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Elon Musk To Write a Book About Earth Sustainability and Mars Colonization
MarkWhittington writes Elon Musk has taken on quite a number of projects with a goal of changing the world while making lots of money doing so. He proposes to revolutionize space travel through his commercial launch company, SpaceX. His more earthly endeavors have included electric cars, home solar power, a transportation system called the Hyperloop, a space based Internet and, most recently, a battery that can power a house. Now, according to a story in Business Insider, Musk will open his mind on his views on "sustainability" was well as Mars colonization in book form.
A guy who got rich off of one of the more hated financial service companies must automatically be a futurist genius.
Paypal was just one of his many accomplishments. There is also Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity. I think he is at least as qualified as anyone else to make predictions. Especially about the future.
The shallowness of the public just gets more shocking all the time.
So who should the public be listening to? Visionaries like Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren?
>If Musk made the prediction that the future is going to be a low energy future with less material wealth than your parents, would you defend him as much?
Well, those are kind of the options, aren't they? Either we go to space, or we are forever limited by the resources available on Earth. The limits which all rational predictions say are going to starting to hit hard over the the next century. Granted, if we get off fossil fuels we can increase total energy consumption by at least an order of magnitude or two before waste heat starts causing comparable problems - but when it comes to raw resources, mining space is likely to be considerably easier than mining the Earth's mantle.
And then there's the pesky fact that space-based solar is the only long-term viable technology for achieving that kind of energy consumption without doing massive environmental damage - sucking that much energy from the winds or tides would almost certainly wreak havoc, and it would completely consume estimated total (not just discovered) fission and fusion ore reserves within only a few centuries. And you can't very well do ground-based solar on that scale, not unless you want to encase the entire planet in solar panels. And building space-based solar farms economically will require either fundamentally new surface-to-orbit technologies, or a viable space infrastructure. Sure, it's a very long-term plan, but our species has reached the point where we really need to start planning beyond our own lifetimes if we want to survive - just look at the problems our short-sightedness is already creating.
The real lunacy is to think that we can sustain a perpetual-growth based economy within a fishbowl. It worked for a couple centuries, but we're pushing up against the glass now, doing serious long-term environmental damage for the sake of a few more resources. Going to space will at least open the door to a few more centuries of "sustainable" growth before we reach the limits of the solar system, maybe as much as a several millenia depending on growth rate and whether we find that the Oort cloud is conductive to harvesting.
There's certainly an argument to be made that we need to get off the "sustainable growth" delusion that has infected our species, but personally I'd like to see the door opened to continuing it for a while without destroying our planet - just in case we can't cure ourselves overnight.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.