I've noticed that during the webcast they talked much more about their planetary colonisation project than they usually do. I guess it makes sense since today is the first time they actually implement the re-usability plan they believe is the key to this colonisation.
But frankly, is the cost of going to mars really that important for its colonisation? I mean, I wouldn't move to mars even if going there was free. For one, there's no breathable air, for Pete's sake. They are talking about building a city on a place where there isn't even breathable air. That's insane.
This whole thing is very conflicting to me. On one hand I can appreciate the technological achievement and I acknowledge that re-usability will be extremely useful for space exploration, but on the other hand I can't help thinking that those people who get excited about building a city on mars are completely delusional.
I'm ok with aiming high and en-passant solving cheap access to orbit. Anything else is gravy, imagine if that dream did not exist this whole saga would not have happened.
Dreams are good, they allow people to expend energy chasing that dream and the spin-offs from that may be worth as much or more to humanity than the original dream, even if we may not be able to figure out what path that might take today.
I'm certainly not complaining, hope they dream a lot more and will produce many more useful milestones, and if they don't end up achieving their dream I'll feel sorry for them but thank them for their incredible service anyway.
Think of that dream as a very powerful motivator for a lot of extremely smart and talented people. It's the fox to a whole pack of hounds that would very much like to gain ground and as such it seems to be doing a very good job.
It's a bit disappointing to me that poverty, human trafficking, addiction, habitat destruxtion, cultural erasure, genocide, torture, extinction, etc aren't very powerful motivators for such people.
I feel such pressure to use our new skills to solve these problems, but I know 10 years ago they were a combination of invisible/impossible to me. If I hadn't been aggressively pushed by smart feminists to examine my life more closely I might still feel the same way. If I hadnt been intellectually curious enough to stick with them, despite their worldview seeming so alien and wrong, I would probably be working in VR now instead of housing.
Maybe it's just that such challenges are too dark for some people... Mars is all optimism, no need to struggle with the realities of evil. Maybe some people just cant handle the pain of working on poverty and violence. I totally understand the desire to avoid fields where evil plays a daily role in your job. I grew up in an alcoholic household so pain seems sort of normal, although I have an intense desire to dismantle its causes. I accept that a more emotionally healthy person might just nope out of such challenges.
I guess it's also a little like the video games vs life choice: Mars is a clear goal, with all the players in a clear sandbox. Poverty is a messy mindfuck of a problem. That makes it more intellectually challenging, but also scarier. Failure hurts worse: a rocket that doesn't launch is one thing. Watching your friends die is another.
Still, it puzzles me that so many smart people need something like Mars to feel like they have a hard problem that's worth solving. I see so many around me. Easing violence seems like such a bigger win than getting off planet.
The understanding of climate change was born out of the study of planets in our solar system. It is reasonable to expect that the investigation of the human condition would greatly benefit from its study away from the planet that humans evolved from.
There are insights into ourselves that we are simply unable to even conceptualize that would be possible. Humans living (not just surviving) on another planet, will change us
They're not really comparable. You can engineer your way to Mars. You cannot engineer your way to a solution for addiction or violence; unless you want to launch a full-blown dystopian eugenics program.
That's a bit disingenuous. There are people are trying to engineer solutions to those problems, both with and without technology. They've also been around longer than rocket scientists. For every 1 SpaceX engineer, say there's 10 other humans working solving violence, addiction, homelessness using data and science. What if they just don't show up in TechCrunch.
Things like space-flight can be solved by relatively small teams without having to convince billions of people from different cultures to change what they are doing.
In terms of global development, things have improved greatly over the last 50 years, say.
So it depends what kind of person you are. Do you like sitting in committees? Do you like, or can you tolerate a great deal of convincing other people to do things? How many cycles of that have you been through? How many otherwise good projects have you seen fail due to (human) factors entirely outside of the participants' control.
Although it may seem that way sometimes, hard engineering problems aren't really an adversarial game. Hard human problems typically are.
Do you have an equation for easing violence? There is an equation that tells us how to get to mars - we only need to design a machine that meets the requirements.
Human nature does not lend itself very well to engineered solutions. If you can so much as put a minor dent in that problem that does not involve cures worse than the disease that would be an engineering feat much more impressive than anything that SpaceX has done to date.
The thing about Mars is that it does not solve any problem. It just give us time to solve the problem. It mulitply the chance of humanity surviving a problem that kills our only "capsule", Earth.
And that dangerous event could be external to humanity. So Mars is a part of a solution for all that : buy all the rest of humanity time to solve that problem and making sure enough humans can be born and live so that at least one find a solution. It is the only thing engineers can do. Give us the chance.
There are no plausible scenarios where survival of the species is easier on Earth than on Mars. Even in the worst runaway climate change scenarios or the worst nuclear war scenarios, Earth is still more habitable than Mars.
Everything today is better then yesterday and tomorrow everything will be better then today (on average on a global a scale for all the issues you pointed out). Progress is being made all the time. But the news/media mostly just reports the failings/problems/issues (sells better) so it feels like everything is getting worse.
(There are some looming issues on the horizon like climate change etc. which might change this course in the future.)
My morality doesn't work in terms of averages. "Better on average" doesn't equate to "good enough" to me. It's a way for people to make themselves feel better about doing violence. I am responsible for countless murders due to living a normal American lifestyle. The fact that previous Americans were responsible for a higher number of murders doesn't make that go away.
There are quite possibly more slaves today than there have ever been. The fact that there are more non-slaves too doesn't cancel that out for me.
We are the first generation with the information processing tools to cut these problems down by orders of magnitude in a couple decades. The faster we do the more lives will be saved. If we make the same incremental improvements our parents generation did, we will have failed.
> My morality doesn't work in terms of averages. "Better on average" doesn't equate to "good enough" to me....
Nobody is expecting it to. But do you know why poverty, disease, hunger and slavery are at far lower levels compared to historic norms? It's because at the global scale we are enormously richer than we have ever been before. We can afford multi-billion dollar programs to fight diseases such as Ebola, HIV, Malaria and the many others we have actually eradicated. We have huge reconstruction and investment programs for developing countries. Space technology, including satellite communications systems, GPS and weather monitoring are revolutionizing third world agriculture and market economies as well as saving lives.
A richer and more prosperous world is also a world better able to tackle the problems you quite legitimately raise.
The way I think about this is: if not SpaceX, some govt or company will one day establish a base on another planet. Something like the stations we have in Antarctica. So SpaceX taking a shot at this isn't totally absurd - over-ambitious, sure, but not so ridiculous as to be out of the question. Maybe it won't happen for a few decades, or a century - but IMO it's very likely it will happen some time. And that's what ultimately matters. It doesn't have to be Elon Musk's company that does it.
Cities on Mars - it's not productive debating this at such an early stage, though it makes for an interesting discussion.
I think who gets there first is going to have a huge impact on what kind of society is established on Mars (the economy, the legal system, the culture, how infrastructure is managed, government, etc...). SpaceX may change its culture over time, but as things stand now I would rather live in a society established by SpaceX than one established by, say, Boeing.
> They are talking about building a city on a place where there isn't even breathable air.
Yet. As far as I know, the plan is to create some generators and a basic colony that can terraform the land to try and create an atmosphere on the planet. It's not unlike what they were planning in "Total Recall" but, at least in this case, there's more science to it than fantasy.
Well, there is probably a reason why nobody thought it was worth doing it again ever since.
More seriously though, just because many projects were wrongly considered foolish in the past, does not mean one can not point at a new one and call it foolish. History tends to remember those who turned out to be brilliant, and forget all those who genuinely were foolish.
The example I like is Franz Reichelt [1]. People around him were watching as he prepared to meet his death. Nobody said "don't do that, you'll kill yourself". Why? I guess because they were not sure, and they did not want to be the person who dissed someone who might be remembered as say the Wright brothers were.
I guess I'm not comfortable being the guy who says nothing as he watches people being foolish or delusional.
Was he really foolish or just ahead of his time and willing to brave the risks?
OK, that one guy was foolish he should have started small and worked his way up. Perhaps a death defying leap onto a mattress, would have been better. But there are plenty of others who were close to a variety of successes and them not succeeding doesn't mean they were foolish.
There must have been hundreds or thousands of potential aviators, but we remember the brothers at Kittyhawk because of their success. This doesn't make the others fools, likely they were successful in some of their other plans or iterated on designs more like the flyer afterwards. From all of their perspectives as long as they minimized danger, unlike Franz, they would live to see another day and keep attempting High risk High reward situations.
This is much the same with startups today. Plenty made their fortunes in tech startups and while history might call all but a few failures, many are relaxing with their millions or even just comfortable enjoying their backup plan of a high tech job and settling down with a family.
That's an argument of semantics. I mean people can jump onto giant airbags without either parachute or jumpsuit from very high heights. I wouldn't call that landing, and in any case that's not what Franz Reichet was attempting.
First, "adventure" is a reason to go there, not to settle.
Second, I'm not buying the "drastically improve humanity's chance at survival" argument. There have been several mass extinction events in the past, so in order to survive one that might be coming, we should move to a place where there is likely no life at all? That does not make any sense to me.
If we can survive on mars, we can survive on Earth no matter what can plausibly happen to it.
Mankind will likely survive the next mass extinction[1], and we don't have to go to mars for that.
> If we can survive on mars, we can survive on Earth no matter what can plausibly happen to it.
Exactly. So going to Mars and staying there long-term will require us to develop many solutions that can be applied here on Earth. Both under current conditions and conditions that would currently be civilisation-threatening.
Its a reach. For comparison, lets start a city on top of Mt Everest? Better air, better weather, lots easier to get to, and help is only days away instead of months. Yet we haven't begun to do things even that ambitious yet.
There's no special humanity wide significance to having a city on Mt. Everest. And there is also no new science that such a city would enable. Lastly, it wouldn't teach us anything about our place in the universe.
Talking about trial runs for Mars, which of course will be far less exciting. But can we imagine doing even that much? It seems preposterous to put a city on a tall mountain - but we're already talking about another planet.
It's hard to say when and how, of course. It might not happen in any serious fashion until asteroid mining and space tourism became real industries, which should result in improved tech and much lower costs for building Mars colonies.
> Think of the old east India trading companies only bigger.
There is no spice on mars. Even if there was, it would not make sense to transport it to Earth[1]. It's not clear what would be the business model. The only thing I see is tourism : hotels, casinos, etc. So basically like Las Vegas, but on mars. Just as in Futurama [2].
Could be cool, but probably not exactly the romantic image Musk's supporters might have in mind.
1. "Well, I think any natural resource extraction on Mars would be - the output would be for Mars. It definitely wouldn't make sense to transport Mars stuff 200 million miles back to Earth. Honestly, if you had like crack-cocaine on Mars, in like prepackaged pallets, it still wouldn't make sense to transport it back here. It's be good times for the Martians, but not back here. Resources would be for a colony to use." http://shitelonsays.com/transcript/elon-musk-at-mits-aeroast...
Everest isn't really better weather. Parts of Mars get up to 70 F in the summer day, and the thin atmosphere means even a big storm doesn't have much impact even on someone walking around (the events that start The Martian simply can't happen as depicted).
I'd build an bioshpere 3 in Antarctica or deep sea rather than Everest. Build sustainable ecosystems on hostile places on Earth will help bootstrapping Mars. Colonising Mars is still an important goal for headlines (and funding), and to have something great for kids to aspire for.
One thing I don't like is that Musk stated that he expects that colonization project to be a public-private partnership. That means that the government will put money into it, and I'm not OK with the State investing in what is to me nothing but an extraordinarily exotic real-estate project. Going to mars for science is ok. Going there and build insanely expensive accommodations, just for the sake of living there, is not, unless you do it with your money.
I think the stated reason for building a sustainable city on Mars--to ensure that a disaster on Earth doesn't end the species--is a damned good one. The science and other technology that will come as a result of the colonization is just bonus.
> I think the stated reason for building a sustainable city on Mars--to ensure that a disaster on Earth doesn't end the species--is a damned good one.
It's stupid. If we can live on mars, we can live on Earth no matter what happens to it. I don't see anything that could turn Earth into worse a place to live than mars.
But frankly, is the cost of going to mars really that important for its colonisation? I mean, I wouldn't move to mars even if going there was free. For one, there's no breathable air, for Pete's sake. They are talking about building a city on a place where there isn't even breathable air. That's insane.
This whole thing is very conflicting to me. On one hand I can appreciate the technological achievement and I acknowledge that re-usability will be extremely useful for space exploration, but on the other hand I can't help thinking that those people who get excited about building a city on mars are completely delusional.