Yeah. As long as the govt doesn’t get involved in the funding in any way, I suppose I don’t oppose him throwing his own money away, and creating a few jobs in the process.
Sad to watch, though. He started off engineering online payments, good for him; some good engineering and management. Then Tesla, a much bigger challenge in terms of tech and politics, and seems to be doing reasonably well so far; eventual outcomes not really known, but not crazy for trying. But then he figures he has to set his sights on something that will nearly defy the laws of physics, and which even if “successful” would amount to a few more bragging rights for the human race and nothing else. Sigh. Go testosterone.
Saying that a mission “fails” is only possible if one establishes what its actual objectives are. Something that this article doesn’t even make any mention of. Plans for colonizing Mars are incidental to Mars being a near-Earth depot. The point is not that it is easy to colonize Mars, its that it’s that it is much easier to access the rest of the solar system from Mars.
Resources are limited by two main factors: 1. humans poor management of them, and 2. expanding within a closed system. Not being limited to Earth presents ways of addressing both of these.
Stross mostly focuses upon the problems of interstellar colonization being problematic due to lack of robust biomes to travel in for millennia. His main criticisms of intersystem colonization are mostly that he thinks it is pointless and too expensive. He expounds upon the possible costs of various means of transcending Earth gravity. Those costs are precisely what Musk was addressing in his talk.
Humans visits to Earth are also brief and fatal, yet more of them do it every year.
Fortunately (?!?) the traits we have as a species that make us fuck up everything we touch will also prevent us from getting to Mars. Greed will take over, and because there’s no direct profit to be made from going to Mars, we will abandon the idea. We barely have the technology to send people to the Moon, and we only did that to show off to the Russians. Sending people to Mars is a leap forward technologically, and colonizing the Moon is a great leap forward in another direction. We are ridiculously far off from being able to colonize Mars. I would like to see someone sent to Mars during my lifetime, but that’s boring scientific stuff that nobody will be able to profit from, so even that won’t happen.
If the US government were to rejuvenate NASA and plan to colonize Mars, we’d be wasting precious resources currently needed for countless overseas warsridiculously militarized police forcesjack shit dealing with climate change.
The main real-world effects of Shrub’s nonsensical vaporware Mars mission were the cancelation or delay of a bunch of urgently needed climate-monitoring LEO satellites.
Do you think that modifying these traits is unachievably difficult? If the view of humanity is something so fatalistic, isn’t there more incentive to fashion humanity into something ecologically viable?
That was largely Musk’s whole point (starting to wonder if I was the only one here who heard him). The only way it can happen is if it - making human civilisation multiplanetary - is the actual goal. Because short-term profits and nationalism will never get us there. In fact, those shortsighted motivations are more likely to render humanity extinct sooner than later if there are not other people out there doing different work, with different motivations. What Musk is saying is that human survival and progress “has value” even if there isn’t anybody making money off of it, which sounds uncommonly sane to me.
Hmm. Or the naysayers can do whatever the fuck they want, and Elon can go suck balls on Mars before dying. (Just tryin’ to match the macho swagger here. Am I in the club? )
Here in empirical Reality™ efforts like this have always paid for themselves, in spinoff products and technologies that have led to greater human capabilities and knowledge, and in some cases to greater total wealth and freedom for our species.
Current efforts to bring modern technology to underdeveloped areas (without massively polluting industrial revolutions that tend to destroy families) rely on technology that was developed for the Apollo program, for example.
With Tesla Motors, Elon Musk has singlehandedly done more for the survival of the human race than any other human being alive today. I don’t have to like him (I don’t know him, so I don’t actually know if I’d like him) to recognize that.
There’s no shortage of water on Mars, it also has a significant atmosphere (unfortunately for us humans it’s mostly CO2, but we can grow things in it no problem).
If we took this attitude to technological development we’d still be living in caves. Not only is the continued development of space travel vital to the long term survival of the human race, it’s also vital to securing the future of life on Earth in the short term. We can’t predict exactly what revolutionary technological advances will come of all of this, but then we never can, we just have to plow ahead and see where it takes us.
)