Funnily enough, Musk did talk about the need to generate an artificial magnetic field (to help with minimising radiation), I don’t think he intends to do so by nuking the core though - maybe they’d just be localised things around the settlements. That kind of thing will be pretty far down the road though, the early colonists will just have to live with a higher incidence of cancer probably.
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One of the key things about a crewed mission and settlement is EXCITEMENT - who cares about a bunch of old rocks?
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Oh, artificial magnetic field, I have no problem with. We’re surrounded by the bloody things.
Using three (or was it four?) nukes to start a ginormous chunk of iron spinning fast enough to protect against solar radiation? Yeah, that I have a problem with.
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And of course, the technology to create an artificial magnetic field of sufficient power could also be used to create power from a natural magnetic field. And lift ships into orbit. (See Med Ship, by Murray Leinster.)
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Musk said they’re currently only using around 5% of their cash for the interplanetary project, they plan to ramp up their investment significantly once they move on to the post-Falcon stage of development. They’ll need a massive investment from all angles (public and private) to actually build the first ships though, along with people actually paying for their tickets to get there (~200k per head). Musk basically plans to spend all of his own money on this.
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No! Don’t do it!
That’s how the Martians died out in the first place!
They harvested their magnetic field for cheap energy, and that’s what stopped their core from spinning!
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I <3 the simpsons (well, ok, I love about the first ten seasons or so? Then I stopped watching. I should probably fix that someday). But the thing is, there’s a ton of technological advancements that the Apollo project created that had use outside space:
I know it’s very much the meta nowadays to imagine that the Apollo and Mercury projects, because of their political slant, didn’t actually accomplish anything that affected humanity as a whole in some positive way. But I think on a preponderance of the evidence, they in fact did. And private spaceflight, IMHO, is going to accomplish even more with far fewer dollars spent.
There’s a bigger argument I suppose, as to whether or not government should be supporting initiatives that don’t directly help everyday folk - I’m thinking DARPA, the arts, science research without direct immediate benefit, research into any part of the solar system other than Earth, etc. I’m Canadian, so I’ll be the first to say I don’t have a US-Centric perspective on those sorts of expenditures, but I do happen to believe that all of those are relevant in some way to a better planet.
I sure if I was born in a time when all cars were painted black and so on that I might feel differently, but nothing will ever be perfect and I don’t believe the solution is to turn off everything that isn’t directly related to the right now just because we have mo’ problems than money. Life needs to be about more than that, IMHO.
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I am not sure how strongly fantasizing usually factors into migration.
New frontiers do tend to be dangerous, but I think for many the danger is not the point. Isn’t it easy to subject oneself to danger where one is? Unfortunately, national parks are largely spoiled by being national. And they are much closer to museums than frontiers. Musk is saying that as a species, it is actually more expensive and dangerous to not go offworld.
Most apposite, I would say!
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I knew you were a Harry Partch fan.
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Something about the name Donald Downer and this gif makes me think he’s going to swallow a handful of barbiturates with his whiskey.
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Which is absurd. There is no conceivable disaster that renders Mars more habitable than earth. You could detonate all the nukes on the planet (~6,500 megatons) and have the KT impactor slam into us simultaneously (100,000,000 megatons) and still have a more hospitable environment than Mars.
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Maybe one.
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If we were in that period of solar system evolution where planetary bodies were still wandering about waiting to slam into each other, sure, be worried. But is like being concerned that our sun is suddenly going to turn out to have enough mass to turn into a blue giant and vaporize us. Science says that worry is dumb.
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Driving science and technology research as well as creating much needed jobs and housing opportunities!
#GiantMeteor2016
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This is America. We fight dumb worries with even dumber movie plots!
(That’s why we’ll all know what to do next time we’re facing down a Sharknado.)
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Apparently Musk is also worried about a robot uprising. Maybe he thinks that the uprising will start on earth, and the Mars dwellers can just turn off their interplanetary internet before the bad code gets fully transmitted over? Maybe rely on non-networked computers on the Mars colony, with paper printouts like in BSG? I dunno. At least our local earth robots aren’t responsible for supplying us with air.
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I think you’re forgetting about a more likely and more troubling prospect… a Donald Trump presidency.
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Not to get off topic, but why did you choose his face for your avatar?
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great, first pepe, now he’s ruined oompa-loompas. 
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And this is wrong. So far, the most massive problems have been for larger species. In the future, another problem is that if we screw up, future societies [hominid, corvid, or otherwise] won’t have easy starter fuels for a couple hundred million years, because this society burned them all.
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