> The concept of having humans on another planetary body makes a lot of sense as backup-plan for humanity.
Sorry, but it's like planning your workout routine in a burning building.
The climate emergency is building right now, this instant. Cosmic threats like asteroids happen on the order of millions of years apart.
We need to stabilize the planet, now, in this generation, immediately, or we will doom a million species and most of humanity.
Once that is done, we can look at problems on the ten thousand to ten million year scales that cost quadrillions of dollars to solve, like "moving to a second planet".
Let me be blunt - unless we go all out, the collapse will happen a hundred years before any Mars colony is self-sufficient, and none of them will survive.
"Global Warming" is about the Earth going ~2C to 4C out-of-whack with our traditional norms over the next century or so.
Mars is about being at -60C all the time, or roughly 80C away from what humans want. And temperature isn't even the worst part: Mars doesn't have enough oxygen for Humans to survive. Mars doesn't have enough nitrogen for plants to grow (and make oxygen). Mars doesn't have enough gravity to keep a dense enough atmosphere for us.
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Look, I recognize the difficulty that Global Warming has on the human race. But Global Warming is a far, far, far easier problem than trying to have a sustainable, livable experience on Mars.
There's 7 billion human brains on earth. We can spare a couple to focus on making our species multi-planetary while the rest deal with cleaning up the mess at home. It's unreasonable to expect the entire human race to stop what they're doing and focus on one issue.
There is no meaningful difference between surviving extreme conditions on mars and extreme conditions on earth.
The only difference is that the number of people that can live in extreme conditions is much smaller than the number that can live in normal conditions.
Fighting against climate change is purely about making sure that the earth can maintain 7 billion + humans. Any mars colonization program will not progress fast enough to let 7 billion humans inhabit mars within the next 200 years.
>It's unreasonable to expect the entire human race to stop what they're doing and focus on one issue.
Nobody said "stop what they're doing" except you. But the usual argument is that Elon Musk is accelerating the progress toward mars colonization and accelerating that progress simply isn't needed because of time constraints that no amount of money can solve. It will take decades no matter what a conman tells you.
...and Rome wasn't built in a day, what's your point? Just because we won't see tangible results in our lifetime doesn't mean the effort, lessons learned and thought energy in that direction is meaningless.
Trying to live on Mars is meaningless. All effort put towards it is complete, and utter waste.
As I said in other comments, feel free to waste your resources on the project. But if you're trying to convince others that the project is useful or fruitful (and ask for other people's resources or help on the matter), then be prepared for some resistance.
> In your nightmare scenario we're going to need terraforming tech both on Earth and Mars.
The hypothetical technology to reduce Earth's temperature by 4-degrees Celsius is simply going to be fundamentally different from the hypothetical technology to increase Mars's temperature by 80-degrees Celsius.
Whether or not A) is true has nothing to do with whether or not B) is worth doing. There's no reason to imply that I'm making a false dichotomy fallacy.
I'm not saying you're not allowed to work on it. If its a task you feel like wasting your money on, that's fine.
But don't expect me to support the effort by any means, not until you give me an argument for why Mars Terraforming would be a worthwhile use of resources I control or resources I have otherwise influence over.
The fact that he's spending resources on nominally going to Mars is completely idiotic. I've got enough of a brain to figure that out.
Its a free country. Which means I'm free to make my opinion on how others spend their money and resources.
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This is relevant because of all of the highly questionable moves Musk has done in the past weeks. He pumped BTC, pumped DOGE online. He pretends that he's a busy and (Aspergers) CEO despite spending huge amounts of effort on pop culture like Rick and Morty, Saturday Night Live, and other cultural mainstays. He proposes that terraforming Mars is a fruitful endevour.
He lies about "Full Self Driving" to the public for years, even as news reports come out as people literally die and burn to death inside of the cars his companies make. He claims COVID19 is a hoax, in an effort to keep his factories open.
He publishes a Finite-Element-Analysis of Hyperloop so basic that a 1st year college student could have done it. He builds tiny tunnels without any emergency contingencies while putting highly flammable lithium Ion batteries inside of those tunnels for Las Vegas.
And then finally, we come to this topic. Where he first hypes BTC (after buying it), and then after selling a huge chunk of it (over 10% in the past quarter), seemingly moves to dump the price of BTC.
Etc. etc.
At some point, we have to recognize that this guy is not an "engineer" at all. Musk is a hypeman at best. His lack of focus (so many topics covered...) suggests mania (as opposed to Aspergers). I dunno. Its getting harder and harder to take Musk seriously on any of these issues.
Nicely put. Just one point on the last paragraph, I guess somebody with Asperger's could also have ADHD. They can concentrate on something that catches their interest and forget about everything else for a while, but they can also shift their focus to whatever draws their attention next. In fact sustaining their effort over one long-term thing might be a skill they have to hone just like many other people. There doesn't seem to be a contradiction IMO.
> In fact sustaining their effort over one long-term thing might be a skill they have to hone just like many other people. There doesn't seem to be a contradiction IMO.
* Solar Panels? Utility scale electric generators?
(SolarCity?)
* Space? (SpaceX)
* Infrastructure? (Hyperloop? Boring Company?)
* AI? (Self-driving cars)
* Internet infrastructure? (Starlink?)
* BTC / DOGEcoin? Crypto-currencies?
For Payment Processors: we're looking at web technologies like Javascript, Two-factor authentication, Back-end Web processing, etc. etc. That's very much in the know for us nerds who hang around here in ycombinator: an extended "hyperfocus" on Payment Processors is a lifetime of effort alone.
There's simply not enough time for Elon Musk to reach "expert" levels of understanding in any of these subjects. Anyone who knows anything about these subjects knows that Musk's discussion points are EXTREMELY shallow. They're deep enough that maybe a layperson thinks that Musk is smart, but... seriously, look at his recent DOGEcoin / BTCcoin discussion points. The dude barely understand cryptocurrencies (or at least pretends he barely understands them, as he "suddenly" realizes the energy implications of BTC).
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I'm not really doubting the ability of someone with Asperger's to change subjects. But given how quickly Elon Musk changes subjects, its my personal opinion that he probably doesn't have Asperger's. Do remember: that all the while he's changing these subjects, Elon Musk is partying hard and participating in pop culture (Saturday Night Live, Rick and Morty, Twitter rants, etc. etc.).
His behavior does NOT match any Asperger's individual I've ever met. I know everyone's case is unique, but... that's a lot of "non-Asperger's" things going on (social partying, pop culture, appearances on TV, live talks, CEO position, "jack-of-all-trades" behavior instead of depth into particular subjects... etc. etc.)
I'm no expert in psychology. But this behavior is _mania_: common in say Bipolar individuals. Which is useful in its own niches of course (much like Asperger's is useful in engineering: mania typically causes an individual to visit many subjects... albeit shallowly but yeah, that's probably useful to a typical CEO moreso than hyperfocus actually)
Sorry, but it's like planning your workout routine in a burning building.
The climate emergency is building right now, this instant. Cosmic threats like asteroids happen on the order of millions of years apart.
We need to stabilize the planet, now, in this generation, immediately, or we will doom a million species and most of humanity.
Once that is done, we can look at problems on the ten thousand to ten million year scales that cost quadrillions of dollars to solve, like "moving to a second planet".
Let me be blunt - unless we go all out, the collapse will happen a hundred years before any Mars colony is self-sufficient, and none of them will survive.