Bezos and Musk are both waxing romantic about saving the human species with space colonization, it does sort of encompass a large number of our problems!
His media narrative is about being the visionary genius who will propel humanity to the next era--working on the big problems in a flashy way has the side effect of being pretty great for your public regard, and therefore most likely your ego. Being a Reddit manbaby and working on big, next-era goals are not mutually exclusive.
And where did I say he was working on all problems?
I was talking about the general psyche of tolerating abusive assholes ( ie. Steve Jobs ) and eccentric renaissance man who we "know" will crash and burn but we rationalize it like "we'll get some indirect benefits, just like the whole NASA thing" or "at least the trains run on time".
There are justified reasons behind this, but also a lot of excuses. The whole Elon fever is something between Steve Jobs and the usual Hollywood actor talking politics on stage.
The only reason why we have the prosperity that we have today is because inventive people built things that people like you said were not worth the time.
>The only reason why we have the prosperity that we have today is because inventive people built things that people like you said were not worth the time.
Does it? Do you have some examples? As far as I can tell, societal progress moves slowly and incrementally, with many people contributing by building on the works of others.
Automobiles were developed over hundreds of years. What was the skepticism there?
>Lightbulb
Edison "invented" the first commercial bulb in 1879. The first electric lights were created in the early 1800s.
>Printing press
People were trying to find ways to print books for centuries. Copying them was laborious. Some random monk claiming hand-writing to be morally superior doesn't change that.
"first lightbulb", "first automobile", "first airplane flight", "first color photograph" etc. are always arbitrary thresholds; much ink has been spilled over who, when, and where; over what exactly makes a lightbulb or whatever else. "First rocket" was probably constructed & launched around the time of gunpowder invention, i.e., in the 9th century China. That's not quite the same as reliably getting cargo & crew to the ISS.
In contrast, "first commercially successful" is about as clear-cut case of inventiveness and crossing a threshold as there can be: the product was made worth more than its costs, and thus became viable for large scale deployment. Whether by one big change or accretion of several smaller ones. Some key inventions regarded manufacturing process rather than the end product itself, and thus are easily lost on a casual observer.
Commercially viable means a fleeting dream got turned into an ever growing reality for us all. To wit, we already have had some /nuclear fusion reactors/ up and running. But we will only perceive it as a real thing when it becomes commercially viable.
I agree with you, but this isn't really a counter-argument; it bolsters my point.
The examples the OP gives of things that were coinsidered "not worth the time" were, in fact, so desired that the time between "first" and "first commercial" was sometimes spread over tens or even hundreds of years.
These were not things that skeptics wanted thrown in the dustbin, but instead a Great Man worked on to bring them to fruition. They were fine tuned over long periods by many people.
We have this weird thing where you can find a quote by some monk, or Steve Ballmer and the iPhone and we think, "No one believed!" But there is plenty of evidence (judging by time from "first" to "first commercial" ) that people saw value from day one. The iPhone was a big step, but itself was still just an iteration. That's how progress works.
The total mass launched to orbit is currently in the order of 500 tons per year. To start a colony on Mars, millions of tons of material would need to be shipped there from Earth. This massive launch capacity is why they want to build so many ships and creating an assembly line is how they want to do it.
Cool story bro but let's just think for a minute, why do you need an assembly line of spaceships now/near future when you don't even have one? when you ARE far away from sending an human to orbit Mars, let alone land one there? I'm talking about the actual realist act of doing that, not a pseudo Hollywood story of sending a "suicide mission", for what? Seriously, for what? When the day comes ( it never will, in those terms ) I want to see who actually steps up.
All of this assembly line talk is "idea guy" talk trying to keep all the plates spinning. Mars is just a pretext for other more mundane/ego/profit driven things.
And what I criticize is this mass stupidity driven romanticism where nobody calls him out on his Starship sized bullshit.
