This is hopeful negativism.

- They don't need fusion. A StarShip can deposit hundreds of solar panels and put them on the ground. No, dust isn't an issue because they'll bring a roomba. No, this isn't a joke, NASA martian probes' solar panels were cleaned by a light Martian breeze.

- They will be able to become self-sufficient rapidly. They're not going to send 1M tons of cargo to Mars without a deployment plan. SpaceX and Tesla have already demonstrated effective vertically integrated supply chains and manufacturing. They have the institutional knowledge to mine raw materials and build factories that build complex parts.

- There are plenty of other Earth-bound governments and billionaires that could devote funds to zero-emission large scale energy production projects. Musk, his companies and assets amount to a very small fraction of the global economy. Your ire is misdirected: your anger about the situation is properly directed at the rule of corrupt imbeciles and their questionable resource allocation decisions (Netflix, coal, etc.) here on Earth rather than one team of folks who seem extraordinarily mission driven and effective.

Mars has dust storms which last months or years, it has no ionosphere, and that dust contains enough perchlorates to poison anything we could eat, including us. Ok, that sentence went somewhere odd at the end but, it's true.

A large asteroid has only one of these problems, by virtue of not coming with any atmosphere, ionic or otherwise.

I kinda hope Elon is bluffing and actually plans to head to the Belt. I've penciled it out and and he'd have to be insane not to. Surely he has pencils as well.

The Martian dust storms are pretty tame. Nothing like portrayed in the movies. The atmosphere is 1% of what it is here on earth.

So while it is a “storm” it isn’t like a tropical force hurricane or anything. More like a very minor annoyance that deposits a bit more Martian dust on your stuff over time.

Isn't long term zero-g pretty hostile to our biology?

Mars is 0.3 G, which is just as hostile for long-term habitation. No human child conceived, born, and raised in that environment would have the ability to stand on Earth without an Aliens-style rigid exosuit. Their heart might not even be capable of pumping blood to their head.

Nobody knows what 0.3 g does to the body because we've spent 20 years on the ISS doing zero-g "science" even after the most important question was answered:

Q: What does zero-g do to the human body?

A: It's really really unhealthy.

Hollow out the asteroid and spin it.

This wouldn’t work, asteroids are like gravel there isn’t really anything to hollow out and even if you did when you spun it the asteroid would just shoot these rocks out in all directions.

That tech is decades in the future.

Is it? Assuming an asteroid of appropriate structural strength, it's just a question of time + propulsion. And acceleration adds up pretty quickly when you're in a vacuum and have all the time you want.

What's the story on navigating in the belt? Approach specific target from above or reasonably safe to traverse it and explore?

>They're not going to send 1M tons of cargo to Mars without a deployment plan.

Can this happen? I imagine before we can settle on Mars we first should be comfortable flying there, and the latter should be sufficient for asteroid mining. But, right, our technology is just not at a comfortable level yet.

Comfortable comes much later than possible. When it's possible to go, that's the time to go. The early Atlantic crossings weren't comfortable, just possible.

Unlike Atlantic, Mars isn't habitable, you can't settle there with merely possible crossing. Maybe first establish a colony at 1km depth in the ocean; we are relatively comfortable going there, but what it takes to run a colony there and would it be possible with only possible crossing?

The Mars backup plan seems kinda dumb to me because Mars is worse as is than all but the very worst post-apocalyptic Earth scenarios.

Just build bunkers here and staff them in shifts. Much cheaper.

Your remaining threats for which Mars would be better than "ruined" Earth are something like a grey goo event, or an asteroid so large that it liquefies much of the crust (killing everyone in all your bunkers). So, a fair bit bigger than the one that killed the Dinosaurs.

I am very interested in watching people try to colonize Mars, but find the "backup for Earth" argument ridiculous, especially if presented as something urgent.

>And obviously it would be vastly better for humanity if Musk spent money on zero-emission large scale energy production, than on rockets.

Classic zero sum thinking. Spacex doesn't cost money, it makes it. How much money do you think Musk put into it? The answer is ~100 million seed. It is now worth 35,000 million.

How far do you think that 100m would go to develop fusion. The ITER project alone costs 65,000 million.

While US gov't put in $billions. But who kept ownership? Mars hype turns out to be good for drawing money out of governments.

ITER is a dead end, no matter what, so not a useful data point.

>While US gov't put in $billions.

There is a difference between buying something and putting in money. If I buy a cheeseburger, I can't say I "put in" $5 to McDonalds and should have some ownership. If I pay my contract plumber to fix my toilet, I don't own their business either.

I think you will be hard-pressed to find any substantial examples where the US gov wasn't buying something from SpaceX.

McDonald's won't go bankrupt if you elect not to get the large fries. SpaceX would have gone bankrupt several times if NASA hadn't kicked in at a crucial moment.

So they deserve equity for being a critical customer? I still don't follow the logic.

You won't.

> Musk is just plain wrong when he thinks there is any urgency to Mars exploration (or it's just vicarious arguments because rockets are cool).

Mars might not be sustainable in our lifetime but in a century or two? I think it's within the realm of possibility.

As for the urgency, the last two years has demonstrated the exact opposite to me. Modern civilization is a hop, skip, and a jump away from instability and disaster. When you say that we should instead spend resources on large zero-emissions energy production, well, we've had Nuclear Fission for half a century. The reason we didn't use it to prevent Climate Change is 90% political, not technical, another problem that having a self-sustaining colony, outside the sphere of Earth's influence, would solve.

Even if we completely screw up liveability on earth, it's probably still going to be way more hospitable then most planets we can reach.

In addition to the fact that there's almost nothing you could do to Earth that would make it less liveable than Mars, any political problem that plagues the Earth is going to plague Mars just as easily. Earth didn't create human political problems, humans did. The only way to keep political problems from plaguing Mars would be to keep humans off of it.

> The reason we didn't use [Nuclear Fission] to prevent Climate Change is 90% political, not technical

Eh. The physics and proliferation risk are pretty intertwined.

Who's to say we would have been better off with greater historical nuclear weapon proliferation risk but lower climate risk?

We know the path we chose, limited global use of fission power, mostly avoided nuclear weapons proliferation, and did avoid nuclear exchanges. So it's provably a successful (or probably successful) path. Whether an alternative would have gotten the same outcome?

>We know the path we chose, limited global use of fission power, mostly avoided nuclear weapons proliferation, and did avoid nuclear exchanges. So it's provably a successful (or probably successful) path.

Only if you value the lack of nuclear exchanges over the impacts of climate change. Which one of the two is more likely to cause a mass extinction type issue on the planet, one puts the control in the hands of people and the other the forces of nature.

I'd say I do. Climate change is colossal in problem magnitude, but temporally slow and distributed in impact. Nuclear weapons are terrifying fast and centralized in impact.

Unfortunately, our civilization is also mostly centralized. Cities, ports, highly productive land : total land area.

If you're talking persistent radioactive effects for a decade+, it doesn't take many to severely cripple the world.

As an example, a 100kt weapon (or smaller dirty) could knock a port out of action. Now look at a list of ports [0] and imagine what would happen if one or more of them dropped off the global trade grid for multiple years.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_po...

How would the increase in the number of nuclear power plants lead to more nuclear weapons? There is no direct connection besides edge cases like Iran using it as a cover to develop nuclear weapons.

Someone please correct me if I'm speaking inaccurately, but early reactor design (1950s/60s/70s) focused on light water reactors, which meant enriched U-235 fuel (@ ~3%?). By design, these reactors also convert a portion of their U-238 to P-239, only some of which is then consumed in the reactor.

Consequently, for widespread nuclear reactors (read: in many countries), you also had widespread proliferation of lightly enriched uranium (in the fuel) and proliferation of plutonium (produced in the fuel as the reactor runs).

Both of these remove the most time and energy consuming step (low level enrichment) as an obstacle to state nuclear weapons development.

And they're fundamental to the way light water reactor technology works, especially with the limitations of the period. So the only way you could have had proliferation-resistance would have been to have some sort of global fuel-control and -custody agreement (presumably run by the United States, USSR, and maybe France, depending on the time period). Which sovereign countries would have likely felt some kind of way about.

The number of new nuclear reactors only stopped growing in the 80's. In any case I don't think access to material is the limiting factor in nuclear proliferation. If we're talking about the US and USSR, it's completely irrelevant, even if they had 100x more reactors since they already have more than enough bombs to more or less to blow up the entire world. Other western countries either have enough nukes already or don't need or want them and I don't see why would they export technology or material to countries which are hostile to them.

It's not obvious to me that having more nuclear reactors in the US, Britain or Germany would had made it significantly easier for rogue states like Iraq, Iran or North Korea to developed nuclear weapons.

So you're talking about having more nuclear power, but only in First World economies?

That seems... ethically dubious.

Why is it anymore ethically dubious than having more solar or wind power in first world countries? But no, I'm not necessarily saying that. I just disagree with the claim that if nuclear power continued growing at the same rate as it did prior to 1979 that would somehow have lead to higher proliferation of nuclear weapons.

It's ethically dubious because solar or wind power wasn't an option in the 50s-70s. So you're effectively gating the majority of the world off from nuclear power, enjoyed by developed economies. Which would have developed economies of scale (see: France) with the end result of developed countries having access to cheaper power than developing ones.

And I'm confused. Your reasoning around why more reactors wouldn't have increased nuclear weapon proliferation was contingent on only the US, USSR, Britain, and Germany (and presumably countries like them, to an approximation) having more reactors.

Either you get to say that (a) all countries, or (b) only "responsible" (for lack of a better word) countries should have used more nuclear power.

If (a), then you have increased proliferation risk. If (b), then you're establishing (and presumably militarily enforcing) a two-tier ability to access cheap energy, that favors developed nations.

There are relatively few countries which wanted to develop nuclear weapons over the past ~60 years and were unsuccessful in doing so. I see nothing wrong with banning the export of technology and equipment needed to develop them to those countries (AFAIK: Iran, Iraq & Libya). In fact that is already the case and Israel and US already used/are using military or clandestine means to prevent those countries from developing them. So basically I find it hard to imagine that the situation would be significantly different than it is now.

But lets I assume you're right and 'a' is somehow correct (I don't agree with the premise that increase in global nuclear power generation capacity would somehow automatically result in a higher risk of nuclear weapons actually being used) that would still mean that the western world, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and all other countries in their sphere of influence or aligned to them would have access to cheaper power (which is at least 80-90% of the global population). And I don't consider 'because Iran does not have access to nuclear power then it would be unfair for anyone else to have' to be very good argument.

In fact even if only developed countries had access to nuclear power (which is obviously not fair and not realistic anyway, good luck preventing Russia and China export their reactor to whoever they want) I still think that would be preferably to nobody having it.

> As for the urgency, the last two years has demonstrated the exact opposite to me. Modern civilization is a hop, skip, and a jump away from instability and disaster.

I mean, you would somehow have to make Earth less hospitable than Mars to make the effort worth it.

There is an inherent urgency in all of his plans, mainly because he wants to see it done within his lifetime. He's got 40 years left tops, but more like 20 during which he could still theoretically do anything significant in. Rockets take decades to develop.

The urgency is because you can fool enough people only so long before they catch on and recognize what they are being sold.

He should really thing about making a company to do solar, and maybe an Electric Car company that outsells every other USA EV company 10:1

One conceivable reason to colonize Mars is real estate.

Perhaps in the near future life extension technology will become common place, people may continue to have kids, but natural deaths may be rare; the human population will increase exponentially and need somewhere to live and something to do -- terraforming Mars in exchange for property may be reasonable.

I don't think that a compact fusion powerplant specifically is needed. But I do agree that a truly self-sufficient Martian colony (I.E. able to exist for more than a few years without ships coming from Earth) would need a gargantuan level of infrastructure to have even a small chance of being viable.

From a standpoint of reducing emissions on Earth, it would be cool to see Elon Musk's best take on how to build a practical fusion generator though. I've heard of a few potential paths that could lead to net power much faster and cheaper than ITER. Supposedly superconducting magnets have gotten considerably better since ITER was proposed, and since power output in a tokamak reactor is something like the third or fourth power of the magnet strength IIRC, there's potential for a newer and smaller reactor design to outdo it in both timeline and cost.

It is not possible to conceive of a path that would not lead to net power before ITER. ITER has no intention of generating so much as a milliwatt, ever.