As I said many times, space has become a religion for people who identify themselves as atheists. And Musk is the techno-utopian Pope, with stock ownership in one of his scam companies becoming a form of techno-utopian indulgence
Many of you are unfortunately too smart to keep believing in absence of evidence, unlike religious individuals who can hold a belief for their whole life.
When you'll realize that there is nothing for us up there, then disillusion and disappointment will be a tough pill to swallow.
Every human activity in space has not only failed to break even but proved to be a financial disaster of epic proportions. The sheer amount of mass that we need to bring up there in order to live and thrive as a specie is so enormous that no rocket, no matter how big or reusable will get us there.
You need a sci-fi type discovery such as the anti-gravity equation that Cooper finds inside the Black hole Gargantua and sends back to Murph.
As an aside, yes, Interstellar is my favorite movie, but I am a practical person and also capable of separating science from sci-fi.
Nothing but resources, science, space to expand, copious energy and the chance to make humanity some what immune to the next asteroid.
200K years ago there was a guy sat in a cave saying "I don't know why you need to go over that horizon, we have everything we need here".
I am an atheist, I'm not dogmatic about it.
I just think that a species can have more than one goal at a time and that some goals transcend petty day to day things.
The ancillary benefits are nice as well, research and development often pays off in completely unexpected directions.
It's about what I hope the future will be and that's a humanity as partially a spaceborne civilisation.
I was born too late for Apollo (1980) and too early for whatever we are hopefully about to do but I hope to live long enough to see it the first parts.
> Every human activity in space has not only failed to break even but proved to be a financial disaster of epic proportions. The sheer amount of mass that we need to bring up there in order to live and thrive as a specie is so enormous that no rocket, no matter how big or reusable will get us there.
You have to boost enough into space for things out of the gravity well to become mostly self-sustaining outside of the gravity well.
To do that you have to get launch costs down by orders of magnitude on what they have historically been.
We don't want to be putting 10 or 20 tonnes in space, we want to be putting 100 up on every launch with multiple launches a day, the solar system is full of raw materials and energy but to make it viable the processing has to be done without sending it down and up the well every time.
The US didn't become the economic powerhouse that is because the UK shipped everything over to the colonies, that wouldn't have worked instead we (and the other countries colonising North America/Canada) shipped over enough resources to bootstrap an economy by supplying the tools/equipment to mostly survive on local resources, then initially shipped back raw materials which allowed the colonies to expand and eventually become independent/self sufficient in their own right.
I could see a somewhat analgous thing happening in reality and it's been a trope of science fiction for quite a while (The Expanse series has an interesting take on it, the UN/Earth, Mars and the Belters).
It's about time to be very clear about this. This sentiment based on hope for the future and the entertainment of seeing the rocket land on its butt is not unlike the one experienced by the fan of every crappy sport franchise putting too much hopes on their chances to win the Championship .
Said hope is based on nothing factual , but it's all based on the entertainment they feel when a player full of swagger but no technical abilities comes in to energize the team.
There is nothing noble or superior in putting up hope in stuff which has low odds of succeeding , there might be if you do so at the individual level or betting on yourself.
The moment you start evengelizing or trying to convince others to blindly believe in something impossible then it's not noble anymore. It's kinda sad actually. Profiting off it? That's pure grift.
This is true for everything, space exploration doesn't get a free pass because "it has the potential to revolutionize our specie".
Well so has mRNA and brain research and defeating cancer and winning the war against alzheimer and parkinsons. Same goes for cardiovascular diseases.
The actual killers of humans, you know? The things that will get you and me, not the abstract pipedream stuff which the used car salesmen is trying to perpetuate.
> we want to be putting 100 up on every launch
OMG 100 tons!! The human specie relies on 350mi of atmosphere above us to protect us and at least 10 miles of Earth crust below us to sustain us, that's on top of all the mass that's on the surface. We need all of that to thrive.
What's that figure divided by 100 ? How many launches you need?
Discounting the fact that you can't exactly bottle the atmosphere and pack up the crust...and on top of that you need to simulate gravity.
Again watch Interstellar. In order to provide the happy ending Chris Nolan and Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne had to cheat their way by having the hero find the anti-gravity formula inside the black hole.
Because lifting 10 billion people plus the crust and the atmosphere was never gonna be possible with present day or even future rockets.
In fact the real plan behind all the window dressing was to simply abandon everybody and send a bunch of sperm and eggs up there in some sort of hail mary attempt.
The only element in which reality suprasses fiction is that in the movie that plan is shamed and the person who conceived it is branded as an evil liar, whereas I am sure that if Musk were to propose the same thing many if not all of the space lunatics would stand to their feet and clap, telling him what a brilliant idea he had, all while they are left on Earth to die.
Many already did when he said that the first people on Mars would live a short life and die of a terrible death...again it's religion for the atheists.
Since you're psychologizing the optimists so hard... can you or someone else explain to me the appeal of doom?
Let's go smaller scale then? How many players need CCTV like surveillance down to 50m resolution from above?
How often do the satellites producing such images need to be replaced?
Who's gonna pay for the whole ordeal? It's the government as always.
Even smaller scale: How many people are isolated and need Internet via Satellite? Considering that the world is constantly moving towards urbanization is it really necessary?
Laying fiber cable from A to B will always be cheaper
The private jet crowd and private yacht crowd will maybe be interested in it.
What's the economic breakdown of the ISS? 100B thrown down the sink , just like everything space related which is not military related or weather monitoring.
> Since you're psychologizing the optimists so hard... can you or someone else explain to me the appeal of doom?
We have just witnessed a miracle with the mRNA vaccine, there are so many things to be optimistic about here on Earth. Pragmatic optimism beats pipedream type optimism every day of the week. Also only the latter can be abused for graft purposes, for sure not the former.
Laying fiber cable will not always be cheaper. Satellites can be built and operated by fewer people - and more economically - than the hundreds of thousands of crews you'd need to connect every remote place.
I've often thought that the pragmatic thing to do would be to send people to Mars that already have short life expectancies. Like old people, and people with incurable diseases. They may want to do something great with their remaining time.
> and die of a terrible death
I doubt it would be worse than the terribleness of most ordinary deaths on Earth.
Great Idea! I think Musk himself should go around in hospices and hospitals to find terminally ill people to send to die 35 million miles away.
Seriously, you guys have lost your goddamn mind. And I don't mean it in a fun and exciting way, but in a Jim Jones, L.Ron Hubbard and Hitler sort of fashion.
Pragmatic, right.....
I swear, this place is becoming darker and darker by the day, I was just pissed off because I killed a mouse when with more patience I could have just shooed him away, talking about sending people to die on Mars....fucking incredible mate.
It's about people wanting and choosing to do something great with what's left of their remaining time. It's not about shortening their lives.
Almost 10% of the global population still goes hungry, even though more than enough food is produced to feed the global population. That's 811 million people that starve while Bezos facilitates ego trips to space.