Elon Musk: We Must Put a Million People On Mars To Safeguard Humanity 549
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."
Profitable, if self-contradictory (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Profitable, if self-contradictory (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no way to "safeguard humanity" (at least in a physical sense). It's called "entropy".
We can hedge our bets, though.
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http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
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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.
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What do you mean by "entropy"? Are you implying we live in a closed system? Or you are being absolutist and thinking about >Myr timescales. In both cases, it is not a good counter-argument to the plan.
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Are you implying the universe is not a closed system (or by extension, whatever multiverse our observable universe may be within)?
I'll need some evidence of that. Within the proposed metaphysical context at hand.
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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
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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.
Re:Profitable, if self-contradictory (Score:5, Informative)
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...
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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 hav
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On the other hand, there's a difference between 100 million years, and 10 billion.
Re:Profitable, if self-contradictory (Score:5, Insightful)
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HOW YOUR FEET FEEL IN YOUR SOCKS!
I guess I am disqualified due to the fact that I am not wearing socks.
dibs (Score:2)
Scratches Head (Score:5, Interesting)
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50k would do it just fine.
or just send females and semen from 1 million guys.
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or just send females and semen from 1 million guys.
That's actually a bloody good idea! Send eggs and semen. For every family, each child conceived should have the male or female DNA substituted for a fresh one.
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or just send females and semen from 1 million guys.
There is always one guy to remove the fun out of great idea ...
Re:Scratches Head (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Scratches Head (Score:5, Funny)
General "Buck" 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?
Dr. 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.
Re:Scratches Head (Score:5, Funny)
General "Slashdot" Neckbeardson: And to mate with these females, would that require talking to them? Like reaching out to hold their hands and stuff?
Dr. Handlove: Regrettably, yes.
General "Slashdot" Neckbeardson: Yiyiyiyiyi
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The fastest way to breed a population increase would be multiple females for every male.
Multiple uteri at any rate. Our ability to grow organs and have them live outside of the human body is improving rapidly. I don't think it is too far out to imagine that we might one day grow babies inside artificial uteri outside of the human body.
If science keeps progressing there may come a day when only the poor make their children the old fashioned way.
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If science keeps progressing there may come a day when only the poor make their children the old fashioned way.
You may have just hit on the solution to economic inequality. Make it so everyone wants to be poor!
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grow babies inside artificial uteri outside of the human body.
The first image that pops into my mind is "Logan's Run.
Re:Scratches Head (Score:4, Funny)
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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.
That would defeat the "genetically diverse" requirement.
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If you come up with something, there are umpteen fathers on Earth with teenage daughters who would be interested.
FWIW, though the longish article begged skimming, it touched on the settlement being genetically diverse from earth. What would a Martian descendant of Earth look like in fifty generations? IDK, but I'd like it if humanity knew one day.
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I think you and Mr. Musk don't share the same definition for : "genetically diverse".
SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:3)
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Did we abandon terraforming?
Yes, don't you remember the environmentalist protests last time we tried?
Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:4, Funny)
I wouldn't call Khan an environmentalist.
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Cargo (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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Fixed (Score:5, Funny)
Elon Musk: We Must Put a Million Lawyers On Mars To Safeguard Humanity
There, fixed that for you.
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save some space for telephone sanitizers and hairdressers
Oblig Dr Strangelove (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Moving people == dumb idea (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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He's right but Mars isn't far enough (Score:2)
He's right that we need to get populations of humans off this rock if the species is going to survive. Mars might be a good first step, but we need to think about more distance, Mars is too close. The gamma ray burst that kills off life on earth would just as easily kill everyone on Mars. If the problem was a wandering neutron star it's going to savage everything in its path.
We need to think about sending generational ships into space. Maybe we can't do it right now, but we should be working toward that g
The general issue is decentralization & resile (Score:5, Interesting)
As I discussed here (~25years ago): http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin... [pdfernhout.net]
"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... [pdfernhout.net]
And here: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d... [ideascale.com]
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/... [kurtz-fernhout.com]
And by others:
http://www.luf.org/ [luf.org]
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Mai... [wikia.com]
http://lifeboat.com/ex/main [lifeboat.com]
http://openluna.org/ [openluna.org]
Also something I've been involved with, but has since became more broadly "Open Manufacturing" and the maker movement: http://openvirgle.net/ [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.
Who would go there? (Score:2)
The Poor will inherit the Mars (Score:2)
Mars has no magnetosphere (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Creating a Mars magnetosphere (Score:2)
Mars does not have a molten iron core, and hence doesn't have the cool magnetic field that earth does.
Spouting some bullshit during my lunchtime - would it be possible to make the core molten and thus spin up a magnetosphere by creating an artificial moon?
I'm thinking keep firing asteroids into the necessary orbit until you've accrued enough mass.
Obviously not a "done this week" project just a curious thought experiment.
Mars has no magnetosphere (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Space and improving Earth are not incompatible (Score:4, Insightful)
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/... [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... [naturalchild.org]
"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
Re:Mars has no magnetosphere (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mars has no magnetosphere (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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You could colonize a million people in Antarctica for a fraction of the cost of sending a million people to Mars. Unlike Mars, water and air are abundant in Antarctica, and the earth's magnetic field would provide protection from solar radiation. Transportation, not having to deal with leaving a gravity well, would be infinitely cheaper. And there is the possibility of finding oil and coal deposits in Antarctica, something very unlikely to happen in Mars. There would be issues of international law regarding
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It isn't about making it nice here. It's about putting all your eggs in one basket. One major natural accident or man made nuclear war or asteroid crashing into the earth can kill humanity. Time and time again if you look at the history of the earth there are terminal periods in which most of all the life vanished in a relatively short time and then after millions of years replaced with something else. We don't want to be that species which dies out. We need to expand to ensure the race's survival. Th
You go first (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe only 1000 (Score:2)
1 millon is a very big number. Mankind odds for the future could be vastly improved if we send maybe 1000 (specific) people to Mars. Or to the bottom of the sea, or maybe just sacrifice them in a volcano.
Seriously, for sending big amounts of people and materials elsewhere you need more than rockets, maybe an space elevator, or a cheaper/more efficient way to send big loads to space (there are several alternatives for non-rocket spacelaunch [wikipedia.org])
The question is : WHICH million people? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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This reminds me of the Golgafrinchans [wikipedia.org] in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. (Obviously some spoilers in there if you haven't read it)
Why bother? (Score:2)
Well just F up that planet too.
The concept of treating planets as disposable vessels for humans to be sucked dry and then we move on basically makes us a cancer.
Screw that! (Score:3)
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.
LOL! (Score:2, Insightful)
As the subject says!
Mainstream - finally! (Score:2)
Forget about sanitizing our spaceships - it proves very little. Spread life around the galaxy! It is our duty.
Agree with the sentiment, disagree with details (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Mars isn't far enough away. (Score:2)
That's a lot of trips. (Score:2)
The number of trips to populate is likely to be somewhat smaller if you send men and women who can reproduce. Those offspring can reproduce (assuming there are both m/f offspring) after 18-20 years. And, of course, people will die of natural and unnatural causes. What will the average lifespan be? Average breeding span?
It would be an interesting equation to figure out as to how many trips it would actually take to make a genetically diverse community that also has other society needs met in order to fun
Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, in case *SOMETHING ELSE* managed to fuck* up our home planet and wipe out humanity. Does the term "extinction-level event" mean anything to you? Seen any (non-feathered) dinosaurs lately?
* we're adults here, or at least this is the Internet and you can pretend. Swearing is OK
To the core! (Score:3)
So, he's saying... (Score:3)
...we need a Million Man Mars?
Re:uhh (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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That's what people said about Tesla and just about every real thinker of the past.
Yeah, and that's what they also said about the crazy guy down on the street corner screaming about his perpetual energy machine, or the "visionary" proclaiming that we'd all be driving flying cars by 2000. Just because someone's ideas sound radical and people disagree with him doesn't make him right. Most "crazy ideas" really ARE crazy. And most "nutters" really ARE nutters.
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
Re:uhh (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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If you're go to is a exaggerated fictional character, maybe you should sit down and consider that you are actually wrong?
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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?
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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
Re:uhh (Score:5, Insightful)
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... [wikipedia.org]
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.
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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/... [washingtonpost.com]
Now, as then, we have lots of overlap between government and corporate power structures.
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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
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I'll not be drawn into a dick-waving contest with you, but I'll add that I've rarely been accused of simple-mindedness or being "fucking stupid".
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Didn't Forrest Gump explain stupid to you?
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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?
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Five major extinctions on Earth does certainly work the statistics in his favor.
I'm certain the tardigrade will be fine, though.
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No he is just dreaming big. I do question his statement that their would be no oil or natural gas. If mars had life it might be possible that oil and other hydrocarbons did form.
It is unlikely that they are around but impossible. If so we just need a lot of 02 and then burn baby burn! Mars needs CO2.
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Re:uhh (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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The parent is absolutely correct. Why is he modded "troll"?
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It has been done before, mate.
A utopia by that name was founded in the South American nation of Paraguay way back in 1893.
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Basically correct, and we will either achieve strong AI within a century, or never.
More Efficient (Score:3)
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 bea
Re:More Efficient (Score:4, Funny)
Or just a LOT of humping.... 100 people = 10,000 genetic combinations. Then move foreward with artificial insemination and invitro.
But a LOT of humping is the preferred path, anything to help get rid of the Stupid- Idiotic Puritanical anti sex bullshit in humanity, I am all for.
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Its like you have learned nothing from the giant petri dish we live on called Earth. If you want life to flourish, you shotgun that shit like crazy. In evolution and survival, optimum at one angle often means weak at another. Massive genetic diversity is the key, not producing perfect specimens. We will need genetics from hundreds of thousands of people to ma
Re:More Efficient (Score:5, Funny)
"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?"
"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."
"I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor."
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"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?"
"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."
"I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor."
Came to the comments for this. Was not disappointed.
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Oh, wait ...
Re:More Efficient (Score:5, Informative)
> I don't know what technology could get a ticket to Mars from the Earth down to say $100 USD,
I do, but then I wrote a textbook about space systems engineering [ http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/S... [wikibooks.org] ]. It's a combination of self-replicating automation, extracting local materials and energy everywhere, and a space elevator network.
* It would be very expensive to haul all the equipment you need to Mars in order to live there. Instead, what you want to send is a starter kit of basic machines, and use those to build other machines, until you grow big enough to make the final equipment (habitat domes, etc.). You prefer to make this starter kit as automated as possible, since you won't have the facilities to support people until later. You start on Earth, and build a starter kit that grows to a full factory. That factory builds a second starter kit that gets launched to orbit, where it grows to a full factory. In turn that one sends a starter kit to Phobos, and then finally the Phobos one sends one down to Mars.
* All of the factories run off of local solar energy and process local materials to make most of the new products. A few percent will need to be imported parts, because they are too hard to make, or use rare elements. At each location you build up greenhouses, habitat modules, and processing plants. One of the locations is a "Cycling Mars Transfer Orbit", which goes back and forth from Earth to Mars. So instead of sending 10,000 Mars Colonial Transports carrying 100 people each, you build up a mining colony/transit hub that makes multiple trips, carrying people each time.
* A rotating elevator (Skyhook or Rotovator) can provide about as much velocity change as a rocket stage. A series of them in Low Earth Orbit, High Earth Orbit, and Mars Orbit can provide the velocity changes to hook up with the mobile mining colony, and then put you down on Mars.
Such a system would be low cost to build and run, but you need enough traffic (like 10,000 passengers a year) to justify building it.
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And telephone sanitizers.
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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 e