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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

You're free to advocate for other things, but most of the critics aren't doing this, they're just shitting all over this idea and then making vague waves in the general direction of other ideas.

Further, why so much focus on this particular billionaire, who at least is focusing pretty hard on driving progress even if you don't agree on the precise direction, and ignoring all the ones just wasting it, or being actively counterproductive?

That's the part that really drives me nuts. A lot of wealthy people are doing things that are highly questionable or are outright destructive, but they don't get this much criticism.

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> That's the part that really drives me nuts. A lot of wealthy people are doing things that are highly questionable or are outright destructive, but they don't get this much criticism.

For one part, I think many people just expect wealthy people to do questionable and outright destructive things. If there's someone that doesn't fit these expectations he or she shatters that worldview because wealthy people can't at the same time be good people, too, can they?

This has a lot to do with a warped sense of equality and equity: People who aren't so well-off don't get to have these opportunities to change the world in one way or another so the ones who are in that worldview shouldn't get to embark on positive endeavours either, so everyone is equally miserable.

The fallacy with that of course is that with everyone feeling equally miserable everyone's worse-off whereas if people - wealthy or not - make the most out of the deck they've been dealt everybody (or at least society as a whole) will profit.

The funny thing about Elon Musk is that he actually accomplishes stuff. Which is not the norm among vision-driven people.

I regularly get approached by vision-driven projects, to help them make something concrete, and the vast majority of them will accomplish nothing because the people on them are not doers and they don't understand practical matters. Many, many people do not understand the difference between dreaming and doing. And many people will happily waste their entire life dreaming about things and then getting bitter when someone else doesn't realize it for dem and give them the credit.

I'm not going to name names, but I had a discussion with a fairly known "visionary" who has been trying to claim credit for something which he did not do. Simply because he fucked around with an idea without actually making any progress on it for _decades_. All he did was to make it ever more complex and unattainable by adding useless shit to it. Then when someone actually managed to strip the idea down to something that could be realized he first shit all over it and then tried to claim credit for it once it became successful. Yet he wanted everyone to recognize him for his "contributions".

I generally don't give a shit about what people who do nothing think. To me, they do not count.

Elon Musk does stuff. His critics don't. Let's start there.

> Further, why so much focus on this particular billionaire,

Personally, I'm worried by the fact that it's a billionaire driving this, nevermind which one in particular. If and when SpaceX colonizes Mars, what sort of life will the people up there live? Will it be a Musk dictatorship? A corporate fiefdom? Rich people remaking society in their own image wasn't exactly the space dream I grew up with.

It's not like NASA or anyone else is going to make it happen anytime soon if this weren't happening. If anyone else wants to take a shot at Mars, they're more than welcome to. Even long after SpaceX's plans come to fruition (assuming they ever do), Mars is a big place and there will be plenty of room for other organizations to do their own thing.

Your concern is that a billionaire is driving a private project that will cost billions of dollars?

> Rich people remaking society in their own image wasn't exactly the space dream I grew up with.

It wasn't the "earth dream" I grew up with either, and yet, here we are.

International law (i.e. the Outer Space Treaty[1]) does not cease to apply in the event that it's a corporation that does the exploring.

[1]: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty_of_1967#Ar...

Any of these is possible, but the character of the founders really does matter.

There's a weird sort of fear of potential corporate dystopias that just ignores all the actual government dystopias that have existed throughout history. Plenty of government colonies were dictatorships, fiefdoms, attempts at building bizarre and broken societies. Many people reading this live in nations that originated in exactly that fashion.

> ignores all the actual government dystopias that have existed throughout history

I think my fear of potential corporate dystopias is informed by my knowledge of actual government dystopias.

There have pretty bad corporate dystopias in history too. The East India companies, Belgian Congo etc.

Many nations with dystopian origins are fine now, sure, but there was a lot of suffering along the way; I don't think it's unreasonable to want to prevent that.

The point is that there have been plenty of purely governmental dystopias -- far more than there have been even pseudo-corporate ones like the ones you describe -- but we don't have people fretting about how we shouldn't have the government run Mars colonization due to that.

Dystopian colonies run by national governments yes. Dystopian colonies run by democracies of which the colonists were citizens no.

Weren't Algerians citizens of France? Anyway, if we're no-true-Scotsmaning here, there also aren't any examples of dystopian colonies run by "corporations" that weren't joined at the hip with a national government.

> Weren't Algerians citizens of France?

I'm not ever so familiar with that history, but a quick look at the wiki suggests very much not; some of the elites were (and, at certain periods, the non-muslim population), but never the regular population, and indeed this was a major point of contention leading up to the war.

> Anyway, if we're no-true-Scotsmaning here, there also aren't any examples of dystopian colonies run by "corporations" that weren't joined at the hip with a national government.

Musk is explicitly talking about a "public-private partnership". I think any project on the scale of Mars colonization is necessarily going to be intimately entangled with one or more governments.

In the talk, Musk says that he plans on selling the ticket, not building the colony. The colony will be a product of the different interests paying to send people to the planet. Who those interests will be is anyone's guess.

> Will it be a Musk dictatorship? A corporate fiefdom? Rich people remaking society in their own image wasn't exactly the space dream I grew up with.

i see the possibility, with corporations there is always the option of quitting the job - that's the limiting factor, so that it can't get really totalitarian as it doesn't have the teeth for that. However you don't have the option of quitting up on Mars. There will probably be shortages and huge problems during the initial stage, so you might end up with a highly stratified society (provided that there are no robots that could do all the work for us).

Now there is always the option of a benevolent dictator who will actually quit after two terms; it has happened before. They might just as well put up reasonable institutions of government given that we have this tradition down here on earth.

i guess the colonists will not just silently comply with a dictatorship (that's a key requirement for keeping this system), just because they are not used to this sort of governance.

> Rich people remaking society in their own image

If that were actually the case, then there would be no poor people, and we can all at least agree that all other things being held constant, a society where no one is poor is better than one where some people are poor, right?

Because there is nowhere to engage with them or around their capital allocation specifically? Also because the problem set they are trying to solve is not as ambitious. Remember the problem set for this Mars project is basically "Saving Humanity from Extinction."

You see similar conversations come up when large scale renewable projects are invested in - wherein people shout about how people should be investing in fusion or Thorium etc...

Also, if someone comes out and says "We're investing in Docker" and the response is "You should be investing in AI instead!!" it just makes you look like a crank - largely because they are different value investments.

My point is basically that it just makes you look like a crank regardless of whether the subject is Docker or Mars.

Sure, people do this stuff all the time. And it's ridiculous, and I can't understand why people are doing it here or why you're defending it.

You're saying that if people are highly ambitious and trying to do some good, that makes them more of a target. And furthermore, you seem to be embracing that. I agree with the former, but strongly reject the latter.

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