Criticizing regulators is Elon's MO, whether it is the SEC for his Tweets, various transportation departments for self driving software safety, labor departments for covid restrictions for worker safety, FAA for rocket launches... You'd think there is some national conspiracy against him at this point.
And that's not even getting into the fact that multiple things can be done by humanity at once.
edit: apologies for the first sentence here which was unnecessary to make my point.
Totally unnecessary. That gratuitous dig doesn't advance your argument at all.
> What about all the resources going into video games, sports, movies, music, amusements parks, television, weapons systems, desserts, travel and vacations, etc?
That doesn't seem like it's u/paxys issue to address. The person they responded to made a _very_ strong claim: "The single most important job humanity has is to get our eggs into more than one basket".
It seems entirely consistent with both the original argument and the reply that humans could have two very important jobs to address (climate change, and becoming multi-planetary) and still have resources to dedicate to all those other things you describe.
> Do you make the same tired comments when those industries are brought up?
I would make a similar argument that u/paxys made if the amusement park industry claimed that building amusement parks was the single most important job that humanity had. Similarly, for sports, video games movies, or most other industries. Claiming the mantle of "the most important job humanity has" is a very big claim.
> And that's not even getting into the fact that multiple things can be done by humanity at once.
u/paxys didn't say that we could only address one thing at a time. They were disagreeing with the claim that becoming multiplanetary is the single most important job humanity has. Disagreeing with which singular job we have is the "most important" one makes absolutely no claim as to how we should be dividing our time.
Ultimately, I actually agree with the original poster that becoming multiplanetary and multistellar is an important feat we should be aggressively perusing. But I also think surviving any extinction-event filters that may come along the way is equally important.
Good point, I should have restrained myself here.
The rest of your comments would be fair, except that u/paxys said the following:
> There is enough time to think about colonizing the stars after that.
Which clearly indicates that we should not be working on space travel until AFTER we've solved humanity's problems.
I didn't read it as indicating that we should fully postpone humanity's problems. For example, the next few sentences read:
> The world isn't going to end because his next launch is a month late due to pesky safety regulations or whatever else. This effort is going to play out over many generations and centuries.
That indicates to me that the delay the person is considering is on the order of the delay imposed by FCC regulations (i.e. months or years), not "start working on it after we've solved humanity's problems".
But that's just how it reads to me
> The single most important job for humanity right now is to save this one planet we have from destruction. There is enough time to think about colonizing the stars after that.
And they're simply unable to come to any understanding, after decades of botched discourse.
I don't see how some group of people focusing on space travel as a way to potentially divert the end of humanity as something that bad
There's plenty of orgs doing worthwhile and important space exploration.
There's a bunch of individuals destroying this planet who want to go to space and are selling a nice colonists fantasy to get backing.
You're right that it's not either or: let's continue supporting viable space efforts. But let's not be naive about it.
This particular thread of comments is specifically about Mars colonisation.
OP: > The single most important job for humanity right now is to save this one planet we have from destruction.
You're arguing with nobody's point.
> There is enough time to think about colonizing the stars after that.
Which directly states that problems should be worked on serially - that space travel should be worked on AFTER we solve other problems.
It's fine to state your own reading of what they said and respond in kind, but dictating that your reading is universal when your comment is directly under evidence that it is not is a big leap.
If you insist on using 3rd party interpretation rather than 1st party intent to decide the meaning of a statement, I've got 16 upvotes on my comments here so others seem to be reading it the same as I.
But we don't need to vote to understand what "until after" means. It's not esoteric philosophical language - my 6 year old would understand it.
"Argument by upvote" is weak, especially in a forum where I can't actually see your comments vote totals.
Also, you are not the first party, so why do you feel so confident in being able to claim sole interpretation of "1st party intent."
They clearly meant that that space colonization was such a far off goal, that the difference in intensely focusing on it and moderately focusing on it won't cause measurable differences in our lifetime.
Or they didn't, I'm not a mind-reader, but I've given just as much evidence to back up that claim as you have yours.
If you want to make it into a discussion about comparing & contrasting impacts, you're going to have to take the collective impacts of those pushing the space-colony agenda: everything from perpetuating individual road transport & UK airline companies to the largest "bookstore" in the world and lots in between.
Space exploration is an extremely important and worthy scientific endeavour & orgs like NASA have been criminally underfunded for decades.
What is absolutely not worthwhile and shouldn't even uttered in the same breath as the history of efforts on ISS and similar, is a bunch of budding space cowboys sending phallic representations of themselves into orbit on PR missions and hiding their own destructive impact on our planet behind a colinist fantasy so thin only a complete scientific illeterate would fall for it.
SpaceX has contributed positively to benign public missions by being a contractor, but all the marketing bullshit outside of that around Mars is demonstrably nonsense.
> a bit of critical thinking
Indeed.
Like do people really think that there's better shapes to go with? And if people really believe this, what part of our public education system failed them most? Because my money is on critical thinking.
Fwiw, I'm at least glad that single word seems to be the only part of the comment above you found objectionable.
Face it man, people making fun of dick shaped rockets are seeing dicks where no one else is seeing them and calling themselves clever.
Fwiw the space plane I was referring to above was SS2, not a NASA vehicle. But yes, I agree, it is unlikely to be good for doing "real work in space". Which is the actual substantive point here, irrespective of vehicle shape.
Just to repeat since you seem to have missed it in my comment above: the phallic comment was not, I repeat NOT a literal commentary on rocket design. Yes, good rockets are long and cylindrical. Not what I was referring to.
Make Earth proper a gigantic park / nature reserve.
We can't "wait" for anything, or the window during which we can develop space travel will close. 10 or 100 years from now we might no longer have the motivation or the means to fund and build new vechicles like these.
Good luck dealing with the absence of cheap oxydizer and the lack of convection which makes heat dispersion a nightmare.
> Move our power generation into space and beam it down.
Our power is already generated in space, and beamed down to us. It also comes with no infrastructure cost, which is truly an engineering wonder when you think of it.
Wasn't one of the disasters in Simcity 2000 having your power-beaming space laser miss your power station instead light your city on fire? It seems like such a thing would cause massive hazards.
> Move people into real orbital habitats.
> Make Earth proper a gigantic park / nature reserve.
Or force people to live deep underground. Then when they save up enough money to buy a ticket, they can be transported there much more economically.
As for me, I like living on the surface.
Dial that up tenfold and I suspect you’ll be fine - especially with the plant in the desert (nothing to burn)
1GWh/y/ha. That’s a 4,000 ha requirement for the US electrical needs, about 10 square miles.
If industry had to pay launch costs for water, air, and other basic things they need, they wouldn't be financially viable.
If we then pointed out that in space or on the surface of a lifeless rock there are no costs of pollutants there might be a bit of incentive to move.
But you are correct, those companies would need to be self-sufficient in gathering all resource inputs and be able to ship finished products back where they are wanted. Much more complex than renting an industrial unit in an industrial town.
If it were at all easy or probable then there would be other players in the space. There aren’t. If you contribute to the friction that opposes spacexs forward progress then you bear the responsibility for working against the things that you claim to love as a self proclaimed nerd.
There were people who put on demonstrations against wealthy people spending their money on being patrons for scientists and early biologists. It was very unpopular for rich people to sponsor nonsense, the collection of random fluids and samples. All of which is the basis for modern biology and medicine. So which side of history are you going to be on? The idiotic mob or the people making things better?
> The single most important job for humanity right now is to save this one planet we have from destruction.
Aren't these two sides of the same coin? If we colonise Mars, but leave Earth a smoking ruin, then we've made things worse by trading a planet with a function biosphere for one without. If we wait till Earth is in perfect state before colonising another planet, we'll never leave, and be subject to many of the same risks.
He has a lot of talent at his disposable, and presumably information to a decent bit of otherwise locked away studies/reports. Do I think he is correct? Perhaps not, but my nor your opinion really matters.
If he's made the decision shits truly FUBAR, ala Foundation, then leave him alone while he works on what he may genuinely believe to be a shot at surviving the FUBAR long-term.
Soooooo. It's probably not vaporware homie.
I think you lack some self-awareness here. Space is clearly a mild curiosity to you at most.
I think it's extremely unhelpful to tell people what their interests are, or what they believe. How much could you possibly know about this person's interests from that one post?
We are very far from a self sustaining society and economy on Mars. Easily a century or more. I'm cheering on SpaceX, but find this talking point of Elon's very tiresome. It's little more than sci-fi fantacism. As just a simple example: no one knows what childhood development is going to be like at 40% of earth's gravity. And that's just one issue among millions.
For better or worse we need to fix the planet we have. And we don't need to invent new technology to do it, though we certainly should pursue new technologies that might help or accelerate the process. What we lack fundamentally right now is political will/unity.
We can arrest climate change. We can end famine. We can extend modern medical care to the entire world. All of these are directly possible, today, with no new invention.
But we have to, to paraphrase Sagan, become a species more prudent than we are today.
What do you mean by "modern" medical care?
Do you think that will make a significant difference in life expectancy?
The difference between, say, Rwanda and the USA is less than ten years, I believe. Comparable to the gender gap in some countries like Russia.
What about the gap between countries like the USA and UK versus Japan at the top? Is that important to close?
(My info from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...)
Hans Rosling has been dead some years now, but used to do great talks going through the basic data and trends.
I'm not sure why you're adopting a tone of debate/rebuttal. Every problem you mention is something I think we should address exactly under what I said originally, whether its inequitable access to healthcare in the US, or straight up lack of modern facilities in low income nations.
1. Fuel-air explosions at ground level can injure people or destroy property (even kilometers away)
2. Rockets on unplanned trajectories can ruin people's day
3. Lots of fuel is toxic, we need to mitigate this.
Basically someone has to walk through all the worst case scenarios and ensure that everyone (and nature) remains safe or as safe as it is possible to be.
Toxicity and polluting aspects of Rockets is of a negligible concern, Everyday Astronaut (Youtube fame) gets this so often that he did an entire hour long video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4VHfmiwuv4
> Rockets on unplanned trajectories can ruin people's day
Well darn.
Perhaps that's true, but space launches are important enough that going "slowly"[1] is a good idea. One catastrophic accident with the destruction of a spacecraft leaving a large amount of orbital debris would make space launches much, much harder until we clean up. Rushing to space could slow us down a lot.
[1] The space race has only been going for 70 years, and less than 25 years commercially. The idea that anything is happening "too slowly" is quite baffling really.
This is a defensible opinion, as are the others saying that the most important job of humanity is to fix our current basket.
While neither agreeing or disagreeing, I will note another very important thing SpaceX is doing:
"The value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear: I'm not trying to be anyone's savior. I'm just trying to think about the future and not be sad."
A lot of what SpaceX is doing is extremely inspirational, and I think the world could use more things to look forward to in the future.
It's always presented as a false dichotomy, though. We can have both.
People insist we should be spending our money fixing the planet, but we already are, including Musk who just sponsored the largest XPrize in history for a carbon sequestration method.
First we must overcome the political hurdles to get people to even recognize that climate change is a problem. Obviously money is only barely starting to trickle in to carbon sequestration tech.
They have really not been slowed down that much FAA.
So everybody should just chill out.
Btw, for people interest, this interview with Ken Davidian FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation is interesting:
https://www.interplanetary.org.uk/podcast/episode/90af4411/2...
A colony on mars, even of significant size and population, is 100% condemned to certain death if separated from Earth. It would be, for all intents and purposes, in the same "basket".
Google "how to make a pen from scratch" for a quick primer into why, but the tl;dr version is that it takes having a huge industrial base already existing in order to keep, let alone advance, our current technological level. And Mars is not friendly enough to support us with lower tech.
Our intuitions go the way of "we can put 1000 smart people there, that's enough to survive and thrive". Well, we as a species can't move our microprocessor factories from Taiwan in less than a decade, and you expect them to be rebuilt on Mars from scratch?
It would be in the near future, true. In fact, the key milestone for humanity being truly multi-planetary is that each planet must be independently self-sufficient.
There's no laws of physics that would prevent human life on Mars or Venus from eventually becoming self-sufficient.
The time-frames to get to that point are large (mid-hundreds to low-thousands of years by my random guess). A thousand years isn't that long in terms of the evolution of the species, though, and are the time scales we should be thinking of multiplanetary life on.
See here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11hYo9UTSRM
And the corresponding book:
How To Industrialize Mars: A Strategy For Self-Sufficiency: How To Settle A Lethal Vacuum In 400 Easy Steps
Part of the whole project of Mars is making this very thing possible in the first place. It requires rethinking a lot of how we do things.
There are quite a few steps to proper, long term self-sufficiency. You need the colonists to get there, to form a permanent settlement, to get to reasonable numbers, to make a place where people would want to raise families into, to get to a point where it has a balanced trade deficit and so on.
Everything up to here is mostly science fiction material, but if Musk lives long enough it might actually happen.
Now, from this point you need a nation-sized colony on Mars make a strategic decision to duplicate critical infrastructure on Mars just to be self-sufficient. This is the step that the OP with his panicked "must not put all eggs in the same basket let the rockets fly now" is not even aware it exists. As an order of magnitude is probably at least equal to everything up to then. Partly because it's objectively hard, and also because when you have a nation-sized bunch of people, you have to convince them to invest half their resources to build factories that will make microprocessors that by the time you finish will be more expensive than those imported from earth, and probably also obsolete. And you have to keep investing in such obsolete industries because a million people can't compete with 10 billion that don't have to manufacture their air. Multiply this for every domain where you need such critical high-tech industries, like medical.
It seems to me that our level of technology has increased, partly through new discoveries, partly through new ways of applying those discoveries, but also at least partly through increased specialization. You've got a farmer growing huge amounts of food. But that's because there's a tractor factory, and the tractors are smart because of the chips in them, and the chips connect to the GPS satellites in orbit. To make that work, you need more than the farmer. You need the workers in the tractor factory, but also the workers in the chip plant in Taiwan, and the chip factory needs the equipment manufacturer in the Netherlands. And you need the rocket manufacturers so you can put GPS satellites in orbit. And the rocket fuel manufacturers. And so on. It basically has taken a globally integrated material culture to achieve that level of productivity on the part of the individual farmer. Which we can do, because the farmers are so productive that we don't have to spend very many people on farming.
A fair chunk of the progress of the last 200 years has been made possible by increasing scales of integration. But I worry, because we're running out of globe to integrate. (Africa, maybe?)
So, back to Mars. Yeah, none of this proves that 1000 people couldn't be self-sustaining. But for them to do that, they'd need a fair amount of tools. And that means that they'd need someone who knows how to repair and/or replace every one of those tools (and any tools they use in the process). And there's a hard cutoff below which they cannot fall, due to the need for oxygen. They can't just fall back to being hunter-gatherers.
So, yeah, I didn't debunk it. But, seriously, what's the maximum number of sophisticated kinds of machines that 1000 people can run and maintain? 100? 500? Can you build a self-sustaining colony on Mars with only 500 kinds of machines?
There are plenty of industrial/mining sites that argue they need to be able to create huge hazard dumps for the sake of the future of the human race. It tends to be a very poor argument for those left holding the bag when the owners have taken their money and skipped town.
If the danger is so great that we have to get off this planet in the next five years or we all die, well, then we might justify more urgency. If we've got 10 or 20 years to do it, let's take the time to protect the environment while we do it.
If you want to argue that none of this bureaucracy is protecting the environment, that's a different argument.
We are going to need far more advanced technology than we have today if we are going to reverse the effects of climate change. If we move heavy industry to space that can dramatically reduce our carbon emissions here on Earth. The technology to do that may also lead to breakthroughs in other areas like energy generation or storage.
I run thousands of hours of batch data processing jobs a day. They aren't particularly time sensitive, as long as they finish in a day I am happy. There's no reason the computers doing that need to be on Earth consuming precious water and electricity resources.
That's a non sequitur
This is one of the biggest political changes I've gone through. In my early 20s I was much more sympathetic to what I'd now call naive libertarianism. Today I realize there's no magic bullet, and you need healthy leadership in both the private and public spheres. Ideally the two buttress each other against their individual flaws. However in the US the process of regulatory capture has hijacked this ideal.
We won't be able to fix it unless we vote in politicians who see this as a top priority. We get the quality of government we ask for.
1: https://spaceflightnow.com/2015/01/04/photos-long-march-rock...
The FAA has no inherent incentive to slow things down. It seems to me that they do have incentive to encourage growth. Without this base for your arguments, they all seem unstable to me.
When there are mountains of red tape it is easy to over-simplify the reasons. But that usually isn't helpful in correcting the problem.
What are minimal capital and time requirements to do this eggs in more than one basket thing? Not talking about an orbiting space whatever but a real, sustainable ecology on another planet.
The depth of our ignorance even about whole classes of basic science there, notwithstanding the number and scale of engineering problems to solve....
Is there any reality where this isn't minimum a century and thousands to millions of $T?
For someone who believes this is the most urgent problem on which to spend capital and time, the most efficient target of advocacy energy has to be the US military which spends $700B a year, not the effing FAA and the relatively small scale projects of this one company- no matter how exciting and advanced they happen to be.
Even making the case for this program, when one considers what could be done with even a fraction of that scale of capital deployed on this planet....Fusion energy itself is probably a $10T investment, orders of magnitude less in money and time.
Space is cool but not for one femtosecond should anyone entertain any of this eggs in more than one basket nonsense.
“The point at which one says the goal is to make life multi-planetary, it means that we need to have a self-sustaining city on Mars,” Musk said. “That city has to survive if the resupply ships stop coming from Earth for any reason whatsoever. Doesn’t matter why. If those resupply ships stop coming, does the city die out or not? In order to make something self-sustaining, you can’t be missing anything. You must have all the ingredients. It can’t be like, well this thing is self-sustaining except for this one little thing that we don’t have. It can’t be. That’d be like saying, ‘Well, we went on this long sea voyage, and we had everything except vitamin C.’ OK, great. Now you’re going to get scurvy and die—and painfully, by the way. It’s going to suck. You’re going to die slowly and painfully for lack of vitamin C. So we’ve got to make sure we’ve got the vitamin C there on Mars. Then it’s like, OK, rough order of magnitude, what kind of tonnage do you need to make it self-sustaining? It’s probably not less than a million tons.”
That’s not a precise number, of course. It’s a rough estimate. But Mars settlers will need vast quantities of stuff. The settlers will need to build an entire industrial base to mine the Red Planet, and there are many steps in mining. To make consumer products requires a huge infrastructure base to refine and shape materials. “I’ll probably be long dead before Mars becomes self-sustaining, but I’d like to at least be around to see a bunch of ships land on Mars,” Musk said.
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/03/inside-elon-musks-pl...