I bring this up because I think it is important that Elon has some projects targeted at making the world better today, like PayPal, the Boring Company, and Starlink, some projects designed to avoid catastrophes a few decades from now, like Tesla and Solar City, and some projects designed to help humanity centuries from now, like SpaceX going to Mars. This is a very nice way of resolving the objection that Elon should focus on Earth's problems, which is to observe that you can both make the world a better place today while also working towards a brighter long term future.
I think that to the extent that Elon will inevitably serve as a role model, I want that part of the story to be told as well.
You forgot the most important one.
3) PayPal is a huge PR nightmare, a pseudo-bank that sits between legal boundaries whenever it needs to in order to maximize profit, screwing over thousands of folks -- many of them with small businesses that foolishly relied on them as a service. A successful service that everyone uses, and most people hate -- the customers are swept in by me-tooisms and forced participation.
If I were Musk, or I was a Musk evangelist , i'd stay far away from that 'accomplishment', as well.
He's not responsible for the entirety of the beast, but afaik he IS responsible for the viral aspects of their customer recruitment -- a method I feel is unethical from a monopolistic standpoint for a banking entity to participate in.
You can say PayPal is bad, but pretty much any company starting on that path run in many of the same issues.
on edit: changed I'm not sure if to I'm not sure that
Anyone can foist one's own unbridled ambitions, mixed in with a dash of lottery dreaming, tossed in with a bit of hubris, to come up with whatever the bright shiny future could be.
The company is more resilient than Oracle, it was left for dead for centuries, but it's still around.
Let alone if that wasn't freely posted in public, but instead gathered surreptitiously and correlated from many sources over much time.
I'm pretty sure I recall him mentioning electric vehicles and solar cells being important for mars, but I don't remember the interview.
Elon and SpaceX have been pretty explicit about Starlink as a system for funding the development of Mars transit vehicles and initial colony, though I'm sure a mini-Starlink around Mars would be in the long term plans.
I don't recall anywhere that Elon Musk has mentioned anything about The Boring Company being used for tunneling on mars, but the connection makes a lot of sense to me, as initial colony development would probably take place largely underground as a cheap radiation shield.
1. Electric cars were created with Earth in mind. Musk was, and probably still is, very interested in ways to help fix the climate issue, and that reason was mentioned explicitly.
2. Connected to 1, not to Mars.
3. I'm not sure what the motivation here is; the official one was that Musk was bored ( :) ) in traffic. It meshes with Tesla's business if properly integrated. That said, the utility of tunnels for Mars settlement seems so big that I'm pretty sure he had it in mind too.
4. No colonies in a nearby future will need a Starlink-scale planetary Internet network. I'm 100% buying the official version here: Starlink exists to generate revenue for further work on the Mars transportation system/BFR (whatever its current name; Starship I think?).
I really don't think these were part of a grand plan all along. But they're all ultimately relevant for Mars.
[0] https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/03/elon-musk-post-series.html
According to them, Bezos feels the same way. Amazon is basically a means-to-an-end, and that "end" is to get humanity into outer space, as an insurance policy in the event of a catastrophe on earth.
According to Bezos, Amazon is a means to an end, and that "end" is putting man in space.
If Bezos said something that spooked investors, that would be bad for Amazon, and what's bad for Amazon is bad for Bezos' long term goal:
Colonization of space.
Three week ago, Jeff Bezos said the following:
"But, Bezos said, if the Earth's population and energy consumption keeps expanding as it has, we will reach a point where every corner of the planet would need to be covered in solar panels to provide people with the quality of life the developed world has come to expect. "We will run out of energy on Earth," he said. "This is just arithmetic, it's going to happen ... If we move out into the universe, for all practical purposes, we have unlimited resources."
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/10/tech/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-b...
What I have noticed as that Elon uses metric, and Bezos Imperial units, Imperial units in space just seems stupid to me.
For Hyperloop, he did too. And Hyperloop involve battery powered electric vehicles, tunnels and solar panels (on top). So indirectly, there is a connection.
He also made clear that colonizing Mars, or at least getting partway through is one of his life goals, if not his life goal.
There is definitely a connection. But following the progression, it seems like Mars isn't the reason he started these companies, but "how can I make it useful on Mars" is definitely a consideration.
This just sounds like some tortured narrative.
TBF he is targeting infrastructure. There's also: water, food, police, courts, legislature/executive, construction, clothing, computation, etc.
And then Little Elon started a little company during the dot com boom called Zip2 and sold it to Compaq for $300 million. Then X.com which led to PayPal. Then SpaceX, Tesla, and all the rest.
It’s anything but “silly”. It’s incredible, it’s aspirational, it’s undeniably impressive. I love that his goal is so audacious as to be entirely implausible, and he keeps taking step by tiny step toward to realization of his mission.
And even though the goal may be entirely pointless to 99.999% of humanity, the steps taken along the way are reaping tremendous benefits to our lives and those of future generations.
Back to TFA, again I think they are missing the significance of what Boring will be doing here. An underground autonomous system which otherwise would have cost hundreds of millions for $50 million risk free is a perfect win-win for Boring and Vegas. Boring gets a beautiful test bed for a whole array of new tech, and a marketing demonstration of what they can accomplish if all goes well. Vegas saved a boat load of money, and gets a tourist attraction to boot.
It’s sad hearing/reading all the comments that this is stupid, just build a train, etc. Because that misses entirely the point that while this deployment could be served by a train the bigger vision is not one that could be served by trains, and the whole point, like everything Elon does, is to take a step on the path toward the Big Vision in a way that provides incremental value that can be monetized in order to fund and drive future R&D.
In fact if the Russians had been willing to sell the dot com billionaire some rockets for his publicity stunt of getting a plant to Mars, SpaceX would have never been formed.
How do you think the boring company is going to be able to achieve these cost savings? If this system is otherwise going to cost hundreds of millions how the hell is the boring company going to achieve orders of magnitudes improvement?
I would guess the engineers at Boring have a list of a hundred things they think they could do differently that would lower overall cost. I imagine the biggest ROI is automation which removes humans from the vicinity and therefore the presumably huge cost of allowing humans to safely coexist with the machine while the tunnel is being dug.
Boring will surely spend a lot more than $50mm building this thing in Vegas. Investor dollars (which in this case I think is mostly checks from Elon) make up the rest. But rather than subsidizing glorified taxi rides like investors in Uber/Lyft where the learning curve is questionable, here the theory is there’s a lot of learning to be done in construction of a reusable and highly automated boring machine that isn’t just entombed in the tunnel at the end of the project.
I think the biggest cost savings initially is smaller bore tunnels using much smaller scale transport pods (e.g. reworked Model 3s).
Also, who else would be able to develop the custom small scale transport pods or the autonomous software that they will run on for just this project? Elon has access to all the Tesla IP as a starting point. They can build TM3s without the steering wheel or pedals pretty easily, and they already demo’d the software for driving in the tunnel.
Handling the pickup, drop off, and coordinating multiple vehicles I’m sure is not trivial but depending on exactly how they design the loading/unloading zones could be contained.
I’m just as interested as anyone in how they will be handling safety, and particularly what happens when a vehicle ends up stopped midway in the tunnel.
What makes the Boring company have the exclusive monopoly on R&D? There is billions of dollars available for R&D. If it was just a question of money anyone could idealize those cost savings. Your entire post is mere speculation. There is not a shred of actual fact based evidence to support anything you have said.
Their competitors had a huge headstart and billions of dollars available for R&D, and yet it wouldn't have happened without SpaceX.
But that's not our way forward. Forget the billionaires, we need to assemble, reinvest in our political system, and start building a better future from the ground up.
Not to nitpick, but if you were to go by the typical comic-book example most 'rich dickheads' end up being super-villains.
If the question is : Do I want the immensely rich to start moving the world around from under my feet with their unlimited resources in order to do 'Cool Things'?
A: No, I don't. 'Cool Things' is too loosely constrained a parameter to allow trillions of dollars to flow into unchecked. What happens when some ultra-rich individuals definitions of Cool Things involves morally unethical behavior?
Do I like Musks' ideas and plans?
A: Yes.
Good luck with that. For now people like Musk and Gates are doing a pretty good job of things in various areas though.
I’d highly recommend reading “Winners Take All”, as it completely flipped my opinion on this subject. The author argues that giving up and trusting rich philanthropists to fix things further undermines our faith in the political system, requiring us to give billionaires even more power. And it distracts us from the question of whether we should change the system to prevent individuals from having that much power in the first place.
Some people are going to be inherently extremely ambitious. Those people will compete/cooperate and somebody's going to come out on top.
Supposing you establish a system explicitly designed to stop this from happening, you need someone to enforce that system. Congratulations, you just created a role for the ambitious people to fight over.
For me, the main takeaway of the book was that we should stop revering consultants/MBAs and their process.
An election is basically a popularity contest. Winning a popularity contests does not guarantee competence, reliability or even correctness of opinion.
We've got a couple of centuries of evidence that private individuals who stand to feel the effects of their choices are much better at conserving and rationing resources than elected officials.
If you make a list of the horrors of history and rank them from worst to mildest, you'll find that public officials (even in democracies) are much scarier than rich people operating private concerns.
50%+1 liking the way someone talks doesn't mean that the person is fit to manage the whole economy for four years.
I'd be quite happy if governments had less power. People aren't threatened by rouge business magnates in the same way as they are by rogue public policy.
A few years of bad public policy does much more damage than any businessman can in a decade. Voters & governments are seriously not good at technical questions like resource allocation. Businessmen will stop doing something if it isn't working, voters usually push on regardless long after it obviously makes no sense to do so.
Sure, it's debatable, but 'genius' is a non-standardized poorly defined opinion, anyway.
I don't care if he's a genius or he isn't. He's done very well for himself, and that's praiseworthy by itself without needing arbitrary titles stacked onto it.
Eh. Doing well for others is praiseworthy. Doing well for yourself is it's own reward, and neither deserves nor needs praise.
No one used PayPal because they liked Elon and thought he would make a great ruling oligarch.
I'm no Elon fanboy, but to patronisingly push someone down because they admire someone you don't idolise is... a bit rich.
2. Joy and sheer inspiration; why go to the moon, run a marathon, or compose a symphony? Joy and inspiration.
3. Potential to improve our own technology as we strive for the above points. Clear, clear evidence of this in parent's comment and after NASA's innovative tech.
It's irrelevant if you personally don't care, you don't have to do it. It seems there will be billions of dollars and thousands of willing individuals, you can sit back and relax while the rest of us explore the stars.
It’s about a site in the Hell Creek formation that seems to show, in incredible detail, what happened in the first hour after the Chicxulub strike a couple thousand miles away.
It reset my ideas about Earth’s habitability after the impact.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/08/the-day-the-di...
(AFAIK, not paywalled unless you’ve used up your monthly quota of free NY articles)
In the galaxy or solar system?
Even if the only appeal was the wild wild west and uncharted territory, what's wrong with that?
Look at what exploring the Moon has brought us, many unexpected innovations and inventions useful for life on earth.
As far as why describing Mars as Earth's backup plan rubs people the wrong way, I think it's a bit like Noah's Ark. While there is absolutely the cute story about the boat full of animals, and it does make for a good story, there's also the "meanwhile literally everyone aside from a minuscule elect ends up dying" bit. Which would be nothing but sour grapes if you didn't see people holding up the possibility of colonizing other planets as a mitigating factor that implies that we really shouldn't be quite so worried about all the environmental damage that's happening here on Earth. But you do.
Put it all together, and the complete narrative starts to sound like, "Sure, we're recklessly hurtling toward turning the planet into an inhospitable shithole for billions of people, but don't worry about that, because 0.00000005% of them are going to get to live on a completely different inhospitable shithole instead!"
Which, disclaimer, I'm not wanting to pan human space exploration. But I much prefer the "exploration for the sake of adventure and discovery" narrative. If that's not good enough, the ground to retreat to should be robots, not messianic fables for rich people.
If it is to preserve diverse species, then it absolutely makes sense to colonize other planets and spread the wide variety of plants, animals, and other organisms. The earth will eventually be burned up by the sun.
If interstellar space travel is ever practically attainable - and, FWIW, that is still a controversial subject - then humans absolutely will figure it out. Or rather, they will just so long as they manage to extend both their existential and economic trajectories far enough for it to matter. Ain't nobody gonna be able to develop that kind of technology from Mars; they'll be way too busy on more prosaic tasks, like repeatedly checking their domes for leaks.
So like a few million years?
Sure, but nobody today is researching the technology to survive a post-dinosaur-meteor earth. If it gets developed at all that's due to our space programs and our desire to survive on the Moon and Mars. So unless we go there we won't survive the aftermath of that theoretical meteor.
[1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/5893387/Apoll...
Not to mention it's still unclear if it's physiologically possible for humans to survive long-term off planet Earth.
Some big urban areas already need to rely on interbasin transfers for their water supply: LA, NYC, San Diego, Mexico City, SLC, Denver. Tunnels for water would actually be a sensible and 'boring' pivot for the Boring Company.
We don't know what the filter is, so it's sensible to reject pessimism and just keep on trucking.
“The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space - each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.” -- Randall Munroe
It's got about as much empirical evidence to back it as RM's postulate. (And a similar sample size of N=0)
Anyone care to get on the train for my pet issue, and get around to nuclear arms reduction, already?
The beauty of making arguments, based on observing experiments with a sample size of N=0, is that you can argue whatever the hell you want.
I'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying, "I want to go there."But I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in. This is the kind of person I am. - Linus Torvalds
In fact living on mars might be the perfect preparation for what Earth might be like after climate change in a few hundred years time.
The technology generated by colonising Mars might help with climate change.
You cannot name one endeavor to get to Mars that doesn't have immediate byproducts that are incredibly useful to everyone on earth.
Its not the resources that matter as much as the ability and capability to extract something from them.
We explore. It is literally in our DNA. It's what makes us human. It's also why we outlive the neanderthals, who never left the geographic region they were "born" in.
[citation needed] I guess he was more inspired by the Michelson experiment and the Lorentz transformations.
> We'd give up our earth centric imaginations of time, gravity, and many other things.
Gravity works exactly like here (But you can jump higher). Time works exactly like here too (The length of the day and the year are different, it will be a problem to choose a good calendar, but it's already a mess here. Anyway, it's not a scientific or technological problem, people just don't want to change the calendar they are use to.)
Perhaps they will find a few new interesting cases for climate science an geology???
And here's a good starting point for the Apollo moon missions: https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/80660main_ApolloFS....
* improved firefighting protective gear
* Athletic shoes
* Sports stadiums being able to move the field of play
* seismological monitors for everything from trains to trucks
* base defibrillator tech
* cordless power tools
* skin care: "Estee Lauder uses digital image analyzers and software based on NASA lunar research to evaluate cosmetic products."
[0] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/80660main_ApolloFS....
There's no lack of material demonstrating that NASA's accomplishments contribute more to the economy than they drain in tax dollars [0] and it's difficult to ignore the volume & leaps of technical advancements achieved by earlier missions. You clearly have a different view though, so perhaps sharing that in a constructive way would be more beneficial than posting shallow comments that obviously ignore the information you requested.
[0]https://www.thebalance.com/nasa-budget-current-funding-and-h...
Also, these aren’t exclusive tasks. Everything that works for Mars also helps earth and in many cases specifically with climate change.
Just going to the Moon and living in low orbit has resulted in a ton of new technology.
Earth's biosphere has already had five (5) mass extinctions. Guess what happens to humanity if number six shows up before we colonize another planet? Mars is simply the closest option.
Of those 5 mass extinctions, did any of them make Earth less habitable than Mars is today? I'm genuinely curious.
Sure, the preppers will be gleefully LARPing Fallout from their bunkers, and a small percentage of humans would probably pull through. Maybe.
If we have a seed colony on Mars, it significantly de-risks human extinction from an asteroid strike. Elon is the ultimate prepper.
Musk could be the sheriff of a colony in his very own space Western. People have worked hard their whole lives for much less.
Social science has taught us religion imparts survival benefits (as does ‘politics’)
And ideology is rising, see
We can have our eggs in more than one basket this century as long as we put effort into it. That is plenty of time to avoid getting wiped by an asteroid in all likelihood.
Do you think the world would be better now if the British had just worked on improving Britain rather than settling in America?
I’m sure there were many people calling the settlers silly back then too.
I for one would have been happy for the Europeans to evolve for another 1000 years before they set foot in the Americas, in earnest, under the aspect of eternity.
I suspect quite a few Native Americans do...
And as others pointed out, America was already settled when Europeans arrived, so what innovation even occurred there?
- Electric cars: subsidies
- Solar panels: subsidies
- Tunnel: transport infrastructure
- Rockets: NASA/military contracts
Starlink looks more like a commercial project but it doesn't mean the government can't get interested. After all, the internet itself started as a military project.
There are missing pieces in both theories (Mars and government money), the biggest one being PayPal. And some of them don't fit perfectly. So chances are that we are just making stuff up.
Is there some universe in which entrepreneurs exit the electric car industry solely because the government starts offering consumers subsidies to buy them?
I don't like the hype around Elon Musk and I think Hyperloop is a borderline scam (I can detail if you want). However I also think the success of PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX are well deserved. With them the world is a better place and Elon Musk is a richer man, that's capitalism working as intended. That subsidies helped creating a company that makes nice electric cars and solar panels is the reason the subsidies exist in the first place.
My previous point wasn't a criticism.
1. Electric cars for transport, Check.
2. Solar panels and batteries for power generation and storage, check.
3. Tunnel digging equipment for making underground bases and transport, check.
4. Satellite communications for an entire planet, check.
5. Then finally, the actual rockets to get us there.
Hopefully he will continue development to the point where the tech can be used on Mars.