She’s cute. No wonder people buy her books.
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No one here seemed to have read the interview, in which KSR was very pro-space travel in general:
It’s really heartwarming to see the old science fiction visions of everyday presence in and use of space coming true. I also like the public sector leadership and their “off-earth, for earth” rationale, which is the strongest one by far. Wonderful stuff.
But thinks that Musk specifically hasn’t thought through all aspects of his plan:
I have to note, first, that this scenario is not believable, which makes it a hard exercise to think about further. Mars will never be a single-person or single-company effort. It will be multi-national and take lots of money and lots of years.
So it’s not that KSR is against space travel, he just thinks Musk’s specific plan is not very feasible. He doesn’t go into specifics about that in the interview, but given that the guy has been thinking about/studying/writing hard sci fi about these scenarios for more than 20 years, I suspect he has better reasons than all the crap screamers in this thread have to think otherwise.
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It doesn’t sound that silly to me, compared with a city on Mars. Then again, that sets the bar pretty low.
Also, if we put a city of ten million on the South Pole, we just know we’re going to destroy the place. It doesn’t even need to be said. But somehow with Mars, we don’t think about it or don’t care as much.
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I’m kinda surprised I have to point this out but every dollar spent in space results in $14 in new revenue from licensing and new technologies.
I get why you feel that way though. Many people do. It’s the reason we no longer can build the Saturn V or have an operational sub orbital vehicle. But the truth is that not only do we benefit from space exploration and research financially, we also benefit through the science as well. What we learn from such ventures benefits us all. It always has.
Many ventures were unnecessary but I’m thankful we went ahead anyway. From the circumnavigation of the globe, to a young Darwin joining the Beagle on a survey mission, to launching the Hubble space telescope, unnecessary and expensive projects like these may seem silly to you but my eyes are on a greater prize.
Besides, being a single planet species will one day doom us all.
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I’m all for exploration and science.
Putting a million people on Mars, however, is well beyond that. I’m sure you have an idea of the monetary costs and energy inputs involved in getting relatively simple craft and small masses into low Earth orbit.
Is it really realistic to think that expending the money and energy required to send tens of millions of times the mass to Mars safely is going to return 14x the benefit?
Hey, I’ll go so far as to say Musk and Space X will probably come up with some worthwhile tech from this project, and they might even put a person or two on Mars in the next 20 years, but quite frankly the idea of a self-sustaining million-strong colony in the foreseeable future smells like a great big steaming pile of bullshit.
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If it could be shown that there is no biological science whatsoever to be studied on Mars – no current biology, no paleontology, no paleobotany, etc. etc. – then I wouldn’t have a big ethical problem with destroying Mars. Dead rock, no consciousness, not a habitat…
The only beings I could imagine being inconvenienced would be our distant descendants/successors, and I would assume that they would have sufficiently advanced tech that they could fix any damage caused by 21st century follies.
But, I don’t think Mars is going to be proven dead beyond a shadow of a doubt before we start contributing our own biology, and that would be a shame.
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It makes sense that the engineering problems are what interests Musk most. He IS an engineer and that’s the part we’ve made good progress on in recent decades. My problem with his plan is that he treats biology as an afterthought, even when it comes to long-term colonization.
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I came to say this, albeit in a far more clumsy manner. I’m with you 100%.
(And I love me KSR as a writer – I don’t care for him all as a philosopher or a technocrat)
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Does he? Or perhaps he understand that his field is engineering and therefore his efforts are best focused on that. It’s not as if this project will only involve ideas that spring from Musk’s mind. Of course there will be the questions of biology to resolve but you must start somewhere.
I see no reason it would not.
Why? Because the scope of the project is too large for you to fathom? It seems the problem may be that the goal is so lofty that people are speaking out against it. But then people said we would never break the sound barrier and that going to the moon was an impossibility as well. Heck, Cuban got rich by doing something people said was not possible. It seems every time someone says something can’t be done, it gets done.
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If he is serious about building a permanent mars colony then he should be spending more resources recruiting people who are experts in fields outside his own expertise. Maybe buy up the old Biosphere 2 habitat and restart the project.
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When you say more I have to assume you know what percentage of funds are currently going towards recruitment of experts and you think that percentage should be higher. Care to share your information on how much is being spent recruiting expert talent?
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Do you think that this is inevitable, or could it be a contingent fact about the specific investments in space made in the 1960’s and 1970’s?
Technological improvement curves are typically S-shaped rather than exponential: progress is slow at first when a technology is expensive and has few commercial applications. Progress speeds up when the cost of manufacturing goes down enough to allow applications of the technology to enter the market and fund more R&D. And then progress slows as the low-hanging fruit gets plucked and the engineering problems that are being solved hit diminishing returns.
It seems likely to me that the $14/$1 figure is from the vertical part of the S-curve. I doubt that’s the case if you use the same metric starting in, say, 1990.
There’s plenty of counterexamples. Some things are physically impossible or so difficult they may as well be (controlled fusion, FTL travel, time travel is obviously non-exhaustive). Colonizing Mars may not be one of those, but then again it might be. It seems like faith in the myth of progress is the main reason that people believe Mars colonization is possible/probable/inevitable.
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Because it’s too large to be feasible. Because it’s folly to ponder sending a million people on a one-way trip to a dead rock.
And what about the environmental consequences of using the massive resources required to get billions of kilograms of people and equipment from here to there?
Do we not care about the climatic impacts of firing thousands of booster rockets? Why not? Because who cares, now we have a Plan B if we wreck our Plan A?
I know I’ll never convince you just how ridiculous this plan is, but at least I can take comfort that it just ain’t gonna happen, at least not anywhere near the scale envisioned.
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That is a fair point, it is possible that Elon musk has been secretly funding all kinds of biological initiatives. But if he is doing so then he certainly isn’t talking much about it. Most of his presentations are about rockets rockets rockets!
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I thought that Musk had said he was only interested in / was focusing on building the ships to get to Mars
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How dare he focus on what he is focusing on right now. Shameful.
based on what? your gut feeling? Your comment reminds me of reading about how people believed going over 25Mph was folly, or women voting, or de-segregation, or going faster than sound, etc etc etc
Actually, that’s the current rate of return as of 2015, the S model theory notwithstanding.
Actually, there is progress on all of those impossible fronts
Controlled fusion https://www.rt.com/usa/fusion-energy-power-ignition-806/
FLT travel and time travel are essential the same thing but here is real independant progress on both fronts Meet The Physicist Building A Time Machine To See His Dead Father | HuffPost Impact and NASA May Have Accidentally Discovered Faster-Than-Light Travel
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- Can you provide a citation? It’s essentially a meaningless number as quoted – I need to understand the method by which it was derived to know how seriously to take it.
- Even if that’s the rate of return as of 2015, I still suspect you’d get a different (lower) figure if you started in 1990 instead of all of time.
You’ve established without a doubt that people are working on these problems, but none of those articles actually establishes that these technologies are possible. There is a difference between possibility and wishful thinking.
Try this example: why don’t we have undersea cities? We know they’re physically possible just as we know that hydrogen fusion is physically possible. But why doesn’t anyone actually live in a city on the bottom of the sea? Thinking through that one might help you understand why, even though hydrogen fusion is physically possible, it might not be technologically feasible.
ETA:
-The fusion article was genuinely interesting – researchers may have gotten more energy out than in for a fusion reaction for the first time. But that took 60 years and it was the easy, safe part. The difficult, dangerous part is controlling the reaction – keeping it from either feeding on itself and getting bigger and bigger or not going fast enough and fizzling out. The researchers quoted said 30 years until fusion power is on the grid, which is extremely optimistic. Scaling it according to how long researchers thought they’d get an energy-productive reaction, it will probably be another 100 years or so before fusion power. But global warming and/or peak oil will likely prevent providing the needed funding to make that a reality.
-The interview with the time travel guy demonstrates that there is at least one person so distraught over the death of his father that he wants to invent time travel. It does not do anything to make the actual problem of time travel more tractable or establish the possibility or likelihood of time travel.
-The techtimes article is kind of trashy – it’s not based on peer reviewed research but on some physicists dicking around on a message board. They may have accelerated particles to superluminal speeds (though remember last time that happened?). But it seems unlikely even if we assume that they really achieved this that it could be scaled up to macro. Making Bose-Einstein condensates is kind of an old-hat physics experiment at this point, but no one’s every been able to create a macroscopic Bose-Einstein condensate.
It sometimes helps to try to understand the science and engineering involved rather than grasping at any article that gives the barest glimmer of a possibility of something.
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Well, y’know, KSR posited that if we send all the smart people to Mars, they’ll finally be able to concentrate and will quickly develop an immortality vaccine, so that solves that problem.
(I did not care much at all for that book.)
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I think that was mostly just a plot device to enable Robinson to tell a story in which one group of characters was able to witness the terraforming of an entire planet.
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Since you believe it’s feasible, feel free to show me some back-of-the-envelope math to show it’s a realistic idea.
How many kilograms of materials, supplies and people will need to be lifted off the Earth? At what cost? Roughly how many launches will it take, at what cost in energy and pollutants, never mind dollars?
At this stage, I won’t even ask you to bother with the even more unlikely part about getting to Mars and surviving there in the delightful caves. Just convince me that putting a million people 100 miles above the surface of the Earth isn’t a ridiculous, resource-sucking pipe dream, and then we can move on to the hard part.
