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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 suppose the number of trips to deliver a million humans to the Red Planet could be reduced if they could be convinced to breed once they arrive there.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Did we abandon terraforming? I know it takes time but it takes away many problems.
The only way such a colony could be sustainable would be if it mined Mars and it's moons for materials to construct most things. There is no way a Mars colony that depends on Earth cargo for raw materials will be sustainable.
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.
Elon Musk: We Must Put a Million Lawyers On Mars To Safeguard Humanity
There, fixed that for you.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
There is no way to "safeguard humanity" (at least in a physical sense). It's called "entropy".
We can hedge our bets, though.
Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?
Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious...service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.
Russian Ambassador: I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor.
f you could take 100 people at a time, you would need 10,000 trips to get to a million people.
No. You'd store their DNA, ship that and "grow" people after it arrives. And after the robots have spent the time necessary building the infrastructure, making it habitable and amassing the minerals, water, gases and power generation needed to sustain the colony.
The only problem would be getting the robots to let go of control, once the humans arrive.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Seriously! While it would be a fun place to visit what nutter would ever want to live there permantly? No life, no trees, no grass. You whole life would be like living in an apartment building that you could never leave.
He advances mankind more in a day than you'll accomplish in your whole useless life. What kind of arrogance leads the simple-minded to throw rocks at people actually succeeding at changing the world?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Mars does not have a molten iron core, and hence doesn't have the cool magnetic field that earth does. That magnetic field does a LOT to protect our atmosphere from getting stripped off, not to mention protecting us from radiation.
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.
Take all that money and just pay off 5% of the population's houses. Those people, now freed from having to grind on the treadmill for their housing, could start small businesses... circulating money in the economy. It doesn't need to be much. Start a taco truck... Employ a few people... We'd have zero unemployment and a lot more happiness. The economic repercussions would be staggering.
A lot of human suffering is because a few assholes ruin it for the rest of us. How about we fix THAT? Screw mars...
Five major extinctions on Earth does certainly work the statistics in his favor.
I'm certain the tardigrade will be fine, though.
And if you pick the right million people to send there, it's a win-win situation! I'm not sure that it would be really ethical to send one million bankster and lawyers to Mars though. At least from the Martians standpoint.
As I discussed here (~25years ago): http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...
"As outlined in my statement of purpose, my lifetime goal is to design and construct self-replicating habitats. These habitats can be best envisioned as huge walled gardens inhabited by thousands of people. Each garden would have a library which would contain the information needed to construct a new garden from tools and materials found within the garden's walls. The garden walls and construction methods would be of several different types, allowing such gardens to be built on land, underground, in space, or under the ocean. Such gardens would have the capacity to seal themselves to become environmentally and economically self-sufficient in the event of economic collapse or global warfare and the attendant environmental destruction. "
And: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
And here: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
But many others have discussed similar things, so just another voice in the choir in that sense. If Musk really reflects on these issues (other than being another Mars fanboy) he will see that there are many possible avenues to decentralization and resiliency, of which Mars is just one. As we gain knowledge and experience in creating such systems, then we can disperse farther and farther to deal with bigger and bigger possible disasters (including the ones you point out about gamma ray burst or wandering neutron stars).
More ideas in that direction: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
And by others:
http://www.luf.org/
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Mai...
http://lifeboat.com/ex/main
http://openluna.org/
Also something I've been involved with, but has since became more broadly "Open Manufacturing" and the maker movement: http://openvirgle.net/
So, generation ships etc. are interesting ideas, and they all fit into a large general picture of possibilities.
Still, for all that, making the Earth work well for most everyone (zero emissions cradle-to-cradle manufacturing, better healthcare and nutrition, a global basic income, better education for all, indoor agriculture, new power sources like dirt cheap solar and hot and cold fusion, and so on) is a good first step towards knowing how to live in space, especially given we are already on what Bucky Fuller called "Spaceship Earth". So, I see no big incompatibility between trying to make the Earth work for everyone and preparing for a future where there are quadrillions of people living in self-replicating space habitats throughout the solar system and ultimately the galaxy and beyond -- perhaps even into other dimensions and realities and simulations? Of course, there are philosophical issues still about all this about meanings in life and so on.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Entropy. I don't think that word means what you think it means. The time between the events that will end humanity as a species or civilization and the time between the events of a possible heat-death of our universe are separated by orders of magnitude. Entropy should never be used as a nihilistic excuse to do nothing...
1 Everybody changes the world. Some good and some bad.
2. Musk is right now building a super expensive electric car for the rich. He is right now Mr. Royce he is not yet Henry Ford.
3. He is build rockets but so are several other companies. He is doing well at it but it is not like he has made spaceflight cost $10 a kilo yet.
Everyone can and should politely question things like this. What kind of almost religious zeal causes you to result to insults at such a simple statement. I happen to think that Musk is doing a lot of good things. Mars may be over ambitious but their is a very wise saying. If you never fail you never tried hard enough. You on the other hand have resorted to worship and adoration for the man. You attacked the none believers with insults and I doubt that you brought any light on the subject. You most certainly did not inform anyone. In other words you have failed to take an opportunity to make the world a better place.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Put a million people on Mars with no oil, and what are they going to do? That's right -- they'll attack Earth to get our oil! No thanks, Elon.
I, for one, will *not* welcome our new Martian overlords.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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?
---
"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.
Hauling 1M bodies to Mars is not an efficient way to populate the planet. Unless and until we have a reliable and cost effective artificial womb, the limiting factor is the ability to have babies. So we should start with, say, 100 very intelligent and skilled, and physically capable women. Each of them should be inpregnated on Mars with frozen, fertilized ova from a stock representing the genetic diversity of Earth. Did I mention that the ova should all be females? So assuming that each woman can bear 7 children in her lifetime (a reasonable average based on good medical care and historic norms) and that the generation time is 20 years, it would take about 125 years to reach a population of 1 million. During that 125 year period the women would be busy building a modern civilization while also devoting a major portion of their time ot childcare. Constant resupply of food and manufactured products would have to be provided from Earth. Oh, and I guess they could have a few males around... you know... for entertainment.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
I think Musk just jumped the shark.
How so? He's been saying this for years now, in one form or another. And as a society you're lucky to have some crazy people like Musk to make up for legions of bean-counter types.
On the one hand, I think his number is off, or at least lacking detail. There's significant evidence that around 100k years ago humanity went through a population bottleneck of around 10k humans, so that seems like compelling evidence that a 10k population at least can contain sufficient genetic diversity to allow a species similar to humanity to survive. If you need a million hands to do work, then you could have those 10k people generate offspring, or you could augment their productivity by a factor of 100, or a combination of both, but as for moving people (or genes) from Earth to Mars, you should be able to get away with only moving 10k and still have at least a reasonable chance of being a back-up to our one planet egg basket.
Then there's the idea of needing to send 100k ships to Mars. Unless you're just swimming in delta V, then you should probably launch ships at or near the transfer windows that happen every 26 months. If you're sending a ship every window, then those 100k ships will take over 200 thousand years. A lot can happen in 200,000 years. Like really, a whole lot. If you're sending 1000 ships every launch window, economies of scale work really well for orbital transfers, and you'd be really a lot better off sending a ship 1000 times bigger. It'd still take 200 years, which is still a long time, but not nearly as long as 200,000. And if you only need 10k people, you could send 1000 at a time for the next 20 years, which while still seeming extremely optimistic, at least sounds within some bounds of rationality.
But maybe it's harder to get people interested in reasonable and achievable, but difficult goals than it is to get them excited about the unrealistic monumental ones. Sitting on the couch watching National Geographic, it's a lot more fun to say "I could totally go and climb Mt. Everest myself, I should do that!" than it is to get off the couch and go jogging for 15 minutes.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
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.
I love the idea, but I think it's been mentioned on Slashdot before that the best way to preserve humanity is to build a colony underneath the Earth's surface. Quite far underneath to protect against various threats, including medium sized asteroids and super volcanoes etc. We're talking about a self-contained, self-sustained system, to the furthest extent that we can manage.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Not relevant except to a pedant. Nothing humanity is concerned with except in the abstract necessitates consideration of the entire universe, only our tiny portion.
We just need to develop a Cosmic AC.
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
That land across ye sea already had a million people on it, long before Europeans "discovered" it. Mars is a bit different.
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.
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.
Never aspire to be Henry Ford, he was a horrible evil man.
Not to Godwin the thread, but I happened to have stumbled upon this yesterday...
" The relationship of Ford and GM to the Nazi regime goes back to the 1920s and 1930s, when the American car companies competed against each other for access to the lucrative German market. Hitler was an admirer of American mass production techniques and an avid reader of the antisemitic tracts penned by Henry Ford. "I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration," Hitler told a Detroit News reporter two years before becoming the German chancellor in 1933, explaining why he kept a life-size portrait of the American automaker next to his desk.
Although Ford later renounced his antisemitic writings, he remained an admirer of Nazi Germany and sought to keep America out of the coming war. In July 1938, four months after the German annexation of Austria, he accepted the highest medal that Nazi Germany could bestow on a foreigner, the Grand Cross of the German Eagle. The following month, a senior executive for General Motors, James Mooney, received a similar medal for his "distinguished service to the Reich."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Now, as then, we have lots of overlap between government and corporate power structures.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
The only proven method of preserving information is to duplicate that information and spread it out over a wide geographical area... the larger the area the better it is. Better yet, if you can provide religious rationale for preserving that information it tends to survive for even longer periods of time (which is precisely what kept the ancient Greek literature preserved... by religious fanatics who wanted to be able to understand the words of their messiah).
What gets that information duplicated is by having people there to perform the duplication and have a need for that information, hence why Elon Musk's proposal totally makes sense. How else are you proposing to safeguard information then?
Duplicating data and sending it to random places in the universe is counter productive and pointless too. Sending data to people who can use that information and add to the database makes much more sense.
The kind that doesn't give legitimate world-changers a free pass when they start with the crazy talk.
Let me emphasize the relevant portion of the summary:
How fast could we do it? Within a century, once the spacecraft reusability problem is solved.
The question was not how fast will we do it, he's answering how fast could we do it. We could put people on Mars in four years if we had the political will to do it. We don't, so we won't do it until China either threatens to do it or actually goes through with it first. As for launching a hundred thousand missions, that is impossible as long as we can't reuse spacecraft, which is mostly addressed by the last point (assuming the reusability problem is solved very thoroughly, e.g. only easily-replaceable fuel made of very common elements is not reused, and the used components are very easily refurbished).
Didn't Forrest Gump explain stupid to you?
Does it have something to do with not reading the card under the lid of the box of chocolates so that you would know what was inside?
If you're go to is a exaggerated fictional character, maybe you should sit down and consider that you are actually wrong?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We can hedge our bets, though.
Hedging our bets would be sending high speed one-way generational ships out of this solar system.
Mars is not much of a hedge. Even if mars was fully self sufficient, many of the most likely killers
like nuclear war probably wouldn't spare a colony on mars. I'm not saying that we shouldn't do it though.
I think one of the greatest benefits would be learning to run a full blown biosphere so when we finally
damage our current biosphere beyond repair at least we know how to create glass cities to live in.
I was under the impression that living in low to zero G for extended periods of time was exceedingly bad for human health, resulting in muscle wastage, loss in bone density, and impairment of the immune system.
In addition, it's far easier to provide protection from radiation on a planet than it is in space, at least it is until we're seriously exploiting space based resources such as asteroids.
As for the title of your post, well, it's easy to be disdainful of someone's dreams and ambitions. After all, the easiest way of "bigging yourself up" is to put someone else down. That says more about the person mouthing off though, than about the person being insulted.
Dirt isn't a big problem, nor are the other materials.
The premise has been examined by Andy Weir in his fiction book "The Martian", which shows that you can survive on relatively little. I am making the assumption that he did his chemistry and biology homework whilst writing this :-)
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
...we need a Million Man Mars?
If we're restricted to a single world in the cosmos, probably so. Planetary calamities that exterminate most existing species seem to happen on a fairly regular basis. That's one of the reasons space enthusiasts want to spread out through the cosmos - create enough isolated colonies and the odds of them all being wiped out drops dramatically. Unless you assume that we're inherently and irredeemably a self-destructive species. Even if 99 out of a hundred colonies collapses, that hundredth colony will be insulated from that destruction by the vastness of interstellar space and, assuming they all stay in communication with each other, will have the opportunity to learn from the collapse of it's peers, and spread those lessons across it's own child colonies.
We've only been recognizably human for 100,000 years or so, and for most of that time we lived a fairly sustainable lifestyle, it's only in the last few millennia that we've become a hazard to ourselves. There's no reason to assume we couldn't learn to live sustainably again, now that we understand that we do in fact shape the world on a scale once attributed only to the gods. And if we can make it another 100,000 years we'll be as far removed from what we are today as we now are from those clever ape-men who set out into the savanna in search of a better life.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's actually pretty simple logic:
Either A) there will be an unavoidable "heat death" which no race may survive or B) Some undiscovered aspect of the universe will prevent A)
and Either C) we get off this rock or D) we stay on this rock.
A and C -- we are doomed
A and D -- we are doomed
B and D -- we are doomed
B and C -- chance of survival.
Someone had to do it.