentially committed suicide."
So did my Aunt. She had cancer a bunch of times before it eventually took her out. The toll that your body takes after chemo and/or radiation therapy makes the cancer that will materialize later in your life a lot more threatening, in addition to how your body decays over time. So basically, the older you get and the more chemo you've had, the higher likelihood you have of cancer taking you out. If Lovelock has had "10 cancers in the last few years", he's going to die of cancer in the next 10.
Considering he's over 100, I doubt he's concerned about such a fate. Also, he might be talking about skin cancers, which are easily removed, yet people often wait until they've metastasized.
I have doubts. You typically don't see an oncologist for skin cancers unless it has metastasized. Mortality is high at that point. I don't count the number of simple skin cancers anymore.
1. He extrapolates from his own experience of cancer
2. He blames people for not taking care of it (so dying of it is their fault)
3. He talks about a disease group that kills a lot of people like it is a cold
And this is the age of the smartphone, so anyone, including him, could just look up empirical summaries over Wikipedia. There's really no need to summon individual stories of cancer to tell people how dangerous (or harmless) it really is.
as far as #2 is concerned, he lives in a country with nationalized healthcare so he doesn't really see a reason not to get it taken care of and get bi-annual checkups.
His response to cancer as a possible outcome of radiation exposure following from a nuclear accident is troubling: "I mean, nowadays, I think middle class and fairly wealthy people don't die of cancer."
He almost made the point that the nuclear accident killed far less people than the tsunami that caused it, but instead went down the route that cancer isn't a big deal.
The tsunami killed over 15,000 people. The nuclear disaster is estimated to eventually kill 100-ish people due to excess cancer cases from radioactive releases.
Don't forget that interviews are usually edited ("for brevity"), and especially in Der Spiegel of 2020 (as opposed to, say, 1980), I wouldn't be suprised if they heavily edited it.
Is it though? If you catch somebody in a lie, will you trust his next statement more or less? On the one hand, you could argue "he will likely not lie again, knowing that I've uncovered his previous lie, therefore I can trust him more", on the other hand, past behavior isn't bad at predicting future behavior.
> Lovelock: The tsunami in Japan in 2011 killed 20,000 people or thereabouts, but there wasn’t anybody much hurt by the Fukushima nuclear power plant itself, that’s the extraordinary thing.
This interview makes Lovelock seem very unwise, is that due to him or the Spiegel site? Is it a fair interview/transcript, or is Lovelock really that intellectually uncharismatic?
He sounds like many other elderly folks who are very dismissive and opinionated, for instance putting climate protests down to kids being kids... well you're 100, you definitely don't have skin in the game, how can you comprehend the mind of a 15 year old?
All respect for the man, but fortunately we can like and respect somebody without agreeing with them.
You get set in your ways with age. Some of his responses are a bit too much of the type "young people these days!"
Young people may get carried away at times but important changes tend to happen due to young people. Young people led the French revolution and other revolutions advancing democracy and freedom.
A lot of the good things that has happened through the environmental movement has happened due to young engaged people. It is not enough to sit in a lab and invent solutions if nobody listens to you.
Sure I have seen environmental movement ebb and flow ever since the 80s. However it would be silly to suggest that this somehow invalidates them. These organizations helped save the ozone layer, whales and other species. They paved the way for the revolution within renewable energy.
> “nowadays, I think middle class and fairly wealthy people don't die of cancer.”
That’s a pretty crackpot thing to say.
James Lovelock has been lucky, and it’s certainly true that early diagnosis improves your chances. But the idea that wealthy people don’t die of cancer is complete nonsense.
Musk putting his fortune on the line and trying colonize Mars offers a win-win for everyone.
If people want to keep expanding as well as having more individual freedoms, we must get ourselves more room and resources.
If environmentalists want to keep planet Earth safe, having a place to send people and begin colonizing off-planet will in the long-term be best for Earth.
Lovelock is too close-minded in this case. Staying on Earth forever means the death of the human race and most likely the Earth's environment.
Also, one thing people often overlook - as you settle more places / build more habitats, you are unlocking the vast resources of the Solar System.
These might give you a hand if any single of the settlements (including Earth) get into trouble. This could range from preventing the disaster in the first place (nearby ship deflecting a potential impactor) to helping the survivors (medical supplies being dropped from orbit, habitat with failing life support being evacuated).
Self sustaining off-Earth settlements go way beyond just "oops, Earth is gone, at least someone is still left".
'Lovelock: You see, when I passed 100, I thought, "What is there to do now? What is there to look forward to?" I don't have any more duties. I enjoy life now... When I wake up in the morning I often think: "Oh, it’s a nice world!" I live here with my wife, we are still in love, what more do I want?'
I wish governments and society in general would make a serious commitment to space travel and colonization, not because of some sci-fi fantasy, but because many of the problems facing Earth are really only problems if we're stuck on this singular planet.
Overpopulation? The universe is nearly infinite and there will always be new frontiers to explore. Environmental destruction from mining and use of carbon as a fuel source? The universe is full of minerals and using fossil fuels in space doesn't really hurt anyone.
I don't know enough about the current status of space travel technology, but it doesn't seem farfetched to say that we could be mass-colonizing the moon and Mars by 2100 if serious percentages of GDP were put toward the project.
This topic comes up a lot and I know it excites investors, but I have yet to see a viable plan for kick-starting the magnetic field on Mars. No magnetic field means no way to have an atmosphere, water or life and everyone has to stay in caves or incredibly durable modules indefinitely. The only O2 and H2O is what you bring with you or produce in the modules.
The only reason I could see doing this is if we knew of impending extinction events coming to earth that would pass quickly and then we could return and re-populate. Is there another reason to colonize a dead planet? Are we trying to find a root cause for something and need a team to stick around longer than a regular mission time-frame?
Your statement is a little hard to refute because I don’t know what you’ll admit as “viable”, but here’s a recent proposal which doesn’t require the magnetosphere actually being located on Mars:
A lot of people get fooled into thinking that because Mars lacks an atmosphere due to a lack of a magnetic field, a magnetic field is required to have an atmosphere. The atmosphere was stripped away from Mars over hundreds of millions of years.
If you could somehow restore the atmosphere today, it would remain just fine over any reasonable human timescales. Giving Mars at atmosphere is of course very difficult.
That's a pretty simplistic explanation. If you look at the details, the magnetosphere is protecting the atmosphere. Take each kind of radiation in turn.
X-Rays: The magnetosphere has no effect
UV: The magnetosphere has no effect
Cosmic rays: While both the Earth's magnetic field and the sun's magnetic deflect some cosmic rays, the Earth's atmosphere is mostly opaque to cosmic rays.
Solar wind/coronal mass ejections: The Earth's magnetic field does block these, but if it wasn't present, the atmosphere would block them (but of course be slowly stripped away in the process)
The fact that the magnetosphere does deflect some particles but isn't what makes life on Earth possible (other than protecting the atmosphere) is made most clear by the ISS being well within the magnetosphere but still receiving hundreds of times the amount on Earth.
You're never going to get the same atmosphere on Mars vs Earth. Not only are you going to need to make a lot of tradeoffs with respect to gas content (eg, that much nitrogen is going to be very difficult to find/relocate) but the same amount of atmospheric pressure is going to take a larger mass of atmosphere since there is less gravity.
So it really is a hard question to answer since to answer it you'd need to know what kind of atmosphere Mars would have.
Mars still has some useful properties when compared to Luna or asteroid. It mostly relates to having quite a low gravity, but still having a thin atmosphere. We really don't have anything else suitable with these properties in reach (Earth has high gravity, Venus is effectively hell).
The atmosphere is very thin, yet should be enough to get rid of most micrometeorites (a possible isue on lunar surface). Also thanks to the atmosphere, you can do various orbital maneuvers (aero-capture, aaero.breaking, aero assisted plane changes, etc.) that are not possible on a body without atmosphere. IT even makes some very specific aircraft designs work. Also with an atmosphere, you get less insane temperatures, you can mine it for CO2 for fuel and other uses.
All in all, Mars is a frozen desert, but still a very useful frozen dessert providing many benefits in comparison to a barren rock floating in space.
Theoretically at some point it should be possible to make this somewhat permanent with minimal maintenance. Depending on technology it could go from a station that lasts a hundred years to millions of years.
I feel that overall the interview is a mixed bag. Lovelock is unnecessarily dismissive of some things (e.g. Fridays for Future), understandably dismissive of some other things (colonization of Mars), but also right on a few counts.
I think it's especially useful to draw attention to the benefits of nuclear power when it comes to combating climate change and pollution more generally.
I also agree with his observation that the way we teach science (as separate, independent subjects) is really limiting. This, as a matter of fact, goes for all other subjects.
> I've had 10 cancers in the last few years and it hasn't been very bad. They just appear and grow. If you go to a good oncologist nearby, they'll take it out. It's just unfortunate for people who let it happen and it grows and grows until it's inoperable. I mean, nowadays, I think middle class and fairly wealthy people don't die of cancer.
Is this (roughly) true? I've never heard this before, and I want to believe.
Something on the order of getting every mole removed. We're all full of little harmless anomalies which if you're rich and your doctor says something noncommittal, you insist gets removed. Then you follow up with claims about cancer when instead of finding things early you found things that didn't need to be found and exposed yourself to the greater risks associated with any removal procedure.
How so? Mars has an atmosphere unlike the moon, it has water in some form and quantity and has approximately the same length of the day as Earth, plus it has gravity much closer to Earth than what the moon has.
Nobody has EVER suggested we should colonize Mars to save ourselves from global warming expect people against colonizing Mars.
We can survive global warming for sure. If we can build habitats on Mars we can do it on Earth. However there are many conditions far worse than global warming which we cannot protect ourselves from: All out nuclear war. Asteroid hitting earth etc.
It is stupid to put all eggs in one basket. Colonizing other planets in the solar system safeguards our future.
You got to start early because it is a very time consuming effort. You cannot suddenly begin colonizing Mars once you discover an asteroid on collision course. It will be too late.
It is an effort that will likely take far more than 100 years to complete.
Humanity also risk regression. Global warming while not killing us could cause such regression in our technological ability and science that we simply loose the ability to send things into space. We have been in dark ages many times before in history. It can happen again.
Earth after most disasters short of getting hit by a full-on planetoid that liquefies the entire crust is still much easier to live on than Mars, and hardened Earth-based bunkers are a lot cheaper and easier to make than a Martian colony.
Really, for most planet-wide disasters the thing they do is force us to live a little bit like we'd have to on non-disaster-stricken Mars.
[EDIT] for the record I'm not against Martian exploration or even a Martian colony—I'm susceptible both to the "because it was there" and the "we'll come up with some cool tech in the process" arguments—I'm just very unconvinced Martian colonization is a good path to better survivability for the human species.
The moon also has water and it's a lot closer. Whatever goes wrong on Mars, it might be months or years before they receive help. Building the technology and experience with something a lot closer might be a better option before moving onto bigger things.
Thats the value of Mars. It forces whatever is built there to be sufficient and is largely a one way trip. A moon base will probably function more like a research station on Antarctica. New supplies will be shipped, people will transition back home every 4-12 months.
For health reasons you'll want to avoid people spending too much time on Lunar gravity. A similar issue exists on Mars, but causes the opposite result. Due to the time scales involved with sending someone to Mars and returning them, it will be a larger health risk for them to return to Earth than stay on Mars (3-9 month trip to Mars + mission time + 3-9 month trip back).
Think about the impact on culture as well. The sort of perspective you have working at a job site that you will only spend 4 months at is very different from the sort of perspective you have working at a home you expect to die in 30 years later. People that don't expect to come back to Earth may have kids on Mars. Most of the Martian kids will not be able to come back to Earth because of cost and health reasons.
A Mars research station is far more dangerous, more likely to fail, but if it succeeds is far more likely to result in long term habitation of an other planetary body.
There is nothing stopping you from building self-sufficient and secluded colonies on Earth as well. Svalbard has a no-visa-needed policy and is barely populated. If you can convince the Norwegian government to sell you land, you can build your colony there and will mostly be kept alone (compared to a colony in say Sahara which lies on a heavily populated continent).
The problem is that it is too to leave Svalbard. If something goes wrong, your Svalbard colony can call for help. On Mars if something goes wrong, help is at least 6 months away. On Svalbard if you aren't having fun anymore you can leave, on Mars it is likely a oneway trip unless you are a billionaire.
Yeah - Mars has great atmosphere with 95% carbon dioxide and 800ppm carbon monoxide. Home from home really however at minus 80 degrees C, global warming doesn't seem to have caught on.
"plus it has gravity much closer to Earth than what the moon has ..."
But still, I believe, only 1/3 of the gravity that the Earth has.
This is the insurmountable problem with human habitation of Mars - we would need to become, in many ways, a different species in order to withstand the very greatly reduced gravity - and humans, as we know them, would succumb to all manner of disease and physical maladies until that transition (millenia ?) took place.
Any discussion of colonizing Mars that does not discuss gravity, front and center, is just silly.
> This is the insurmountable problem with human habitation of Mars - we would need to become, in many ways, a different species in order to withstand the very greatly reduced gravity - and humans, as we know them, would succumb to all manner of disease and physical maladies until that transition (millenia ?) took place.
Well, you don’t know that humans can’t survive indefinitely at 1/3 gee. I know that because no one knows that, so let’s not speculate on what the threshold gravity would be before we need to “become a different species” would be.
But I’ll admit, unlike radiation and resource concerns, gravity is something we’re never going to overcome. If humans can’t thrive at 1/3 gee, we will never permanently colonize any terrestrial body in our solar system. However, given the range of adaptations humans present, e.g. to extreme altitude, continuous saltwater diving, or long-distance running, I’m willing to bet we can handle, and adapt to, reduced (not micro) gravity.
"Well, you don’t know that humans can’t survive indefinitely at 1/3 gee. I know that because no one knows that, so let’s not speculate on what the threshold gravity would be before we need to “become a different species” would be."
Yes, you are correct.
However, I think you'll agree that all evidence points in the direction that 1/3 earth gravity would be highly detrimental, somewhere along the scale that zero-gee appears to be...
Mars’ atmosphere is less than 1% the density of Earth’s. It’s completely unusable for any practical purpose and would likely cause more problems (dust and erosion) than it would help.
No offense, but you could not possibly be more wrong. While just 1% the quantity of CO2 is enormous and large important resource. With CO2, ice and martian soil you got everything to get plants to grow. Nothing can grow on the moon unless you import carbon.
Also CO2 can be used with electrolysis of water and sabatier reaction to produce methane which can be used as rocket fuel. The fact that the atmosphere is almost pure CO2 makes this much easier to do than on earth. This is also important feedstock for producing plastic.
If you want to build any advance industrial base, you need to be able to produce plastic. This is a huge disadvantage of the moon. You are limited to metals and rock.
> you got everything to get plants to grow. Nothing can grow on the moon unless you import carbon.
Nothing is going to be growing on Mars either, outside of pressurized chambers, which, in the event of a loss of pressure, will kill everyone inside. The atmosphere is so thin that you really aren't gaining anything by not just bringing the carbon with you.
Frankly, the idea of colonizing the Moon or Mars, except in the sense of a temporary science post like the ISS, is a sci-fi fantasy that will never make practical or economic sense. Why am I going to want to build an industrial base on Mars? Why is it economically feasible? How many people are going to want to live in a cramped cage their entire life, never able to go outside, afflicted by low-gravity diseases? What can be produced or gotten on Mars that can't be on Earth for 1% of the effort and cost?
People don't want to live in Antarctica or the bottom of the ocean right now, and these environments are much more survivable than the Moon or Mars, and more economically feasible to boot. Why is anything going to change?
> People don't want to live in Antarctica or the bottom of the ocean right now, and these environments are much more survivable than the Moon or Mars, and more economically feasible to boot. Why is anything going to change?
Absolutely but I think you underestimate human desire for adventure and breaking boundaries. Living on the arctic is not something that really push the boundaries on anything.
Helping to establish a human presence on another planet is something a lot of people would find meaningful. Why by another cog in the wheel among 7 billion other people? Why not go to Mars instead a make a significant difference?
Be among the few names who established the first colonies and secured humanity's presence on an alien world?
> Nothing is going to be growing on Mars either, outside of pressurized chambers, which, in the event of a loss of pressure, will kill everyone inside. The atmosphere is so thin that you really aren't gaining anything by not just bringing the carbon with you.
Yes you gain something, are you kidding? How practical is it to have to send a spacecraft to earth every time you need to expand your farm?
With Mars you don't have to. Initially you will. But Mars has all the resources to build everything we have on earth. All resources for expanding farms on Mars exist on the planet.
> which, in the event of a loss of pressure, will kill everyone inside.
It is not like you immediately die when there is a breach. For a large dome, there will be plenty of time to fix the leak.
> would likely cause more problems (dust and erosion) than it would help
Agreeing with your comment but to add: To my knowledge, the biggest problem the athmosphere is causing is the dust storms which can go on for months and which occlude the sky. This means you have to be able to hold out for that period. The Moon has pesky dust too (which got everywhere, it's so small it got through the joints in the space suits).
Maybe if your plan is to have a base where most goods are transported from Earth. If you want self sufficiency Mars is much better in terms of available raw material.
Moon has nothing useful on it other than H3 -- and it doesn't really make us a multi-planet species in the sense we're protected from cosmic dangers (gamma ray burst, red dwarf etc) as the moon is relatively as vulnearable as the Earth to these.
Going to Mars won't save us from a gamma ray burst either. Not sure what you mean by red dwarf but I take it that you mean an event on the scale of a gamma ray burst. Mars ain't good enough for that.
I'd be curious to hear about events which would wipe out Earth and the moon but leave Mars intact.
That's hundreds of millions of years into the future. It's further away from us than the dinosaurs. Even if we never went to Mars (which we absolutely should), it would have been a major achievement had we survived for so long.
Yes, at Lagrange point 1 between the Sun and Earth.
This approach has a big advantage: If it has some unwanted side effects we can rather quickly stop doing it. That's unlike some other proposed solutions such as creating clouds by spreading stuff in the upper atmosphere.
Elon is a long way from wasting money on colonizing Mars.
Everything SpaceX has done, and probably will do for the next decade, has immediate value for exploring and exploiting outer space.
As for actually colonizing Mars, he should perhaps read more Phillip K. Dick.
I had never even heard of a “James Lovelock” before now, and after skimming the comments here, my desire to know about him went from zero to negative.
On the subject of Mars etc., how are billionaires, especially the older ones, not already bored with all that Earth has to offer? Surely they must have experienced everything, natural and manmade, and crave for something more than the accumulation of wealth by now.
What Lovelock is suggesting that if Musk wants a challenge, he should try to fix this planet. Instead of seeking a challenge in brand new, clean space for him and a few extremely lucky individuals, how about saving the planet for seven billion of them?
I think Lovelock is missing that Musk is also doing some of that -- he thinks that electricity storage is the key. I suspect Lovelock knows that -- the "Mars" and "Musk" aspects are a tiny fragment of the interview, and perhaps if he'd elaborated he's have talked more about that. Lovelock is right that there's much more to do, though.
Musk is perhaps understandably self-centered in that he wants his adventure to include a clean-sheet planet, an adventure open to humans for most of history until the last century or so. There are lots of adventures here, but they're messier and harder, and it's not as if Musk is opting completely out of them. So I think Lovelock is partly on the mark and partly off it, and I think it's a mistake for the headline to focus on that one tiny part of the interview.
Not speaking on behalf of rich ppl, just want to say imo there's a lot more than what can be easily acquired through money. A lot of things are so disgustingly hard to achieve no matter how rich you are and the kind of sensation they provide can never be purchased.
"I had never even heard of a “James Lovelock” before now, and after skimming the comments here, my desire to know about him went from zero to negative."
Although I question the conclusions, I feel that having read his original work "The Gaia Hypothesis"[1] is required to be broadly literate in our age.
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.
Not super aware of literature on this. Maybe transhumanism and future-looking AI stuff (not current AI challenges). It’s clear if you think about it. I don’t think the people who are aware of this are talking about it much yet, because it would freak most people out a bit too much. Note that Elon Musk does not talk so much lately about spreading humans through the solar system... he talks about spreading consciousness.
The thing is that Mars settling is not an idea Musk thought up. It's something that space pioneers have been pursuing since the dawn of the space age or even slightly before. Tsiolkovsky and the other Russian (and later Soviet) Cosmists. Robert Goddard and Wernher Von Braun. And it was kind of the understood backdrop narrative to NASA's foundation and Apollo, why it seemed to capture everyone's imagination. Yeah, scifi. But scifi is not supposed to be a synonym for the impossible or fantastic (ala Star Wars). Jules Verne (for instance) is scifi but powerfully predictive in what technologies ended up existing (nuclear submarines, space travel in capsules, etc). People EXPECTED space settlement after people landing on the Moon and were excited about it. I think the Cold War eventually kind of destroyed that optimism for a while just due to dread and dystopia becomingfully mainstream in media and scifi.
NASA never gave up human missions to Mars as a goal (and not just supporting the search for life, but as a goal in and of itself, with permanent presence as the goal). Apollo was wound down in favor of Shuttle, which was to lay the groundwork for Mars by lowering launch costs and establishing Space Station Freedom (which became ISS) as a platform (in part) for building and launching missions to Mars. The Soviets were pursuing a similar path. After losing the Moon race, they chose to refine long-duration human spaceflight instead, developing the Salyut space stations built with logistical support from many launches (a first for spaceflight, and considered a prerequisite for Mars). Salyut was considered a kind of precursor to a Mars transfer vehicle. Salyut expanded to the Mir program, whose spares and follow-ons ended up contributing to the critical propulsion elements of ISS. But like NASA, the goal was still eventually Mars and space settlement. (And around this time in the US, there were also space settling enthusiasts focused on just scaling up space stations to be large, permanent settlements... a kind of rival for the Mars sect).
In the 1980s and 90s, there were a group of Mars enthusiasts in industry and NASA that started pushing Mars settlement hardcore after a few decades of post-Apollo disillusionment. They saw ISS and space stations in general as a kind of distraction, a needless cost and time tax for missions to Mars. They were (are) led by Robert Zubrin, who developed an architecture for Mars exploration called Mars Direct that could do cargo or crew launches to Mars in just one launch, with rendezvous with the different elements happening on the surface of Mars, not in orbit. They also did some important work on in situ resource utilization (ISRU), i.e. the idea of producing the vast majority (or all) of the fuel, oxidizer, and even consumables like water and air from resources on Mars (initially relying primarily on Mars' CO2 atmosphere, but later incorporating surface ice as knowledge about the extent of water on Mars expanded), convincing NASA to hesitantly baseline ISRU for future missions (previously had been Apollo-like all-up missions bringing all supplies from Earth). They were more vocal about permanent settlement on Mars as the end goal than NASA. Robert Zubrin and his group established The Mars Society in 1997, with permanent settling of Mars as a primary goal. Today, The Mars Society has Mars analogue research stations around the world where volunteers dress in mock spacesuits and live in mock space habitats (naturally, modeled after the ones from Mars Direct) and conduct mock Mars missions, including studying rock samples from the surrounding area (usually some kind of remote desert). This has been going on for decades, now.
Elon Musk, shortly after selling Paypal and getting rich, became kind of converted into this Mars settlement vision. He donated a bunch of money to the Mars Society (they named a telescope at one of the Mars analogue research stations after him), and they convinced him to try to send a greenhouse to Mars to kickstart the public's imagination on Mars, with the goal of increasing NASA's budget and focusing them on the humans to Mars goal. Long story short, he tried buying ICBMs from Russia on the cheap, was rebuffed, and so ended up starting SpaceX (and the ambition has grown tremendously from that point on).
So I'm not surprised not everyone is on the Mars settlement train. You've got to catch the Mars bug. It's not for everyone. But it's much bigger than Musk alone. It's an old dream going back over a century. Here's the Mars Anthem, with words written by Robert Zubrin, describing in grandiose terms the goals of the Mars Society:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj8-NcyULps
We must really really destroy earth to make mars even remotely interesting to try and inhabit.
To me the whole Mars thing looks like an attempt to find unclaimed territory. The earth has been claimed, there are no vast riches on a mysterious far away continent anymore. The digital, as the extension of the world, has been claimed. Where to expand now? Mars.
> 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 learn is how awful it is up there: You can't breathe the air, the pressure of the atmosphere is a tiny fraction of what we have on Mount Everest.
Instead of straw manning Musk and implying he doesn't know about the composition of Mar's atmosphere, try steel manning him and trying to figure out what he's doing.
Musk has captured the imagination of financiers, engineers and the public and gotten them all pulling in the same direction - into space. Musk is marketing, that's his core skill. Mars is the sales pitch that drives SpaceX.