I've been annoyed by this attitude for quite some time now. You see it all the time. Same deal with Tesla an Model S. Because not everybody can afford it, and because not all power is renewable an electric car like Tesla Model S seems like some sort of terrible crime.

Whatever people level against Elon Musk he seems to have already done something about it. People say don't go to Mars, save the planet earth instead. So Elon answers I made electric cars. Then they are like, but they don't run on renewable energy but coal power plants. So he can reply I am also promoting solar power through Solar City. Ah whatever, people shouldn't be driving car anyway, they should take trains. Well I came up with Hyperloop, Elon can answer to that.

But somehow it is just never enough. He should have pushed out an electric car yesterday which everybody could have afforded while simultaneously have closed down all coal plants and replaced them with solar.

And his rockets are nothing because he hasn't landed on the moon like NASA yet so screw him.

Man these negative people just gets my blood boiling. I am from Norway, so I grew up with the Law of Jante. I am surprised that that law seems to have spread across the globe.

Elon Musk grandly announces: I'm going to make humans an interplanetary species. This is such a grand and far reaching goal that were it to be achieved it would be by far, by very very far, the most important achievement of the human species so far. So far I've seen him put a rocket in orbit and land it again.* So excuse me if I tamper my enthusiasm.

Hyperloop, as you so mentioned? Yeah, he announced he would try to implement a concept already thought about, that without absolutely major breakthroughs in several fields remains impossible or at a cost of trillions of dollars, by far the most expensive private undertaking in history. So excuse me if I tamper my enthusiasm.

*(Don't get me wrong, this is an amazing achievement, it deserves all the praise it can get and I will be the first to give it. It's when he starts with these talks of master plans, and multitrillionaire projects, and making humans a multiplanetary species, that my brow starts to frown.m)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlas_LV-3B

Further, Musk explicitly admitted that his ability to create realistic schedules is poor, and the timeline should be considered more aspirational than concrete.

To me, "no ground in reality" would apply if they had announced, say, plans for a warp drive, or a teleporter. This plan looks extremely grounded in reality to me, which is why it's so exciting.

I'm also dubious of the economics of this venture. I simply don't understand how living on Mars is advantageous for anybody. Mr. Musk is welcome to set his money on fire if he wants, of course, but I don't see a Mars colony ever being a rational investment for those of us on Earth, nor do I see paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to live a hard life and die in a frozen wasteland to be rational. I suspect after the initial enthusiasm dies down, very few people will choose this.

Also, why would someone do this? Same reason people crossed the Atlantic, to take part in something greater than themselves. That's why I want to do it. Don't care it's cold and dry. It's obvious to me that it's the most meaningful thing I could do with my life. To each their own, but I'm pretty sure you can see how I come to this idea; it's not far fetched.

>Same reason people crossed the Atlantic, to take part in something greater than themselves.

People crossed the Atlantic because they wanted gold, or slaves, or timber, or land, or because they wanted to escape from religious persecution, or because they were slaves or prisoners transported against their will (by someone who wanted gold, or timber, or land). They received resupply, not as charity, but from companies which expected to receive gold, tobacco, timber, or other goods in return from their investment.

Colonization is driven by economics. That's why thousands live permanently in Norilsk, Yellowknife, La Rinconada,and Kalgoorlie, but nobody lives permanently at Amundsen-Scott, under the sea, or in LEO. If history is any guide, "how will this turn a profit" is the question any Mars colony needs to address if it is to have any hope of prospering.

That was before the industrial revolution - the new world offered relatively mild opportunities; nowadays people still cross the ocean - but these are all people from third world countries, or countries destroyed by civil wars; i think that in order to move people from the first world you would need to promise to make them really rich.

For instance: I'll try to do it for the sake of it. Sampling folks around me, a dozen would. It's not that crazy or rare a proposition. Arguably my environment doesn't represent an unbiased share of the population, but it's still a certain amount of people.

This is the big question to me... when is the right time to go? If we wait 50 years, wouldn't the technological progress make such an endeavor cheaper, safer?

And the counterpoint is, well... it's been 50 years since apollo and still we don't have the ability to get to mars, so if there's nothing driving the technology then it doesn't just magically happen, and there's nothing to say that it will magically happen in another fifty years either.

To me, it's not the natural extinction events that are driving this, but the thinking that there is a short window of perhaps 200 years between technological enlightenment (particularly in nuclear and biological engineering) where the risk of self-annihilition is considerably increased, and the only way to decrease it is to add the redundancy.

To be sure, we will not achieve redundancy during the first decades or even perhaps centuries of this colonization. I think that terraforming needs to happen first

Could a natural extinction event happen in the next 50 years?

If the answer is 'yes', I think we should go as soon as it is possible.

Humanity has been much closer to self-annihilation in the past. That gives me hope that we wont nuke ourselves before a giant rock falls from the sky ;)

Use that gray stuff in your head to think of a way to do it. It depends on the type and grade of bolt and how it's holding the things together. You could broach & thread the hole and replace your broken bolt with a larger bolt.

Then you can collect your metals, melt them down, work the metal with some oils to imbue it with some carbon, and make reclaimed bolts.

With power, a lathe, and time you can build anything round. With some more tools you can build anything of any shape.

Just recycle everything.

This is, thank god, incorrect. We have closed loop systems for food, water and air.

I have in front of me a shelf of books relating to closed loop systems. They were designed for two purposes, space travel on one side, and on the flip side as a final resort against nuclear annihilation. I can give you sources to look up if you're interested.

The details were worked out in the 70s and 80s, but the projects were closed down when the West began to lose faith, no thanks to exponential energy shocks but that is a separate story for another day.

> Even simple problems like "how do we replace failed bolts" will require resupply from earth for a long time.

I would not call the manufacture of steel bolts a simple problem except in a colloquial sense.

This is something different to food/air/water, but we should be able to accomplish this in a new closed loop project.

The secret to space colonization and closed loop systems is not physics, but chemistry, knowing the correct procedures for the synthesis of new compounds from more basic elements.

> I don't see a Mars colony ever being a rational investment for those of us on Earth

This is another subject again, but many rare things exist in abundance in space that could be used to create an economy unlike that of Earth, such as platinum and the isotope helium-3. Then there is the ability to use nuclear systems in a way we cannot without political and environmental problems on our home planet.

To lift all restrictions on the use of nanotechnology, biotechnology and nuclear engineering would unleash a torrent of creativity from our society that is presently bound up in other things.

This is something that is not anybody's area of expertise. It is the area in which businessmen are going to have to come up with exploits.

And let us not forget one important thing from geopolitics. He who controls the skies, controls the earth. So going up is not really an option. The full weight of military support should be behind any spacefaring entrepreneurs. You want Iran or Korea slinging rocks at our cities? You do not need nuclear weapons if you have that much kinetic force on your side! You cannot be at the Apex if there exists a rock hanging over your head.

Fortunately our enemies disapprove of science fiction, or we'd be in a spot of trouble!

Small note on helium-3: if you can get net energy from He3 fusion, you can also get it from the easier D-D reaction. The output of D-D is half He3, and half tritium which decays to He3 with a 12-year half-life, so you can breed He3 from deuterium and get energy in the process.

The D-D reaction does produce neutron radiation but it's lower energy than D-T neutrons and more easily shielded. The fusion startup Helion is attempting a hybrid D-D/D-He3 reactor, and says only 6% of the energy output would be in the form of neutron radiation.

The famous Biosphere 2 project:

Biosphere 2 John Allen The Human Experiment Jane Poynter Life under Glass Abigail Alling

There exists other biospherics projects but not much information on them. The ESA and Russian projects have materials but in languages I cannot read.

I suspect a lot of this stuff is also classified under sources and methods for other secret government projects.

> Small note on helium-3: if you can get net energy from He3 fusion, you can also get it from the easier D-D reaction. The output of D-D is half He3, and half tritium which decays to He3 with a 12-year half-life, so you can breed He3 from deuterium and get energy in the process.

That is nice. I know it is an important subject but am ignorant of even the most basic physics. Nuclear engineering appears to be dying which is an indictment of our society.

> The fusion startup Helion is attempting a hybrid D-D/D-He3 reactor, and says only 6% of the energy output would be in the form of neutron radiation.

I saw that, I think sama posted something about it or it was on techcrunch. I wish them the best of luck, because like I said, it is dying on the vine. Society, at least in the West, appears to be turning its back on all forms of science that could lead somewhere and the inmates are not just running the asylum but adding new wings to it.

Social dysfunction to me is the most likely calamity to strike us down, which is why we need to go to Mars, we need some kind of control group!

Musk is a visionary, and I think we need people like that. He said of Tesla and SpaceX that he went in with a fatalistic view: that there was a 10% chance of success.

In his talk yesterday, he repeated a phrase he used before, about moving the ball forward as far as he can.

So I'm an Elon Musk fanboy because he has real vision, tempered by reality and pragmatism.

I think what a lot of vocal skeptics react to is less Elon Musk (or whoever), and more to the seemingly mindless fawning of some of his 'followers'. That also bugs me.

As an engineer, I'm always looking for the ways something can fail. At the same time, I try to add as much vision as I can to my professional work, so long as its tempered with real engineering skepticism.

And Elon Musk appears of the same mindset.

By the way, did I note correctly that at the price tag was 'only' ten billion dollars to get the first humans on Mars? If close to true, that's pretty awesome, in my opinion at least. I and he suspect that once that benchmark is reached, the additional billions necessary to get a real civilization going there will flow more easily.

Yeah, he did make that claim. I think the specific claim was meant to ONLY cover getting the initial transportation system running, not the cost of setting up an initial colony there. He is focused on the transportation problem and wants other people to figure out how to support human life there.

I was also particularly impressed by the assertion that they would start sending some vehicle in every transit window to mars. Regular cargo flights to mars will be crucial to getting started on the science required to support the initial colony.

He even did that with regard to the chance of surviving the trip to Mars: he emphasised that there was a high risk of death for the first travellers and that he wouldn't want to do it. He actually stated that the first travellers would have to be comfortable with the high risk of death.

He's not saying "I'll colonize Mars". He's saying "We should colonize Mars. I'll make sure people interested in doing it can get there."

I feel that saying, "So far I've seen him put a rocket in orbit and land it again" is along the lines of when you come up with an invention called the potato peeler and everyone says, "But isn't that just a dull knife?".

People constantly downplay new ideas, they're only recognizing the similarity and not the genius the slight alteration an existing invention offered them.

On a positive note, Elon Musk has somewhat of a track record for executing on his dreams/goals and making it happen. :)

This is why people get irritated when he gets criticized because the arguments boil down to "this is so ambitious and will likely fail, so why even try?"

But going from this to imagining a space taxi and a space settlement? There is so much work that needs done first, effect of radiation on people? Effect of lower gravity? Effect of high concentration of heavy metals on plant life? Recycling everything? Making propellant on Mars? And so much more, he just hand waives it saying that is easy, all their idea relied on was reusing their booster 1000 times, even when they have not reused it once! If I wanted science fiction (not that I think it is impossible), I would read a book.

It's really like the Wright brothers doing their first test flight, and then imagining a commercial airline system, complete with Boeing 777, airports and hell even SR71 Blackbird. It's just too far off, and feels like a sci-fi con. Plus you can see what kind of people this thinking attracts, like that idiot who thinks that Burning man is what mars is going to be like, completely ignoring the thin atmosphere, lack of gravity, cold temperatures, and all its' effect on humans, plant and building materials.

Musk is pointing out, correctly, that this is possible with existing rocket technology -- at least the transportation. Keeping people alive once they're there is apparently somebody else's problem, but until we have the materials science for a space elevator, an obscenely heavy lift vehicle will probably have to do. Ultimately he's going to be asking a lot of people to climb on top of a monstrous Engine and hope that it explodes correctly, and I hope that his conscience is clear when that day dawns. Probably you are right that we're going to have a hell of a time keeping people alive on Mars, but we seem to have a tough time of that here as well.

This is not science fiction. There is no new physics required, just some fiendishly difficult engineering challenges. The Wright Brothers were able to build their plane because there was nothing physically stopping them. They had the scientific knowledge and the dedication, and everything else followed. Really it's not that people -- even Presidents -- haven't been talking about doing this and working on details and preliminaries for decades. This is news precisely because it's not science fiction. This time, it could actually happen.

And, again, nobody's saying it's anything other than a long shot, not even Musk himself. But a lot of people seem to be pooh-poohing it for bad reasons. For instance, the awful quality of the audience at the Q&A does not in reality tell us anything about SpaceX's ability to execute on some or all of this plan. In fact, I think Musk was ready for much more challenging questions than he ended up receiving (how could he not have been?)

And where in the recording did he say it was going to be hard?

Your argument comes across as "There are unsolved problems, and it's expensive, so don't try". Attitudes like that don't drive human progress. Society was not built on "it's hard, so don't try". I'm kind of surprised that this attitude has to be argued against on Hacker News, of all places.

So when he talk about stuff like this, people have begun to pay attention.

I am pretty sure this is exactly the kind things people said about going to the moon, build a machine that can add numbers together faster than humans etc... lol

"This is such a grand and far reaching goal that were it to be achieved it would be by far, by very very far, the most important achievement of the human species so far. So far I've seen him put a rocket in orbit and land it again.* So excuse me if I tamper my enthusiasm."

What have people see NASA do when Kennedy announced landing a man on the moon? Would they be able to accomplish if people would tamper their enthusiasm? I don't think so. They had to invent technology that didn't exist to accomplish it and I believe this needs the same thing. Hence the reason I am stoked about it.

Someone who grew up admiring the achievements in space and technology(I was born the same year the Voyagers left earth) that kind of dreaming and willingness, set me on course as a child to study science and work in tech. I am very excited to see announcements like this. Because without dreaming it up and setting a direction we would stagnate. Just like NASA did with the space shuttle program.

Helping out and working on a CubeSat project that is going to be launched in June 2017, I see how much work it is to even communicate in leo never mind beyond that(I can't even begin). Yet I can barely contain my excitement :)

I think you and Musk probably have pretty similar views on his chances for success. He mentions that this is precisely why he likes the name "Heart of Gold" for the first one of these ships he sends to Mars: It is extremely improbable and the Heart of Gold ran on an improbability drive.

edit: typo

And it could inspire a whole host of companies that simply try and do X on Mars. And perhaps in the process we will learn how to do X better on Earth also. Because the unique constraints of Mars are an extreme version of the sustainability issues we face on earth. Humanity has to evolve to be independant of ecosystems that we will otherwise destroy.

And even with solar power, I've heard criticism, stating that it's not renewable because you need rare earths possibly for solar panels (i don't know) but especially for batteries. And that it's only effective enough in regions where there is a lot of sun, even though Elon claims that it would work fine even in the UK.

Action > Words even when it's about physics.

I understand where you're coming from. But it is not about all negativity per se.

I am quite negative about our progress over the past few decades. But that is because I think we could be doing much, much more.

I think it is a combination of seemingly opposite attributes that is the most helpful here. Enough optimism to have faith in the future, and enough pessimism in another part of the brain to catch the bugs before you get taken down by the obstacles.

So please don't throw me in with the crab people! :-)

Elon Musk has given us a torch for the first time in a long, long time, and if he falters, our cadre shall pick up the fire and continue on.

http://millionmarspledge.com/

AD ASTRA.

A similar concept is 'tall poppy syndrome'.

One benefit of criticism is we might get to read an angle of attack we hadn't thought of and thereby improve our ideas and designs.

Sure, when people blow off an idea by saying "pointless, let's save the baby dolphins first" I don't find those comments helpful, but HN almost always has far more in-depth critiques.

Edit: fixed a word

We'll all in this game together, learning how to be a single mind. Be nice to your fellow human-cells no matter their goal, if their goal is for the greater good. The thing is - we can save the dolphins && live on Mars, not mutually exclusive goals.

If somebody told Elon "don't go Mars, do something like cure cancers first" what would he say? Thye're missing the point altogether, right? People are curing cancer, saving dolphins, working on hunger. The reason Musk is so successful and iconic is because specifically he followed things that interested and mattered to him, i.e. energy and colonization.

If someone is following their passion and investing enough energy to be recognized on the level of these people, they're assuredly more cognizant of what's in the realm of reality in their scope than the average journalist/internet commentator. I can glean so much from just listening to the man react to the audience's question.. the one about the Funny or Die video, he's sending "you're wasting our time" body language... I get it, though, this is a pointed, focused thing they're working on; grandiose and monumental indeed, focused nonetheless.

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html

Considering progress humanity made this letter is more actual than ever. So I wish more people understand that it's super important to work on what you like and can do the best since there always chance that space exploration help to solve other problems too.

Anyway success of people as species is through specialisation. Side effect is that we also have specialist naysayers

Skepticism is a good thing but it's unevenly applied in the weirdest way. Solar Roadways, it seems like the smallest amount of skepticism would have dismantled the entire idea. Two nobody snake oil salesmen from out of their garage were roundly applauded by everyone to such a degree that competitors opened up.

When Musk presents a design on a much larger scale following a career of related success, it's called down?

Therefore I appreciate criticism but I'm skeptical of its sources.

You don't need to be an expert to understand the limitations of rockets as a means of getting to space.

Here to the crazy ones.

I encourage people to say, "This won't work, here's why, but here's how it could."

All public forums go bad once they reach a certain size. Since everything is on a gaussian curve (fat mediocre middle, and two asymptotes, one for greatness, the other for the opposite end), it's just pure statistics that junk comments will start creeping in once the population grows beyond a certain threshold.

The things that aren't features (like the lack of notifications) also help.

I've been making comparative studies of a few communities (HN, Reddit, G+, Imzy, Ello), and it's interesting to see how various ones work. In particular, there's a tremendous culture against the types of even indirect personal attacks at HN which fly in spades elsewhere. I saw @dang inveighing against a comment which began with "<sigh>", on the grounds that that is the equivalent of an internet eyeroll.

On G+, discussion quality depends very much on the host and how they manage a particular thread. I've got problems with Google itself, but the platform can support quite good discussions. Overall participation has always been small (6-12 million users posting publicly per month, a value I'd had a hand in determining), but in corners, that's still a good crowd. The best circumstance is to cultivate a small group ~30-100 members or so, set firm expectations for participation, moderate aggressively (that is, promptly), though fairly and starting with social nudges. There's a balance between topic drift and derailment.

Reddit varies hugely by subreddit, the good ones are exceptionally good. The site as a whole has some faults that leak through even to the good subs though.

Ello has a very small (~10k or so daily, ~200k or so monthly visits) userbase, but it strikes me as quite well behaved for the most part, something I've commented on specifically to the site's admins.

Imzy, the "kinder, gentler Reddit" has largely proven not to be. For reasons not entirely suprising when you combine an on-tap, ad libitum anonymity access, lacking leadership, overtaxed / AWOL moderation, exceptionally ill-conceived notifications, threading, and response mechanisms, and a community drawn from SRS and similar beds of vitriol. It's not the issues advocated for, but the methods of advocacy, including ample amounts of friendly fire and hypocrisy, which generate problems.

I watched a trainwreck explode simply trying to discuss anonymity itself: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/qdxyzy2x4lbaq_4rx81nnw

HN seems in that sweet spot for me where it is large enough to have a good amount of discussion but still has very good quality.

Most "reddit but more free" sites turn into imzy or even worse voat. G+ communities are too small for me, and finding a good community is proving to be hard. And I've given up on reddit for any larger scale technical discussion (there's just too much vitriol and "my team is better" sentiment there. It always seems to focus on the negative, and creating a "positive only" subreddit seems like a bad idea, and it attracts the users that will fight that idea on principle)

I'll need to try Ello though. Have you looked at lobsters? It's much smaller than HN but also more technical (and with its own share of bias against anything newer in my experience)

Ello is tiny, though there are again some interesting folks. I'm simply impressed by the healthy socialisation.

I've done some rigorous "tracking the conversation" studies, which are based on terms I have interest in, across numerous sites. Blogs are still surprisingly relevant.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3hp41w/trackin...

I'm not familiar with lobsters.

You need to be invited by someone there, and they actually show the full invite graph, and I believe will somewhat hold you accountable if you invite spammers or trolls.

That being said, if you won't cause trouble I'd be willing to send you an invite if you email the account in my userpage on HN ;)

https://lobste.rs

the irony is too damn high

That said: discussions can be about the nominal topic, or they can drift, naturally, to other areas of interest. I find the meta-topic of "where is a good place to discuss the things I'm interested in discussing" to be generally on-topic. HN isn't a bad place for that.

With the ability to collapse threads baked into the HN page design, if you're not interested in a discussion, you can simply collapse it an move on.

On which: I'm increasingly hitting long threads from the bottom, for a few reasons:

1. The top-ranked post often isn't particularly on-topic, and attracts diversions posted for visibility.

2. It's easier to tell if a thread is of little concern if you follow it from the bottom.

3. It's easier to track a conversation from bottom to top and collapse going up, than it is to backtrack back to the top and collapse that. There's a subreddit which runs the collapse bars down the side of the thread, allowing a subthread, or entire thread, to be collapsed in one go.

4. There are often downvoted or flagged items which I feel are incorrectly tagged. It's usually faster to assess if something has some merits than to see if it's solid, and I'll nudge stuff up -- even if I substantially disagree with it -- if it seems it's been overly penalised.

HN, as with other online discussions, does poorly for deep and complex posts. One standout was The Edge Question issue a few years ago. There were a handful of comments on the first few essays, but given that there were ~100 - 150 total responses, it's not the sort of thing you can digest quickly.

I've tracked down other issues of the Question and gone through it. I have to say on balance I'm fairly disappointed in the quality -- much is narrow self-promotion of research, another large set is rampant speculation. The short an humerous responses are often disarmingly refreshing. And every so often there's something quite good. Sturgeon's quality estimate though seems generous.

Yeah, those things are an example of something that sounds great in theory, but doesn't work out in practice.

I don't remember wanting for collapsable threads and such four or five years ago, but now I can't imagine sifting through all the junk without them.

But I also feel like my karma goes up faster now too, but that could just be in my head.

The ability to collapse means you feel less bad about somewhat-off-topic conversation, which in a way can create worse discussion for the actual topic.

But at the same time some of my favorite HN threads have been offshoots of the submission's topic.

Pedantic point aside, you bring up an important point. Can behavioral incentives be aligned to avoid the bottom side of participation?

The Gaussian depends upon a notion of independence and identical distribution: independence can be dispensed of when one thinks about power laws.

If you can soberly state the assumption that the effects of a comment on any other comment is completely negligible, or falls into a couple of other strange exceptions that leads to the universal phenomena that generates the Gaussian, then and only then can you state that any quantity associated with comments is Gaussian. I do not think that this can be soberly stated as such.

All this said, I'm hugely and awesomely excited by the future prospects of becoming a multiplanet species.

(That doesn't mean that it will follow a Gaussian distribution, just that it could be defined in a way where it makes sense that it can sometimes be negative.)

It's a pretty old website now. I thought the hilarious banter/play on words would have run its course. There must be some psychological thing going on?

I am reminded we are just monkeys, hitting buttons when I'm there. (No offence to monkeys. I like you guys. I think you're better than us.)

Some fads just take longer to run their course? Skinny jeans for men--done. Guys buying $500 tennis shoes--still going on. Guys that have the semi-Mohawk. Just enough on the sides to get a job--almost done. I can't think of anything that doesn't have a beginning, and end. All I can think of, right now, is life is too short. Depressing. This summer went by way to quick for myself. I wasted it.

True, people here can be frustrating at times. But the mod team is one of the sharpest, and they cull abuse. And they do it well.

When the abuse is removed, what's left is substance. Sometimes that substance is disagreeable, and sometimes even hostile, but never personal.

It can be un-fun sometimes. But it's been rewarding to watch this place grow and see all of the new and old opinions intermix. Sometimes you end up learning about yourself more than other people, which are special moments. I haven't really felt that on other sites, so HN feels unique and worthwhile.

It's a journey. The community has ups and downs, but Dan (and now Scott) have always taken care of it.

Total side anecdote about this: I was at the airport check-in counter. At the only open counter was an obvious hoarder with many trash bags as carry ons asking all kinds of vague questions about if the TSA was going to take his stuff. The guy behind the counter kept answering his questions politely. I guess policy was never to tell a customer to get lost. This was taking a very long time, so a little old lady at the front of the line went over to him and told him to hurry it up. He looked a bit shocked and moved on. I guess companies are so scared of bad reviews or creating controversy that they indulge these people for as long as it takes and it's up to the other customers to put a stop to it.

That's been happening since I've been here, since around mid 2007. Not to dismiss what you're saying, I just want to say that there have always been people fighting the good fight.

To quote from Elon's Q&A, "space questions only".

“Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it.” - robert-a-heinlein

"This is nice, but my cousins, uncles, framework that's coming out next week is way better!"

I believe we should first learn to clean up our act on planet Earth before we export anything of our existence and what we do.

To me, the real revolution that needs to happen is a spiritual one - a statement that will only be understood by those practicing meditation. Our brain has so many "undiscovered" capabilities. Discovering them will change our behavior and ultimately allow us to survive on Earth.

It's not like Elon Musk building this rocket is at the expense of SolarCity (improving the environment through solar energy).

Sure, I've seen humans change - but only under heavy "brainwashing", i.e. internalizing an ideology that values being fair, helpful and truthful, and that only holds with a support structure of adherents. And I doubt it scales.

If you look at the world, a lot if not most changes for the better are technology-driven. Technology alters the economical landscape, which makes people do things better, even though they're still following the same behaviours as they always did.

TL;DR: I think individuals have much less agency than we'd like to think.

I think the only "spiritual" anything we need is to drop anything spiritual and focus more intensely on reality and evidence based reasoning. Spirituality has done plenty of harm and it is not hard to argue more harm than good if you can lump religion in there with it.

Your ridiculous claims about undiscovered capacities in our brains allowing to to survive is non-sense. Our ability to problem solve base on past experience/evidence is the real miracle and our gradual takeover of every ecosystem is why we have survived this far. Now we need to use this capacity we already demonstrated to not kill ourselves. Going to space is one possible option.

Besides that, Musk is doing two things at the same time. He tries both to protect the earth (Tesla, solar power), and initiate a base in case something happened to our home.

Spirituality alone won't help you survive winter, regardless of how developed your mind is.

It's funny that you would say that - you may want to take a quick look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6XKcsm3dKs

(The main site is: http://www.icemanwimhof.com/)

http://www.parool.nl/binnenland/-iceman-oefening-eist-opnieu...

You also don't drink and drive.

http://loweringthebar.net/2016/09/frozen-guru-update-iii.htm...

So, let him do what he is doing, he is doing everything right, now if you are communicating with people through mobile phones is just because of satellites, that happened only because people explored the space and it's application.

So, the final goal of Elon is great, support people so that you will also get good support when you have a great idea.

I'm not saying it applies to all those commenting negatively, but one commonly held philosophy amongst some of my geek friends is this logic:

"the world is terrible and people are terrible" -> "there's no point trying to improve things" -> "I don't need to improve things"

It's essentially an argument that allows people to live a defeatist (selfish?) life without feeling guilty.

Anyone who stands up and says "we can make things better and I'm going to do it!" is an immediate threat to this philosophical position. If Elon Musk can make the world(s) a better place, then it's much harder for me to maintain that all humans are selfish and evil, and it's harder to justify living a selfish and cynical existence. Hey, maybe I'm wrong about things, maybe I need to mature and learn about the world, which means the stance I've held all my life is incorrect and that is a scary thing to contemplate. It takes great self-awareness to move beyond that position.

I don't know why these thoughts correlate with being a programmer. Perhaps it's somewhat related to seeing things in a very black and white manner: things are good or bad. Elon Musk is a hero or a charlatan or he can't achieve what he says he will and he will fail and therefore it's pointless.

Here's an example I came across recently: "people are individually smart and collectively stupid, therefore we are doomed wrt politics and climate change." But the mature, adult, response is to ask "how can we help people better make collective decisions?"

Overall, this thinking comes across as childlike, failing to appreciate the subtleties in how progress is made, and the reality that nothing is all good or all bad, all failure or all success.

"things are good or bad. Elon Musk is a hero or a charlatan or he can't achieve what he says he will and he will fail and therefore it's pointless"

On the granular level, considered from only one problem's prospective, decisions actually have a binary value. For a supposed genius like Musk it's no wonder why there's a backlash for the wrong ones. The judgment itself has a scale of tolerance for its subjects (even though this is harder to admit openly) and exactly this high bar inherently set for highly potential, highly resourceful people like genius billionaires is what we see here. This is a good thing, I think.

This is kinda a stupid position to hold as statistically for the average human on this planet everything today is better then it was yesterday and most likely will be better tomorrow then today.

What are these subtleties? Why is it better to invest energy into space instead of sustainability? It's just heartbreaking that we can't remotely get as excited about sustainability as we can about romantic memes of curiosity and history books. Is the 'subtlety' that we just got to accept this as a fact about human nature and hope for sustainability as a byproduct?

Yes, excessive negativity can be a bad thing. But when a small minority of the comments being critical (comments mostly downvoted to the bottom) is considered too negative (to the point where people are advocating scripts that remove or auto-downvote comments deemed negative), it suggests that there's a danger of people being overly sanguine and reflexively hostile to any criticism.

I'm not sure how something as massive as this could ever be accomplished without taking it seriously. And I don't think it can be taken seriously without taking a good, hard look at the numerous challenges that face it. Mindless hype doesn't really get us anywhere.

A caveat: particularly in the case of someone like Musk who already has, conservatively speaking, some very decent stuff under his belt, if someone wants to post something against an idea they themselves have the responsibility, to make sure it is indeed well thought out, and not just knee-jerk negativity, pessimism or cynicism.

Likewise, people need to realize that excessive fanboyism really needs to be tempered and can really turn others off from supporting some of the truly great innovators of our time whomever they might be. No matter how stunning a person might be, they still gotta take a shit like anyone else, and you bet that shit's gonna stink too.

Maybe you're right that the numbers don't justify my complaint, but this isn't about silencing dissent or being hostile to criticism, I just want intelligent criticism.

We don't progress the species with digging up more rocks, building more stuff, selling more stuff, or dare I say it, finding a new way to get a cab.

A few more vastly wealthy eccentrics building teams to play with space, fusion (carefully I hope), generation, or whatever pipe dream they have could easily make up for some of the global short termism.

Does it matter if he sells enough tickets to Mars to profit? I doubt it. I don't think that's the point. The moon landings were excellent for helping humankind dream big, Mars will be too.

What will the moon landing conspiracy theorists do then? :)

I think you are assuming that being wealthy is just a state someone gets into magically.

While the things you mention aren't on their own crazy species changing ideas, the selling stuff, the getting a cab is what allowed some folks to become wealthy and go after crazy things. So don't discount the process of acquiring resources.

It's the means to the end. Nothing wrong with that either.

Bezos was being connected with space as the destination in the 90s long before Amazon was even a certain hit or Blue Horizon. Amazon gave him the means to follow his childhood dream. That's not to trivialise an Amazon, but had Amazon failed, which it almost did, whatever came next would try to get big enough to make Blue Horizon. Selling books online wasn't unique, getting big fast was more so, at least for a while.

For Musk, he'd identified as having a dream of alternative energy, solar, and electric vehicles from years ago and mentioning it along the way. No surprise that as soon as he can he's founding Tesla. With SpaceX right after Paypal I cant recall hearing earlier mention, but I'm glad he did.

Lots of people have wacky childhood dreams. Our society picks who gets to pursue theirs based on money. Some inherit it. Others execute magnificently on something daring.

For the latter, their dreams seem like good bets to bet on (but only given the prior performance). For the former, I suppose it's a plus they mostly remain in a holding pattern.

Oh but we do. Statistically such things contribute a lot more to humanity overall, it's just less visible because the benefits are widely distributed. What enables projects like this is the huge amounts of human labour that have been saved by less glamorous projects, along with general innovation in manufacturing.

they say NASA has changed Mars colors in the photos, it is more Earth-like, because something

I can't agree more. I've seen HN degrade into that kind of discussion over the last 2 years and it really disappoints me.

Part of me wishes HN had a really strong moderator that slapped down nay-sayers. If you're not contributing something valuable, comment deleted.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Slapping down dissenting opinions leads to an echo-chamber. One mans sceptic is another's "nay-sayer", I think community moderation (via votes) is filtering high value comments rather well,so specific moderation is hardly required: egregious flaming excepted.

> If you're not contributing something valuable, comment deleted

Just because you disagree with a given opinion does not make it worthless.

What a load of rubbish. Note that HN already has strong moderation, and does delete "way out there" contrarian views. If this was taken to the extreme, only back-patting allowed, the comments would become useless. And I feel, like others, this already goes on a lot (e.g. the top karma posters all tend to agree/compliment each other, there isn't that much disagreement although it happens sometimes).

You say it's "degraded", but it's more likely that HN's audience has diversified as it's grown, and therefore it's less likely for you to agree with any given comment.

What if HN included sentiment in the sort algorithm?

The post score you see would stay the same (upvotes minus downvotes). You'd just multiply the sort score by, for example, 1.25 for posts positive in tone and 0.8 for posts with negative tone.

So if two comments have about the same number of upvotes, the nicer one appears higher up.

Criticism or disapproval could still become top post with enough upvotes, but it wouldnt happen as often as it does now.

"I think these questions at IAC are great, it's good that people get a chance to <self promote thing> at a technical conference"

"Wtf is with these stupid questions at IAC? They should be asking about <fascinating technical detail>"

i.e.,

"I think these questions at IAC are great,..."

"...they should be asking about <fascinating technical detail>"

"I think it's a good idea to start a national wingsuit base jumping team."

"I don't know if that's a good idea. Pretty high chance of death"

Penalized - negative post

But it could be useful to look at the comment history of a user. When someone who is an overall positively minded contributor (with a high average positive sentiment) suddenly writes one scathing reply, this could mark a potentially interesting thread.

I just want positive comments to appear as the top comment more often.

Negative commenta should have a bit of a higher bar (in other words, need more votes) to get to the top

Pointing out flaws == not valuable?

The man who says it can't be done needs to get out of the way of the man who's doing it.

No, the risk v reward curve has to be better than an equivalent risk v reward curve for a terrestrial species survival project to justify the mission.

I would argue that just about any PhD in epidemiology, disaster relief, or geopolitics will have a risk/reward curve far better than any Mars mission.

People keep making this argument that, absent any other information, a two planet species is more robust than a one planet species. But that's not the choice we're facing. The choice is a two-planet species versus a more prepared one-planet species.

That's not the choice. Those two options are not mutually exclusive.

I think it may take some time - centuries even - for colonizing Mars to "pay off" in terms of reduced extinction risk. But I think in the long term - say 500 years from now - we will indisputably be safer as a species if we started colonizing Mars 500 years ago than if we didn't. And if we don't start now, then when?

I would increase that number if someone could tell a story with even a whiff of truth about how it could happen.

Obviously it's not completely trivial to sustain humans on Mars, but there is literally no reason to believe we couldn't accomplish it using current levels of technology, to say nothing about whatever we're going to invent over the next fifty years.

Keeping humans alive on Mars starting from now is vastly easier to comprehend than putting a man on the moon starting from 1950. I wonder how many armchair pessimists there were for the space program back then.

Fixed. Mars is impossible, for now. We haven't kept someone in space long enough to reach mars nor have we developed a sustainable model that's extraterrestrially tested. Mars has more problems than a moon base, not significantly less (there's a few small pros and cons but being so far away is a major con).

> there is literally no reason to believe we couldn't accomplish it using current levels of technology

Except that we have no demonstrable way to do it, any fantasy seems plausible in comparison. At least try to start a closed biological system with a rat and find out how hard that is, then add the lag-time to service problems and a low gravity high radiation environment, etc. The movies have really poisoned the reality for the US population, but maybe it's part of the PR to raise money. I can understand that, but I won't concede that it's doable yet.

A quick google search says a trip to mars varies between 150-300 days. The longest human spaceflight exceeds that at 438 days aboard the Mir space station [1] from 1994-1995.

1. http://www.space.com/11337-human-spaceflight-records-50th-an...

See e.g. http://www.mars-one.com/faq/health-and-ethics/how-much-radia...

But this is pretty basic for any Mars trip. I'm sure it's been considered.

I'm not one of the nay-sayers. Musk has a good record of getting things done, although sometimes maybe he pushes a little too hard.

I certainly don't think "That's s stupid waste of time and money."

And if Musk doesn't do it, someone else will.

> We haven't kept someone in space long enough to reach mars nor have we developed a sustainable model that's extraterrestrially tested

SpaceX claims to be able to do it in as little as 90 days. You can go a lot faster with more free fuel. We've kept someone in space for 4 times that.

> Mars has more problems than a moon base, not significantly less

What are you referring to? Mars has available gasses, water, and more easily accessible useful solids than the moon. It will be easier to get radiation shielding on Mars, as the surface is more amenable to building underground structures.

> Except that we have no demonstrable way to do it

You are aware that we have sent probes to Mars, yes? The only difference between that and the human is how much money you're willing to spend to increase the chances of the journey being survivable.

What about the tech to grow food in space? Is it "just expensive" or it doesn't exists? I think it doesn't exist.

I think we need a dedicated food-growing space lab, and run it for least 10 years, until we're confident we have a robust technology that works.

Once on Mars, we could probably use something like this:

https://uanews.arizona.edu/story/the-martian-food-growing-sy...

For producing crops and oxygen, and maybe even supplies for a return trip.

That's already been done. It was called "Biosphere II", set up in the Arizona desert. It failed.

The insects and plants selected didn't cohabit well, as well another issues. There was clearly lots to learn from the experiment.

The really weird thing is we already sort of know how - "bottle gardens" are a thing. It seems to be mainly a question of scale. So why aren't we building bigger and bigger bottle gardens?

Apparently, after giving it one little shot here in a convenient location and failing miserably, we think we can just skip straight to Mars and be successful there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2#See_also

So that's at least five.

In Poland, there's a Mars-like base being built right now, though not aimed at testing self-sufficient ecosystems but equipment and work procedures of potential off-world colonists. My guess is there's more of such little-known projects happening.

The point being, the number of projects related to living off-world is slowly increasing, and my guess it will only go up as the perspective of Mars mission comes closer (SpaceX is doing a lot of good work making this close to "very soon" in peoples' minds). So we're definitely not "giving it one little shot".

>That's already been done. It was called "Biosphere II", set up in the Arizona desert. It failed.

>An experiment is only a failure if you don't learn anything from it.

It was a failure. Go back and look at what I replied to: the OP said someone should go set up a self-sustaining colony. That was attempted with Biosphere II. It failed. It was not self-sustaining.

It they learned stuff from it, that's all well and good, but it doesn't meet the requirement from the OP of being self-sustaining.

The OP says we should set up a self-sustaining colony on Earth as practice for something in space. We have not done that. We tried and we failed, and we didn't bother trying again. So the point here is: what makes us think we can set up a self-sustaining colony on Mars when we can't even set one up in Arizona? Cart before the horse.

But it can also be thought of as an experiment whose purpose was to test the hypothesis "this is a good way to set up a colony". In the scientific sense of the term, experiments that disprove their hypothesis are as successful as those that prove it. A failed experiment is one that is inconclusive or incomplete.

Building a habitat on another world is not a scientific experiment; it's an engineering project.

Doomed pioneers suffering grim fates in hostile environments is how the west was won.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amundsen–Scott_South_Pole_Stat...

Anime reference: "Starship Operators".

Right. And as what appears to be the loudest voice in this discussion, it's also my prerogative to advocate for what I believe to be a better allocation of resources.

Lets not pretend there is not competition for attention, capital and enthusiasm for vision based projects. That I advocate for one over another - in competition - is exactly what is supposed to happen.So, bring the merits of both and have the conversation.

Just saying yay this thing is credulous and doesn't actually evaluate what are possible futures.

In my case I advocate for Transhumanism and AGI as our solutions to his existential questions and promote those (as does Musk actually but to a lesser extent).

Further, why so much focus on this particular billionaire, who at least is focusing pretty hard on driving progress even if you don't agree on the precise direction, and ignoring all the ones just wasting it, or being actively counterproductive?

That's the part that really drives me nuts. A lot of wealthy people are doing things that are highly questionable or are outright destructive, but they don't get this much criticism.

For one part, I think many people just expect wealthy people to do questionable and outright destructive things. If there's someone that doesn't fit these expectations he or she shatters that worldview because wealthy people can't at the same time be good people, too, can they?

This has a lot to do with a warped sense of equality and equity: People who aren't so well-off don't get to have these opportunities to change the world in one way or another so the ones who are in that worldview shouldn't get to embark on positive endeavours either, so everyone is equally miserable.

The fallacy with that of course is that with everyone feeling equally miserable everyone's worse-off whereas if people - wealthy or not - make the most out of the deck they've been dealt everybody (or at least society as a whole) will profit.

I regularly get approached by vision-driven projects, to help them make something concrete, and the vast majority of them will accomplish nothing because the people on them are not doers and they don't understand practical matters. Many, many people do not understand the difference between dreaming and doing. And many people will happily waste their entire life dreaming about things and then getting bitter when someone else doesn't realize it for dem and give them the credit.

I'm not going to name names, but I had a discussion with a fairly known "visionary" who has been trying to claim credit for something which he did not do. Simply because he fucked around with an idea without actually making any progress on it for _decades_. All he did was to make it ever more complex and unattainable by adding useless shit to it. Then when someone actually managed to strip the idea down to something that could be realized he first shit all over it and then tried to claim credit for it once it became successful. Yet he wanted everyone to recognize him for his "contributions".

I generally don't give a shit about what people who do nothing think. To me, they do not count.

Elon Musk does stuff. His critics don't. Let's start there.

Personally, I'm worried by the fact that it's a billionaire driving this, nevermind which one in particular. If and when SpaceX colonizes Mars, what sort of life will the people up there live? Will it be a Musk dictatorship? A corporate fiefdom? Rich people remaking society in their own image wasn't exactly the space dream I grew up with.

I think my fear of potential corporate dystopias is informed by my knowledge of actual government dystopias.

Many nations with dystopian origins are fine now, sure, but there was a lot of suffering along the way; I don't think it's unreasonable to want to prevent that.

I'm not ever so familiar with that history, but a quick look at the wiki suggests very much not; some of the elites were (and, at certain periods, the non-muslim population), but never the regular population, and indeed this was a major point of contention leading up to the war.

> Anyway, if we're no-true-Scotsmaning here, there also aren't any examples of dystopian colonies run by "corporations" that weren't joined at the hip with a national government.

Musk is explicitly talking about a "public-private partnership". I think any project on the scale of Mars colonization is necessarily going to be intimately entangled with one or more governments.

It wasn't the "earth dream" I grew up with either, and yet, here we are.

[1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty_of_1967#Ar...

i see the possibility, with corporations there is always the option of quitting the job - that's the limiting factor, so that it can't get really totalitarian as it doesn't have the teeth for that. However you don't have the option of quitting up on Mars. There will probably be shortages and huge problems during the initial stage, so you might end up with a highly stratified society (provided that there are no robots that could do all the work for us).

Now there is always the option of a benevolent dictator who will actually quit after two terms; it has happened before. They might just as well put up reasonable institutions of government given that we have this tradition down here on earth.

i guess the colonists will not just silently comply with a dictatorship (that's a key requirement for keeping this system), just because they are not used to this sort of governance.

If that were actually the case, then there would be no poor people, and we can all at least agree that all other things being held constant, a society where no one is poor is better than one where some people are poor, right?

Because there is nowhere to engage with them or around their capital allocation specifically? Also because the problem set they are trying to solve is not as ambitious. Remember the problem set for this Mars project is basically "Saving Humanity from Extinction."

You see similar conversations come up when large scale renewable projects are invested in - wherein people shout about how people should be investing in fusion or Thorium etc...

Also, if someone comes out and says "We're investing in Docker" and the response is "You should be investing in AI instead!!" it just makes you look like a crank - largely because they are different value investments.

Sure, people do this stuff all the time. And it's ridiculous, and I can't understand why people are doing it here or why you're defending it.

You're saying that if people are highly ambitious and trying to do some good, that makes them more of a target. And furthermore, you seem to be embracing that. I agree with the former, but strongly reject the latter.

Honest question, not trying to be rude: what makes you believe you have a better idea of what a good allocation of resources (and Elon Musk's / SpaceX's skills) would be?

If you're so smart and good at allocating resources, what prevents you from pursuing that other project instead of demanding from other people to follow your lead?

Same reason as anyone else I suppose. Not really sure how to answer that without sounding like a douche.

If you're so smart and good at allocating resources, what prevents you from pursuing that other project instead of demanding from other people to follow your lead?

I mean that's exactly what I'm doing...

You're not advocating for something your advocating against something.

We all advocate for what we believe, advance our best arguments, and collectively reach conclusions. That's how discussion is supposed to work, no? Or are we supposed to pick the smartest person in the room and then ignore everyone else?

Let me argue that allocation of resources as a zero-sum game is a deeply flawed view of the situation. There is competition, but this is not a bucket-for-bucket transfer and given the figures displayed here as well as ballpark estimations, there is more than largely room for all of those to develop simultaneously. As mikeash points out, there is an untapped audience as well as boatloads of resources going down the sink that totally dwarf the resources put in any of those endeavours (and this extends way past "wasteful" billionaires)

This is especially biting when you go out to raise money - there is a limited pool of money out there that is looking to be allocated. Sure, some small changes open up small amounts - such as the introduction of crowdfunding - but generally speaking there are more companies seeking funds than there are funds seeking investment.

Said another way the pie grows too slowly to consider the market anything other than zero-sum over the window of time that a venture has.

I'm sure you have it all figured out.

I have no problem with people arguing against SpaceX's Mars plans, either on the basis that the plan is infeasible, or that he should be doing something else. I have a huge problem with people arguing against it on the basis that the commenter doesn't like it and the whole idea is dumb.

I just want to see an intelligent conversation.

Reading this whole thread I'm reminded of something from my childhood that greatly impressed me. My mother emigrated in the sixties from a country which had undergone a communist-fomented civil war in which her father, a policeman, was killed (when she was four). When she arrived here she know no one other than my father. One of her first and greatest friends here was a woman that along with her husband was a card carrying member of the communist party. When I was old enough to understand these things I was pretty stunned that two people who by rights should probably hate each other, could get along and be so friendly. That has stayed with me to this day. We can seek consensus and argue positions and come together or stay in our corners. But the ability to do it without being dicks is very special.

If he would have said "You know guys. We're going to Mars. But right now, we're working on making rockets that go up, on time, in one piece.

When we finish with that, we'll show how to go. It'll be hard. Here are the technical and sociological issues involved. When we're getting close to being ready to go, we'll get working on them."

I can't understand how this kind of openness gets labeled "a reality-distortion field."

While he's going good, and is launching rockets, but right now he's behind OldSpace in doing what he's actually doing - launching rockets.

OldSpace has not devloped a new rocket or rocket engine or rocket in a while. OldSpace has almost completely been pushed out of the international launch market. OldSpace launches cost at least 2x more, and for a number of missions more like 4x more. SpaceX is flying a young rocket that is seeing huge amounts of improvement still, while Old Space is flying Old Rockets that don't really improve all that much.

They are not just 'launching rockets'. SpaceX is flying an active Space ship, Dragon 1, and are working on another one. OldSpace company Boing is for 4.2 Billion for the Commercial Crew contract, SpaceX only 2.3 Billion. For that money SpaceX will have to perform extremely complex tests, that the Boing craft will not even be capable of. Plus, Boing has actually tried to get around even the more basic tests. Additionally to that Boing is already far behind on their schedule, even thought they were specifically picked over SNC Dreamchaser because 'they are the most likely to finish development in time'.

They are in space, orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, driving around the surface of Mars, flying by Pluto and escaping the solar system. And that's just NASA.

While its true that they haven't landed a rocket on a barge, I'd say SpaceX is far, far, far behind.

1. I consider Arianespace and Proton "OldSpace" - Old established players who exist to make a buck.

2. What counts is success at your business. If you're good at that, you can take time off to do R&D. If not, you're rightfully seen as a not-focused, unreliable company.

It's like if Firefox Os. If Firefox was a great, secure, light browser and then they want to also came up with an OS, fine. If their browser needs work but instead they write experimental OSs, they got their priorities wrong.

Now it's true that OldSpace has been tremendously lucky with the latest rocket incarnations, but except the three Delta_III launches, they were tremendously successful.

Delta II was 151/153 Delta III was 1/3 Delta IV is 32/33

That's 184/189. That's five mistakes in 17 years.

In any case, it's not like he infused the whole thing with a "we are the best at space" attitude, so why does that even matter?

Today, I don't care. His clients know what they're getting involved with, and if they don't care, I don't either.

My concern is when he does go to Mars, he'll have hundreds of people signing up not realizing that he's putting lives on a beta rocket.

1. Part of participating in humanity is being critical. Part of participating in anything is being critical. If people have complaints, it doesn't harm you to hear them out. If you only seek to have your beliefs validated via the internet, you're going to have a bad time.

2. Just because someone criticizes Musk doesn't mean they're not critical of anything else. They're just giving you their thoughts on the subject, which is better forum etiquette than just randomly going on about China when asked about NATO, so to speak.

I must have written my original comment poorly, because a lot of people seem to have come away with the impression that I don't want to see any comments that aren't fawning. That's not it at all! I just don't want to see knee-jerk stupid negative comments that add no value to the discussion.

These do cause harm, because they waste time and derail conversations that could otherwise go to more interesting places. It's not a huge harm, but the harm is on the same order as the good that comes of a site like this.

As for #2, I don't see this sort of negativity towards the more mundane projects of other super-rich people when their activities get brought up. I don't expect to see it in this thread, but there seems to be a lot more effort put into whining about why Mars is a terrible idea than goes into, say, doing the same for why Uber is doomed in China or whatever. (Those get negative comments but at least they're mostly well thought out!)

I have no problem with intelligent, well thought out negativity. It's just the "why would anyone want to spend $100,000 to die in a metal box?" stuff that I really dislike.

You forget that Musk envision a public-private partnership for his insane project. That means public money will be involved.

I don't mind Musk building an interplanetary rocket. I even agree with him that it will be useful to visit other places than mars. But his project to build a "self-sustaining city" on mars sounds ludicruous to me and I don't wont any tax money to be spent in it.

This just suggests Elon chose to run forward to avoid any questions asked about the current and the past. He didn't revolutionize anything yet, made a few small dents in status quo but still far away from his plans and visions. Why talk about interplanetary travel in 5 years if SpaceX rocket has just made a single successful flight to Earths orbit? Why talk about revolutionizing transportation if Tesla cars are just a tiny percentage of all automobiles without clear grow path beyond fanboys? Same with battery industry - nothing meaningful so far, just plans and visions. Deliver first then build on that...now even a single critical remark about Tesla can make the company value go down and Elon mad - get some solid foundation first and then look at the stars.

"The timeline is unrealistic and major problems X, Y, and Z must be overcome." I welcome this kind of comment.

"Going to Mars is stupid. You'll just die in a box. We should focus on climate change instead." This is what I'm complaining about.

SpaceX has a bunch of rocket companies working on reusability when just a few years ago that was dismissed as stupid. Tesla has a bunch of major car companies working on serious electric vehicles when just a few years ago there was nothing of interest. Both of those are already revolutionary.

As I thought about how he is perfecting rocket technology, I wandered off on a tangential rocket technology (thought) that would tract nuclear rockets launched from the earth's surface and curry them off into space... and return home.Is it a good idea? It is if it works. Do I plan on working on it? I don't know shit about rockets, so probably not. The point it, we need more "Mars Men" in order to discover the ideas that will change things here on earth. Maybe Musk won't cure cancer or end wars but maybe someone inspired by him will.

Hypothetically, if the US were to put 20% of their budget into (truly) getting people on Mars, they'll do it.

If they put 20% of their budget into eradicating poverty?

Right now the US government puts between 10% to 30% of their budget into Medicare and Medicaid.

Is poverty eradicated?

Which is not how it works.

The cost of the actual raw materials to build almost anything is a tiny tiny tiny 1% fraction of the cost of what the thing actually costs to build. Rocket fuel, titanium etc. are all cheap compared to the cost of actual rockets. So the question of course is, where does all that extra money though? And the answer of course is: into people, process and technology.

The cost of rocketry, or particle accelerators or fundamental science, is correctly viewed as a massive sponsorship and investment into people and tools to improve how they do something so they can do it better.

And that is why "spin-off technology" actually happens in the first place - because large projects mean that we have now skilled up, tooled up and improved the capability of vast numbers of people, companies and fields of trade - which is what makes new innovations possible, or changes the market dynamics so things become economical and then profitable.

It's fine with me if some of my fellow crabs climb out, but it is very important not to lose sight of the fact (and to his credit, Musk gets this right) that unless all of us climb out (and we won't) then conditions in the pot are still going to matter to those -- almost certainly the vast majority -- who are left behind.

That would be unacceptable if it meant the end of humanity.

It should make its way to HN guidelines.

HN bunch is courteous and precise and that is generally best applied to topics which require expertise. You triggered them to defensive mode and by now most are accusing you of fanboyism in the most courteous and precise way possible.

I hope you set an example to future commenters on what not to write.

I don't think I can do anything as valuable to humanity here on earth as I can by even helping space missions. Even if there is a 50% chance some system fails and I'll die in space I still think its important to do so.

And on a side note I've also always wanted La Forge's cool visor so if you can throw that in too I'd be very happy.

~ Orville Wright

Yep. I'm sure plenty of detractors tried to pull down the Wright Brothers. Human innovators have had these detractors as always.

There can be criticisms of a plan to send a few people to die in a metal box millions of miles away at incredible cost that do not require jealousy as a motivator.

*There's criticism: "Maybe it would work better with Type A rather than Type B" and there's _criticism_: "Thats stupid and you are stupid for thinking its not stupid"

Apollo was dangerous, expensive, and didn't accomplish anything that couldn't have been done more safely and cheaply with probes. It was cool as shit too, but I'm not going to pretend that 'cool' is a real basis for public policy.

Mr Musk is welcome to spend his money as he wants, of course.

I wish I had this much talent at putting a negative spin on things. You could make a cure for cancer sound like the bubonic plague.

My lack of skills necessary as a programmer to help, and my health issues mean that I can't really do anything but cheer from the sidelines. There will be mistakes, but sometimes you have to jump into the river with both feet if you wish to cross.

Then changing planet doesn't help unless the colony has people who are protected from them compared to those left behind.

The chances of the second one are pretty low, but some people think that any chance is too high.

We can also start improving these facilities today, if we care about the survival of homo sapiens. Even out the gender ratio at Cheyenne mountain, give it a small nuclear reactor, a hydroponic farm, and a seed bank and we can be reasonably confident in it weathering anything but a very near miss.

I'm pretty sure humanity currently possesses the knowledge and resources to build multiple underground shelters around the Earth (as seen in Hollywood movies) that can sustain a population of at least one million indefinitely. Food can be grown with artificial lighting. Air and water can be brought in from outside, purified and recycled. If you need anything else, send robots (or people in protective suits) to scavenge the surface. The only thing we lack is political will.

Just comes down to how well prepared you want the human race to be for a planetary or solar system wide disaster.

Because most others aren't constantly being worshipped by people on HN and the like. Musk worship was the reason I stopped bothering with the technology subreddit.

The hero worship should be pretty simple to understand: he's built (with the efforts of thousands of people working for him, of course, it's a huge group effort) amazing things. Every time I get in my car, I marvel at it. He's landed an orbital rocket on a barge in the ocean. Several times! Even if somehow these things somehow fade into absolutely nothing, they're amazing accomplishments.

Some folks who only focus on wealth would call it foolhardy regardless, though.

That said, its incredibly exciting.

(It is indirectly funded through some tax dollars with things like their ISS resupply missions, but that's money the company would get with or without a Mars plan, and could easily just take as profit instead.)

If you have data about this, please share, otherwise avoid making unsubstantiated generalizations about the community. It's a predictable rhetorical device that doesn't move us towards gratifying our intellectual curiosity.

Well, maybe they like to shout "the King is naked". Or maybe they want the interest in space exploration to go towards what they think would be more realistic and/or reasonable plans.

I'd venture that's because it somehow silently challenges the humanocentric point of view that many (unconsciously, mostly) hold onto. Why would anyone seemingly cling so much onto that pale blue dot unless it's held as deeply special in some way?

We have no chance of achieving that if we keep on endlessly postponing each step towards it. And as far as rocky space dots go, Mars looks incredibly close to Earth.

Well, man is still a teritorial animal driven by instinct, and as any animal, it perceives the unknown as dangerous and it will attempt to stop, in a knee jerk reaction, anyone who will try to change the status quo.

We're still driven by the past, by what we know, than by the future. We're not used to thinking in terms of probabilities and possible outcomes, but Elon does.

This is why most great breakthroughs have been made by exceptional individuals that fought through resistence and brought progress for the rest.

We are still not ready to act like a single consciousness. I wonder if we will ever be..

He's proposing a system for getting stuff to Mars cheaply enough.

Characterizing this as "emotional manipulation" is ridiculous. You want to see what emotional manipulation actually looks like, watch an Apple keynote. This is a guy risking his fortune on a crazy dream and presenting his efforts in a technical and factual manner.

Remember, the talk was about a method of transportation, not colonization as the title suggested. Optimism is great; don't let it be a means of deception.

I'm certain folks have tried on Antarctica (we've had constant human presence there for decades).

However, we still failed even under a much more controlled and hospitable environment - Biosphere 2.

Biosphere 2[1] failed because of our lack of understanding of our own ecosystems on earth. A minute imbalance led to the entire ecosystem failing.

The issue with Mars isn't getting there (or back) - government's have been doing this for more than a decade.

The issue with Mars is getting people there, alive... and keeping them alive for the duration of the mission, and then returning them home alive.

We're only now starting to explore the effects of microgravity on the human body - and having not figured out how to mitigate some serious issues (such as your eyes losing shape, causing you to go blind[2]), we're not going to be able to seriously consider long duration space travel, let alone inhabit another planet.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2

[2] http://www.space.com/25392-manned-mars-mission-astronaut-vis...

Biosphere 2 was in many ways more challenging than Mars. It was intended to be totally self-contained with all water and oxygen recycled. On Mars, water can be found outside, and oxygen can be made from the atmosphere industrially.

The transit time to Mars with this system is 3-4 months. Astronauts have already spent far more time in orbit than that. There are negative effects, yes, but blindness isn't one of them (and your link doesn't even list blindness as a potential consequence, just impaired vision).

It's possible that the reduced gravity on Mars would continue to cause harm, but I rather doubt that it would be so bad as to make the whole venture impossible. Maybe Martians have bad eyesight and shortened lives, but nobody's doing this for their health anyway.

Nobody said they _had_ to, but I'm sure someone has tried over the years out of a scientific interest. (Although I have no source for this, so it's unsubstantiated unless someone digs something up).

> The transit time to Mars with this system is 3-4 months

Travel time depends on trajectory, however safe estimates usually are around 6 months each way.[1]

> It's possible that the reduced gravity on Mars would continue to cause harm, but I rather doubt that it would be so bad as to make the whole venture impossible

Well, the effects we're observing now (for the first time!) are largely from Scott Kelly[2]'s year in microgravity. Going to mars and back takes around 1 year's time (6 months approximately each way), plus we assume they'll stay on the surface longer than a few hours... so these may prove to be serious complications. The scary thing is, few talk about these issues when dreaming about traveling to Mars (Musk included, apparently).

[1] http://www.universetoday.com/14841/how-long-does-it-take-to-...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Kelly_(astronaut)

The figure I stated comes from the presentation we're discussing, I didn't just pull it out of my nether regions. You can go faster if you're willing to use more fuel.

You're "sure" that someone has tried to set up a self-sustaining colony in Antarctica even though you have absolutely zero evidence for any such thing, yet you completely reject a figure I got straight from the source material we're supposedly discussing here? I can't carry on a conversation like that.

We have yet to see if these figures are sound. Hauling enough fuel up there for an oversized vehicle quickly becomes an issue - the more weight, the more fuel required, which adds to weight.

Regardless, 3-4 months each way is still a long time in microgravity. I don't see the point you're raising.

> You're "sure" that someone has tried to set up a self-sustaining colony in Antarctica even though you have absolutely zero evidence for any such thing, yet you completely reject a figure I got straight from the source material we're supposedly discussing here?

The grand point I raised was we've tried this on earth, and failed. We understand earth fairly well, comparatively... yet we've failed each time we try. We can't just waive hands and say this isn't an issue.

I'm not talking about Mars anymore, because it would be fruitless.

A grand point that you have failed to back up with anything other than a hunch, and are defending by rejecting numbers, that while are far from infallible, you didn't give any reason for rejecting.

Maybe as a hobby idea. But has anyone seriously tried, with an 8-9 figure budget, a team of engineers, etc.? Shipping in supplies is cheap. There is little financial motive to make a self-sustaining colony.

The point is to make humanity resilient to what would otherwise be an exctinction-level event, such as an engineered superplague, weaponized nanorobotics, or a massive asteroid impact.

His viewpoint is that SpaceX is a transportation company, not a colonization or habitat company. He drew an analogy to the railroad companies that built the first railroads to California. Once they made California easily accessible, others came after them to settle down to and build the state.

Two-way transportation is the biggest obstacle in the way of Mars colonization. That's why SpaceX is focusing on it. But colonization is what gets people excited, and it is the long-term vision, so it has to be the central pitch.

The fact that something is marketed does not diminish the utility of a thing.

Sending multiple tons of robotic drilling equipment to Europa to look for life under the ice for example...

A switch with what, exactly? If he's just trying to make money, just space tourism alone would be more than enough, since he could charge the same as he'd charge for a Mars trip . Also, if your goal is to colonize Mars, a pretty critical step one is getting humans to Mars. It's not some nefarious plan.