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Elon Musk: We Must Put a Million People On Mars To Safeguard Humanity
An anonymous reader writes: Elon Musk's ambitions for SpaceX keep getting bigger. First he wanted to make the trip to Mars affordable, then he wanted to establish a city-sized colony, and now he's got his eye on the future of humanity. Musk says we need a million people on Mars to form a "sustainable, genetically diverse civilization" that can survive as humanity's insurance policy. He continued, "Even at a million, you're really assuming an incredible amount of productivity per person, because you would need to recreate the entire industrial base on Mars. You would need to mine and refine all of these different materials, in a much more difficult environment than Earth. There would be no trees growing. There would be no oxygen or nitrogen that are just there. No oil." How fast could we do it? Within a century, once the spacecraft reusability problem is solved. "Excluding organic growth, if you could take 100 people at a time, you would need 10,000 trips to get to a million people. But you would also need a lot of cargo to support those people. In fact, your cargo to person ratio is going to be quite high. It would probably be 10 cargo trips for every human trip, so more like 100,000 trips. And we're talking 100,000 trips of a giant spaceship."
I think Musk just jumped the shark.
That's what people said about Tesla and just about every real thinker of the past. It doesn't mean he isn't at least a little crazy. Crazy can be good. Take John Nash for example.
There is no way to "safeguard humanity" (at least in a physical sense). It's called "entropy".
We can hedge our bets, though.
I will stay here on the Green Hills of Earth
I think Musk just jumped the shark.
No, he's just selling some snake oil. If people are stupid enough to buy it, he will make a lot of money.
Earth is the only place humans can survive. No known natural disaster is going to make any this planet less habitable than any other planet in the solar system. No other planet in this solar system can be made habitable and sustainable to humans without RADICAL alteration of humans themselves. And no known technology is going to take us to other solar systems.
Yes, there may be technological advances that change this in the very distant future. But right now, wasting resources on Mars that would be better spent making the earth more sustainable in the long-term is foolish. You don't piss in the pool in hopes that one day you may be able to find some other pool in some distant land that hasn't been pissed in.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
As the subject says!
Basically, yes. There is basically no job that a man can do and a woman cannot, except producing sperm. So there you go (posted as a man). Think about it.
Screw Mars. Spend all that money on making it nice HERE. We have the means. We have the tech. We could have a star trek utopia right here... Free education, opportunity through small businesses, cheap housing, plentiful energy. We could have all that right here if we just put a smidge of effort into it.
Well, we could do that too.
But us fucking up the planet isn't the only scenario that might cause planetary extinction. Do you remember what killed off the dinsaurs?
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"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
In Musk's case, though, I don't think he's crazy. I just think he's a charismatic con man looking to line his own pockets by selling a pipe dream.
Really? The man was independently wealthy. He could have bought his own island and lived in luxury the rest of his life. Instead he plowed his entire fortune into Tesla and SpaceX and was a couple of weeks away from losing everything. If the 4th SpaceX launch had failed like the previous 3 or if they hadn't figured out the drivetrain problems on the Tesla roadster he would have nothing now.
I'd think it's pretty clear that Musk is motivated by other things than money. You may agree or disagree with his dream, but there's no question the man is sincere.
Why would we need to populate Mars in order to preserve humanity? In case humanity managed to wipe itself out on this planet? If that's the case - humanity has managed to f*** up so catastrophically as to destroy itself on its home planet - then it doesn't deserve to be preserved.
Lot of good that'll do us when Earth gets hit with a large asteroid, as it does periodically. That's why he says this is about hedging our bets, not about human happiness.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
It doesn't matter how much money you spend here, by staying only here you are committing the species to a single point of failure. Fault tolerant design requires the elimination of single point failure architecture, particularly if the detection and correction of the failing element is difficult or impossible prior to failure.
We are pretty bad at detecting dangerously large rocks flying directly at our faces. Said dangerously large rocks have the potential to kill every one of us in one event. There is no safe mitigation, there is no localized preparation that can eliminate the risk. Parallelism is the only idea that provides the proper redundancy. Extra-solar would be better, but we can't reasonably achieve that yet. We also might not be capable of colonizing Mars yet, but we should all get behind the fact that we really need to.
Pedantry is often mistaken as philosophy.
Actually history is not all that simple. Henry Ford also started paying his employees a living wage long before it was popular. In fact other industrialists hated him for raising wages.
Ford hated unions but actually paid his workers very well for the day. It was in 1935 that the problems with the Unions happened and Ford was getting up in years. It is a lot more complicated than you think http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Of course Auto Workers Union revises their own history and has removed a lot of the influence of radical communists from the official history.
He also "interfered" with his workers lives and offered programs to help with "heavy drinking", gambling, and dead-beat dads. He got a lot of flack for these programs in the day as being too intrusive.
Henry Ford in the end was a great man but also a product of his day. Today he would be seen as racist and anti-semitic. In the early 1900s he was seen are a radical progressive. No man is all good or all bad.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Your argument has a surface level truthiness that I found myself agreeing with until I realize the logic was quite flawed. I'll paraphrase your argument, "he was already rich and then he risked his money to start new companies so he must not be motivated by money". Take a counter assumption, assume he was always greedy, does having money prevent you from wanting more or taking risks to get it, just because you have enough in most peoples standards? I think clearly not. Musk might be motivated by things other than money, certainly he seems to have a fascination with Space, but you can't draw that conclusion based on the fact he was already rich ... are the Koch brothers not motivated by money just because they are already rich or take risks?
Seem my other comment here, but in short, pretty much all the same sorts of technologies we need to live in space would make life better on Earth. These include better recycling, power generation, advanced medicine and nutrition, cradle-to-cradle zero emissions manufacturing, greenhouse agriculture, education-on-demand, a library of open source part designs for 3D printing or other manufacturing, better ways of resolving conflicts in small groups or between groups, and so on. So, we don't have to pick one or the other. Sad thing is, we too often seem to pick neither and instead prop up social systems built around "artificial scarcity" and "learned" stupidity.
In general though, I agree with you that we could make the Earth more like a "Star Trek" society. Here is an essay I wrote about that a decade ago:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"This essay shows how a total of $14000 billion up front and at least another $2085 billion per year can be made available for creative investment in the USA by adopting a post-scarcity worldview. This money can help further fund a virtuous cycle of more creative and more cost saving efforts, as well as better education. It calls for the non-profit sector to help shape a new mythology of wealth and to take the lead in getting the average person as well as decision makers to make the shift in worldview to their own long term benefit. "
I'm nearing the end of reading "Player Piano" which several people on Slashdot have recommended regarding understanding humans and technology -- although I think a basic income rather than a work requirement would have created a different society, and Vonnegut also seems to ignore how much effort can go into raising healthy and happy children or being a good friend, neighbor, or citizen -- focusing instead of "jobs" in a manufacturing sense.
Related on learned stupidity, by John Taylor Gatto: http://www.naturalchild.org/gu...
"Our school crisis is a reflection of this greater social crisis. We seem to have lost our identity. Children and old people are penned up and locked away from the business of the world to a degree without precedent - nobody talks to them anymore and without children and old people mixing in daily life a community has no future and no past, only a continuous present. In fact, the name "community" hardly applies to the way we interact with each other. We live in networks, not communities, and everyone I know is lonely because of that. In some strange way school is a major actor in this tragedy just as it is a major actor in the widening guilt among social classes. Using school as a sorting mechanism we appear to be on the way to creating a caste system, complete with untouchables who wander through subway trains begging and sleep on the streets.
I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my twenty-five years of teaching - that schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers do care and do work very hard, the institution is psychopathic - it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to different cell where he must memorize that man and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.
Our form of compulsory schooling is an invention of the state of Massachusetts around 1850. It was resisted - sometimes with guns - by an estimated eighty per cent of the Massachusetts population, the last
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.