James Lovelock: 'I Would Not Waste My Fortune on Colonizing Mars'
spiegel.de
spiegel.de
> It’s crazy, completely crazy. Elon Musk has read too much science fiction. He got carried away with it. If I were in his position, I would not waste my fortune on colonizing Mars. And all they would learn is how awful it is up there: You can't breathe the air, the pressure of the atmosphere is a tiny fraction of what we have on Mount Everest.
Instead of straw manning Musk and implying he doesn't know about the composition of Mar's atmosphere, try steel manning him and trying to figure out what he's doing.
Musk has captured the imagination of financiers, engineers and the public and gotten them all pulling in the same direction - into space. Musk is marketing, that's his core skill. Mars is the sales pitch that drives SpaceX.
I think he's nowhere near the level of people that we usually think of as geniuses. In certain ways he's good at marketing and hyping things up, but a lot of his ideas, especially the Mars one, are nonsensical.
Just try to think about this: how bad do the conditions on Earth have to get before it makes sense to try to move to a planet that is essentially uninhabitable? Where even in the best scenarios we would live really harsh lives after a long and dangerous voyage.
And he leans into the craziness a bit beforehand by choosing to describe stuff in a way that sounds a bit unbelievable ("hoverslam onto a droneship" = land under constant deceleration on a barge with station-keeping thrusters... "bioweapon defense mode" = good air filters, "autopilot" = good lane-keeping like an airplane's autopilot), drawing scoffs from a lot of intelligent, serious people. ...which pays off in spades when the thing succeeds. So maybe that's a bit of marketing instinct, but not in the traditional sense.
So the more nonsensical he makes it sound, the greater the return when it actually happens.
He gets the scoffers to do his marketing for him.
I agree, but this is true only when things actually happen. How about his idea of using rockets instead of planes for long haul flight (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LENvGRsr7Q)? Or how about the hyperloop - any real progress on that? Or his idea of a submersible to save those kids trapped in a cave - was it good that he hyped that up? Remember when he started calling people pedophiles without proof?
I'm also curious if you have more details on his technical contributions to Tesla and SpaceX. Do you know to what extent he's actually involved in the work (design, engineering etc.)?
Hyperloop is making progress. It wasn't a priority for Musk; he didn't start a Hyperloop company, but open-sourced the idea and let others run with it. Those companies have kind of petered out for the most part. He did also start a student competition for Hyperloop, which IS continuing. There's a mile-long prototype vacuum tube outside SpaceX's headquarters where students tested pods going hundreds of miles per hour for several years (including 2019). He is now having a 10 kilometer long tube (with a turn) built to continue the competition and test speeds comparable to the original concept. He did start The Boring Company to try to address one of the main problems with Hyperloop (the extreme cost of boring tunnels), and that IS making progress. They're on-track (heh) for completion of tunnels in May for a mass transit system using pods (but at atmospheric pressure) based on stretched Tesla vehicles that will serve the Las Vegas convention center. Currently has dug about 3000ft of the first tunnel which is to be a bit more than a mile long.
The cave bit was embarrassing to Musk, he made some gross mistakes, and while the submersible folk were definitely trying to help (like NASA had developed capsules to rescue trapped miners in past disasters), the feedback of crazy between Musk and the media was more a liability than a help. He lost a lot of credibility with the name-calling, even though I definitely think he had been trying to help.
Musk is chief engineer at SpaceX, so he does similar systems engineering work as you'd expect for someone in his position. If you talk to people who have worked with him, they will tell you he has a good understanding and a deep technical involvement in both companies (especially SpaceX). Although that's hardly unique. I think the main strength is pursuing goals that are both important and challenging and empowering his employees to execute quickly on these challenges (and part of the reason he can empower them to act quickly is because he has enough technology knowledge to make command decisions on key technical questions which otherwise could end up in "analysis by paralysis" or even worse, continuing down a technical dead end just due to organizational inertia).
If at least the hyperloop project manages to get off the ground (pun sort of intended) that would still be a nice contribution to human progress.
I'm not at all sure about the long-haul rockets though. I think having rockets near population centers is extremely dangerous to begin with.
Secondly, I'm not sure the cost-benefit ratio makes sense. Transport aboard a rocket must be extremely expensive, but if you take the trip to/from the rocket-port into account the door-to-door time won't be spectacularly shorter than it is now.
But SpaceX intends to pursue fully and rapidly reusable rockets, which at least theoretically have the possibility of solving that problem by lowering launch prices by orders of magnitude, allowing greater improvement in reliability by returning the vehicles, and increasing the flight rates enough that you can prove out safety. I'm thinking probably a history of thousands or even tens of thousands of launches are necessary before the first point-to-point crewed launches (for specialized purposes, emergencies, charters) are feasible with reasonable safety, and maybe 100,000 or even a million launches before mass transit usage. Here's an article where a SpaceX representative addresses your exact point, i.e. safety of in-land launches of Starship and how many launches may be necessary to get to that point: https://www.businessinsider.com/spacex-one-million-starship-...
As far as door-to-door time, IMO, you would need to use like a seaplane or maybe an electric VTOL vehicle (or, heh, a Hyperloop) to get to the launch pad quick enough for the trip to be worth it.
As far as energy usage, such long-haul rocket flights may be roughly comparable to Concorde flights by my calculation (if they fill the vehicle up with high capacity seating... which may be a challenge if the tickets are business class prices), and the fuel is planned to eventually be made with the same carbon-neutral solar-to-gas technology (electrolysis of water, then the Sabatier Reaction) that is required for Starship on Mars (which, of course, has no natural gas deposits or free oxygen).
I don’t agree. We already have maglev, is hyperloop going to be cheaper to build/operate? If not, why would the marginal speed increase prompt governments to invest in this kind of infrastructure vs. traditional rail or maglev? The problem is not that hyperloop won’t work, it’s that it is another gadgetbahn[1] that doesn’t make economic sense in a political climate where infrastructure investment is verboten.
With fully reusable rockets, one gets to the point where they are better than airplanes because you can use them more (10 flights per day from Sydney to New York and back instead of the 1/2 round trip per day you currently get with airplanes). They cost similar amounts to build, but can make much more revenue/time. Also for long trips (1/2 way around the world) the fuel used/passenger will also be similar.
This is of course future tech, but could be coming in the next few years. Elon Musk say first orbital tests coming this year.
As fo the Earth-to-Earth Rocket plan, that’s based on Starship which is in development, and you can follow along live in the SpaceX subreddit.
As for calling people pedophiles, I am sure you have said equally terrible things about people who have insulted you or dismissed your work as useless.
He did was able to build a car company and a rocket company. Sure you found example that are less crazy than what he said, but you forget the actual crazy stuff he did.
I agree, any scenario where people are able to survive long term on Mars the same techniques should work on Earth given enough resources dedicated to implementing them. The main reason surviving Mars might be easier than a ravaged Earth is just the number of people, it'll be much harder on Earth because even if one particular country manages to setup something they'll be in competition with every other country for the resources to do it and the scale required will be bigger because of the number of people it would have to support.
There is one other reason to colonize Mars that isn't 'running away from a burning planet' and that's just as a kind of civilization backup against crazy civilization ending events (super-bug, meteor strike, complete climate collapse, etc.), note none of these need to completely wipe out human life to want an 'independent backup' civilization. Modern life can seem pretty fragile when you think about the long supply chains from raw material to finished product and the intricate machines/techniques that go into even relatively simple products.
I think it's the kind of thinking that partially comes from exposure to a lot of scifi and also the fact that very few things threaten billionaires beyond death (which I'm a little surprised more aren't pouring money into senescence research) and the break down of modern life. They're pretty secure against most everything else.
He is probably in the 99.99th percentile of engineers, but that still means there's many many thousands of engineers as smart as he is. However, he is also in the 99th percentile for marketing, 99.9th percentile in leadership, 99th percentile of celebrity, etc.
No, he is not special on any single dimension, but it is extremely rare to find this distribution, which is what he actually is and all these dimensions were used to make his companies successful.
I agree Elon is backed by incredibly smart and possibly overworked people and that contributes to his own reputation undeservedly, but he’s driven a company that has made more space progress than most of humanity. Let’s give him some credit on that front and let him spill his own cash on the crazy ideas at least. “Completely overrated” is a bit too far.
Benefiting from open-sourced research that was publicly funded (https://www.inverse.com/article/15272-nasa-releases-rocket-a...) probably also helped a little :))
Also don't forget that the US federal government is an important SpaceX client.
And yes, Nasa (and the DOD) are probably the most important customers of SpaceX... So? Its not like SpaceX are getting free money there. They are providing a service to the government, and getting paid for it - And providing that service at a lower cost than the government would bear if they did it themselves, and a lower cost than their competitors (I'm looking at Boeing - They are getting paid 60% more than SpaceX per seat for commercial crew flights to the ISS)
Also look into the Raptor engine SpaceX have developed. Its a key plank for their future mars ambitions. Its the most advanced rocket engine ever developed and SpaceX funded its development themselves.
The point of colonizing Mars (for Musk) is not to move there when Earth becomes inhabitable. It's too remove the single point of failure for the species that Earth currently represents.
With a self-sustainable (even if harsh) Mars colony, a nuclear war on Earth no longer necessarily means the end of humanity.
How realistic is this self-sustainability? Where any moderately complex spare parts can be produced on Mars, instead of having to be supplied from Earth with yet another ultra-expensive supplies mission?
Imho we are talking hundreds of years here. Until then our burning home base Earth remains a single point of failure. Better douse the fire first.
Until then putting some people on Mars as a symbolic gesture to show humanity is still capable of grand achievements may be fine, esp. if that gives us hope we can tackle our other more immediate problems (though for me that is not needed).
So we are already hundreds of years late, aren't we? Let's start right now to make this happen.
> Better douse the fire first.
Here we are again... the good old, well there's something else wrong, lets just fix that other thing wrong and ignore everything else.
Why not working on both? What stop us from working on both? I would be happy to be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that you could do more to "douse the fire". We sadly can't stop doing 100% of what we do to fix everything.
I'm just speculating now, but I think this might be one reason Musk is so interested in robotic manufacturing (e.g. the failed "alien dreadnought" vision for the Model 3 production line). If you have mostly automated, flexible manufacturing systems that can be computer controlled and require minimal human expertise to operate then all you need is the computer files for whatever spare part you need to build. Set up 3-4 of these manufacturing centers at different spots for redundancy and you don't have to worry so much about spare part availability.
The first effort (Model 3 assembly) was a disaster though.
At least in terms of radiation, living on Mars seems less likely to be survivable than a nuclear war on Earth since fallout decays away but the space-based radiation bathing Mars is moderately high and permanent. See: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/death-on...
Fair point. However it's sad to think that as a species we're so petty and narrow-minded that we need a backup in case we fuck this planet up ourselves. Maybe I'm too harsh, but I almost feel that we don't even deserve a backup if we can't avoid a nuclear holocaust or environmental collapse here on Earth.
Your question is premature because you're comparing the Earth of today to the Mars of today.
The short-term goal (short in the grand scheme of things, that is) is to build a colony on Mars that can satisfy the first level of Maslow's hierarchy: air, food, water, shelter. After that, moving to Mars will be a much more attractive prospect to a non-negligible number of people.
What is the timescale you have in mind? Hundreds, thousands of years? If this is the case, it makes more sense focusing on keeping Earth livable.
I think Kim Stanley Robinson had a nice take on this in "Aurora" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurora_(novel)). Without giving too much away, one of the core ideas of the novel is that there really is no place like home.
> After that, moving to Mars will be a much more attractive prospect to a non-negligible number of people.
Hmm, what makes you think that? Again, how bad should Earth get before living in a place where you can't go outside is a better option?
Expanding beyond Earth is something we must do eventually. If we can do it now, why wait? We risk that we are unable to do it later.
[0] Beyond that I'm increasingly skeptical of any attempts to draw parallels or inferences from evolution about humans today because so much like evo-psych turns into unfounded garbage. Once a species gets to the point it can manipulate it's own environment and mortality evolution gets shaky as a framework.
[1] Simpler atomic components and resources could be mined on Mars where they couldn't in space so I'm allowing for some basic supplements extracted on Mars.
More importantly, there just isn’t enough reason to bother doing it aside from satisfying the Edmund Hillary “because it’s there” urge.
If you want more space to live, you’d be better off investing in women’s health and education so long run population trends can go down here in Earth.
If you want natural resources, you’d be better off figuring out how to mine asteroids so you don’t need to contend with overcoming a planetary gravity well to get them home.
If you want to push the envelope with terraforming, you’d be better off focusing on ambitious plans for carbon sequestration on Earth.
If you want to engineer us out of the “all our eggs in one planetary basket” problem, you probably want to first build permanent stations in outer space that are as self-sustaining as possible since those technologies will be foundational for both a Mars colony AND for building generation ships.
Basically, there are much more useful and generalizable technologies you can throw money at than a pointless Mars colony. I don’t get the obsession with that over everything else.
I think it may be more likely to happen somewhere with gravity just given how much development still needs to be done to extract materials out of asteroids. There's a lot to work through in being able to refine stuff like metals in micro gravity that hasn't even started yet.
If history is any judge though we'll go to Mars long before it's really viable simply because it's there. Hopefully not too many people get caught up in it.
[0] Unless it's turns out to be viable to bake similar resources out of lunar regolith. I haven't read deeply enough to see if that's just SciFi or a viable source of the basic elementals needed to support a settlement.
[-1] edit: To clarify here I mean on Mars for consumption on Mars of course. Though Mar's much thinner atmosphere would also make some more exotic launch technologies potentially viable. eg: a rail/coil gun launch to a skyhook maybe given the much lower atmospheric drag it would experience.
Well, sort of. Most of these aren't as convenient as they sound. Gravity is only about 40% of Earth's IIRC, so if you had humans there you'd still be contending with loss of muscle and bone density. If we're talking about ambitious future technology I think a spinning wheel station is probably a more stable way to keep people healthy. Plus you have to contend with seasons and weather. Wind, dust, wild temperature swings and all the extra wear on materials you will get as a result. . .
It would also take forever to actually thicken up the atmosphere, so you would probably want to be careful how much you go pulling CO2 out of the air to grow plants if long-term viability is your priority. As for mining, locality is a big help, especially if you're going to be remote-controlling drones, but contending with landing/taking-off on a planet is a huge logistical expense. Particularly if you're dealing with lots of heavy machinery for mining.
You could make a similar case for Asteroid mining. There are plenty of resources up there.
Sure. But does it make sense to rely on this as a realistic Plan B to an Earth destroyed by global warming?
Fort Bridger, Wyoming has a population of 345[0]. California has a population of nearly 40 million[1]. Should those crazy people of the 19th century never have bothered with Fort Bridger?
Inhabiting a habitable planet outside our solar system is so far beyond our current capabilities that there is no point putting any money in to it.
Any kind of foothold on a second planet within our solar system would change that reality. Routine travel between Earth and Mars would provide heaps and heaps of experience and capability. It would make any discussion of colonizing outside our solar system much more reasonable than it is today.
Inhabiting Mars was never the end goal. It just happens to be the most practical one in a much much much larger picture.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Bridger,_Wyoming 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California
Human skills to breathe and find sustenance below the ocean surface have been common enough for 70+ years. Do you really require that we wait millenia before we try it on another planet?
they have already got very bad - the conservative anti-progress people are running the show more and more, and by means of SpaceX and Tesla Musk is saving our civilization from the main danger for a technological civilization, the danger of being completely overtaken by the conservative anti-progress people.
LOL. If the New World is any indication, as soon as there's money to be made or persecution to escape (which we are not out of).
But is there money to be made on Mars (that could not be made with robots)? Also, I suspect that the people who are currently being persecuted (e.g. Uyghurs in China) won't be in a position to leave Earth any time soon (e.g. in the next 100 years).
Still, even if both things end up happening, this is still not the same as having Mars as a plan B for Earth.
I think you again need to look to the example of the New World. The Pilgrims were not persecuted like the Uyghurs. They were relatively well off English folk living in the Netherlands who felt that their laws were overly restrictive and prevented the free practice of their religion.
Thus, groups highly likely to colonize Mars would be traditionalist Catholics, evangelical Christians, and maybe some new age movements. These feel like the current system is persecuting them, but still have enough werewithal and freedom to be able to choose to move. That, and their respective philosophies encourage exploration. It is highly unlikely that any group that decided to move because of persecution would be a racial or ethnic one.
Going to Mars makes a lot of sense to some fairly capable folk. Getting there, and sustaining life, is going to be hard.
But, we will make it easier eventually. I can think of a way we could turn Earth into a recovering paradise, full of natural wonder, and it would definitely involve using Mars to fix it.
Understand those motivations and you'll understand why in the current century nowhere on Earth is as appealing as Mars for satisfying the needs that previously could have been satisfied by going a bit further west. The environmental challenges of the journey and the destination will be great, yes, but the payoff will be indescribably (if you don't understand those motivations at an emotional level) worth it for those who meet the challenges.
That being said, the GP doesn't actually provide any evidence, hence there's not much to refute.
It’s amazing to me that people don’t see the parallels, the silver spoon childhood under a ruthless father breeding an unbounded narcissism and entitlement that must be fed with marketing spectacles, social media battles, and young women.
I guess people love them both because it’s all so quintessentially American.
The reality is that we are in space because it is required for great power contests. I'm mired in space as a DoD executive, so I promise you space - at least inside the GEO orbits - is extremely practical. Starlink is honestly amazing.
Mars though? I've steel-manned that one and I don't see it as anything more than what JFK did. Tickling the never-ending exploration/expansion desires of humanity.
I say it frequently: Outside of the sun exploding or the moon crashing into earth, there is no future event that would make earth as uninhabitable as Mars is today.
Given we seem to struggle with working out how humans will get on okay on earth in the coming decades, we should not be distracting resources (our own and our planet's) until we have solved some more pressing issues. Given most of the 'wealth' that we have today has been created by exploiting fossil fuels (or exists only within financial systems), we have a huge job ahead in transforming society into something more sustainable.
> there is no future event that would make earth as uninhabitable as Mars is today
As I heard someone say recently: while we think about terra-forming Mars, we are busy Mars-forming Earth.
What's your reasoning here? The purpose of the military is to defend valuables from others. Deploying military to Mars is as likely as deploying military to the Antarctic.
Scientists will be the first and probably last to occupy. Difficult to imagine it will ever expand much beyond research missions. The Antarctic environment is far less harsh than Mars and no-one maintains a permanent base there.
That's completely incorrect. While a lot of the workers in the Antarctic program (I wintered over in 2016 as a station Network Engineer) go on to work at NASA, because of environmental similarities to space/Mars/etc, many countries maintain permanent research stations in Antarctica. The personnel switch out every season, but the bases are permanent.
Nobody is suggesting we colonise the Antarctic, because there's nothing much (of current economic value) there. There are a handful of people there to study it and they need a constant supply of resources to sustain them. If that was the point of going to Mars, then you'd really have to question what can be achieved there that warrants such massive cost, especially if any part of that cost is government funded.
Now, if we contrast that with the Arctic, the first sign of a melting ice cap and there's military posturing over who is going to exploit the natural resources being exposed there.
I would agree. This is what fuels SpaceX. Aspiration. He's generated excitement and interest in space that rivals what JFK did, it doesn't have to be more. People in my life with no previous interest in the subject now want to hear all about it.
Wouldn't that imply if we can make Mars habitable, then we'll be capable of dealing with whatever problems arise here on Earth? Think of it as a nice test run without the immediate fate of humanity's only biosphere at stake.
But yes, Mars would be a mega project. Isaac Arthur does great stuff on Youtube which gives an idea of the magnitude of the works necessary.
I think it would be more realistic to say, if we are able to live on Mars instead of making Mars livable. Being able to live on Mars won't require "the sum total of human activity to date (300k years worth)"
But the flip side is, why not? What else do we have to do...
We can't (excluding domes etc.). We won't be able to unless we acquire such powerful planetary engineering technology that we could much more easily build enormous orbital cities complete with functioning biospheres.
It may work to live in enclosed environments on Mars, but the scale of actually terraforming it puts it in the realm of fantasy.
One thing people who are not exposed to the realities of aerospace don't understand is just how difficult and improbable this stuff can be.
As complex as it is, going to the ISS is child's play when compared to the moon and beyond. For one thing, the earth's magnetic field and atmosphere provide valuable protection in near space. Once you leave that protective blanket, as I like to say, everything out there is trying to kill you and drill holes into you at the speed of light.
I think we can, with effort and investment, achieve regular missions to the moon and slowly build-up our knowledge as well as a solid base of operations. In, perhaps, 25 years or more, we could consider launching into deeper space from the moon.
I just don't see the value of risking so much just to set foot on Mars. People are far more likely to die a horrible death due to our hubris than anything else. The risk would reduce substantially if we could prove we are capable of reliable and safe missions to the moon. There is no way I would want to send people to mars without first demonstrating exceptional capabilities and safety on the moon.
Wouldn't either of those render the Earth temporarily uninhabitable?
Is the argument that it would be easy enough to build on Earth places to survive such events rather than going to Mars?
Doesn't sound very sexy though right? Kind of like all the data engineering, infrastructure plumbing I do to help our data scientists and ML folks do the sexy inference work.
I'll do a little pre-buttal here about what kind of science we're "losing out on" by not pursuing more space: Building for underground or undersea habitats has significantly less research put into it than space habitation, so you'd see an equivalent boom in research/technology development that has dual use as we did in the 1950s likely.
This is so absurd. You aren't losing anything by pursuing more space. What's up with all the binary stuff in theses discussions? Why every time someone talks about no doing something, the argument are that binary?
You know you can do both right? It's not space or water. We don't have a thresold where we have to choose between one or the other. Research into underground and undersea habitats doesn't happen because we are unable to make them happen, not because we love space.
Our society is interested into space, just like you said, it's "sexy". It's also filled with potential, space mining for example is worth trillions. It's also filled with unknown, there's reasons why stars are so much filled with legends, stories and mythology. That's what make space something that sell, unlike underground or undersea.
So the alternative isn't underground or undersea research, it's no research at all.
You can make undeground or undersea research sexy. Go for it! I'll be the first one to support your cause, more research is always better. Please stop arguing for less research....
I'd say the argument is that Mars is currently a (much) less hospitable place for life as we know it than the Earth in any nuclear winter scenario that I know of.
Nuclear mutual assured destruction doesn't work if one side has a base on mars, where it would take 6+ months for any fired nuke to arrive.
Having people in spacecraft could be a good place for high-importance leaders - nearly no bunker is nuke-proof, but a spacecraft far away is far harder to hit.
Like when some one is sent from one country to another very far country to fight people. You'd wonder why don't use this logic, we are here, why fight for people thousands of miles away.
That's because throughout human existence, things like Identity, and an expectation of something in return eventually from the home country/society always exists.
The fact that Mars is far doesn't mean anything here, what matters relative time and periods of time people are willing to wait.
The way I see it, the Mars base could be ignored for MAD purposes unless it's self sufficient and large enough to be considered civilizational survival. By the point it can no longer be ignored, the other side will just aim a couple nukes at it - what will the colonists do, move the base in months?
(Also, tangentially, I don't think the whole transit time would apply to something expected to blow up on arrival. It doesn't need to slow down enough to land, just enough to survive plowing trough Mars' thin atmosphere before slamming extra hard on the ground. Heh, for a small enough base the attacker might skip the actual nuclear warhead altogether.)
Yes. If you knew that your city would be destroyed in 6 months, you'd build a new one elsewhere.
People on earth don't have that privilege due to not having 6 months notice.
Musk acquired his money through voluntary exchanges with buyers freely and willingly engaging in market transactions.
The government uses coercive force to raise taxes, it is not voluntary.
Tax money is public property and we should have a say in how it is spent. Musk's money we gave to him freely and is his to dispose of as he sees fit.
A substantial portion of Elon Musk's company's funding comes from "tax money" (Goverment contracts, EV credits, tax breaks, subsidies). This seems to contradict both of your sentences.
And if you don't believe it's substantial: Tesla's EV credit sales alone were on the order of $500 million this quarter. Why is that not tax money that goes to better projects, instead of the bottom line of a company that has set its CEO up for a $350mm payday? Did the public have a say in that?
So that "insulting amount of money on military and defense" is where SpaceX gets it's money.
AFAIK we're (DoD) the only organization actually paying for starlink right now.
If you have a hobby you love (go to Mars, die on Mars), it doesn't hurt to get rich building the infra your hobby needs. You will need those funds to buy services from your companies for your hobby.
Mars is an aspirational, asymptotic ideal that could get more people in space/lunar and possibly also prove to be wildly profitable in some applications - while also being somewhat orthogonal to existing terrestrial hegemonies.
According to Hans Rosling the world has already changed dramatically for the better, you just didn't notice.
I shouldn't have laughed. I definitely shouldn't have upvoted. Apparently I am not a good person. :P
Even geniuses make mistakes. We can celebrate him and question him at the same time. We don't need a hero or a fairytale ending to be able to appreciate the impact his companies are having and could have on the world.
The main contribution is from his employees, not himself. He manages to convince them to work for him with extreme hours for bad pay and without even receiving proper credit (check out how many authors the Neuralink paper listed, then check out the cern paper's authors). How does he convince people to work for him? Marketing. He's a marketing guy.
This, he is actually a horrible public speaker, and has a knack for going on tangents that often confuse even his biggest proponents.
But, he has the Public's adoration because his insight and vision can bring people like Shotwell (who really runs SpaceX) into the foray and allows for the coordination of a great talent pool to work for extended hours, and what amounts to not much money in a selfless manner and this captivates the imagination of the People and subsequently inspires them to want to be a part of it all.
No other car, or truck, has generated anything close to the buzz Musk is able to consistently pull off.
> "You can't breathe the air, the pressure of the atmosphere is a tiny fraction of what we have on Mount Everest"
Well, thank you professor science. An observation that my 8 year old nephew could have told me.
The benefit of colonizing mars is all of the ancillary technologies that come along with it. Reusable rockets will give us Starlink, Easier Space Travel and asteroid mining.
Making a habbitat on mars will force us to invest interplanetary internet protocols. It will force us to make better catalysis research for air, water, waste processing and synthesis.
Uninhabitability will force us to increase automation capabilities so robots can build the base structures before we arrive.
Going multiplanetary will give our species apocalypse redundancy.
I'm sure I only touched on 5% of the reality because my imagination is so limited, but anyone who's done a tiny amount of reading on the subject can see the insane benefits, including commercial opportunities that exist here.
But James Lovelock "wouldn't waste his fortune" on these endeavours - isn't it good we don't live in a world of pessimists like him who would hoard their future, secure in the knowledge that, when the planet finishing asteroid hits us, at least he can be vaporised with his pile of money, and it wouldn't have been "wasted"
Perhaps it might have been possible in some long distant past to underestimate Howard Hughes and write him off as a crazy person. That time is gone. If Hughes appears to be doing something crazy you've not understood it.
I do however agree that Mars is a sales pitch for SpaceX, but the idea that Musk is not crazy may also be headed for a turnaround.
On the other hand, Elon presenting some rendering across Jupiter's radiation belts doesn't strike me as an example of understanding anything, to be honest.
Marketing. He understands that a great visual excites people, accuracy be damned. Never let the truth get in the way of a great story.
Musk is someone who's obsessed about being admired and considered smart.
> Hyperloop
He's spreading FUD and trying to undermine any kind of mass transport which could negatively impact Tesla's car.
> self-driving
Not sure what the stupid part is here (maybe I've fallen for it!). His cars have some driving assists which he oversells as auto-pilot (it isn't). Straight up marketing.
> world as a simulation theory
Consolidates his image as a great genius ahead of the curve with a certain segment of the population.
Yeah, he's not obsessed with sci-fi, he's getting other people obsessed with sci-fi.
I might not like Musk and most of his ideas seems bit out there, or like hyper-loop pure bs, but...
At least he is doing something with that wealth as oppose to other billionaires who are only growing and hoarding it.
Elon Musk could be exceptionally brilliant and crazy at the same time. (Probably not as brilliant as Pauling, though.)
Exactly how many people, in the best possible scenario, would we have the capacity to transport to Mars, or even simply into space?
What happens to everybody else? There are billions of people on the planet. Does Elon Musk plan to send even 1/10 of them to Mars?
So yeah if one's goal is helping preserve the human race, unless you're ready to write off the planet and everyone on it as totally fucked, not sure how Mars is a solution.
You can make an argument about the _technologies_ developed in the space application process having value for the planet, but, that's a different argument.
That's a pretty ridiculous attitude. You're literally talking about Musk like he's a god or something. He's a regular guy, not some kind of superman: he makes mistakes, has limited understanding, and is often wrong.
It's not that he's never wrong. It's that how outlandish his statements are is not a good indicator of how likely he is to be wrong.
What someone considers outlandish, is subjective. By my observation (of topics I think are interesting), he's wrong all the time. Same as Nostradamus, although Musk probably isn't as crazy.
There's absolutely the risk, probably already too late for some, of getting into hero worship of Musk. We should definitely steer away from that type of erroneous thinking.
If you are playing Kasparov at chess and he appears to have made a beginner blunder so stupid you think him crazy then you are not seeing the full picture. Kasparov makes mistakes and loses matches but never one so serious he could be called "crazy" in the sense that any fool can see the error.
Elon Musk is a regular guy, not some kind of superman: he makes mistakes, has limited understanding, and is often wrong - but never would he commit a blunder so severe as to earn the description: "crazy". Something else is going on if it appears crazy, look closer.
There are no environmental regulations, no taxes, no diversity policies, and with appropriate screening, no human, plant or animal diseases.
To put it simply: imagine a space colony of a thousand of the best and brightest men and women Earth had to offer, where gonorrhea, AIDS, chlamydia, the common cold just didn't exist? Where one could work without the tax burden of paying for a huge welfare state?
This is something that Earth cannot offer. Even in the most remote desert you will have to deal with the local tribes and the United Nations. Space colonies could developer free of the burden of socialism.
I'll remember that next time he accuses a rescue worker of paedophilia,
This is an existential threat to Musk's operation and he reacted rashly and extremely aggressively slinging the nastiest mud which might stick. That type of reputational damage is extremely difficult to recover from.
It also drew the public's eye away from the the "Elon the publicity hound" story to "Elon possible defamation" which is a much less serious problem.
I understand he "enjoys controversy" but it's hard to take someone seriously who says things like "Oh, politicians should just ignore the protests and keep their minds straight. It will go away. It always does. They’ll find another big issue after a little while and switch to something else.", as if protests have never effected any substantial change.
Or almost worse, that the protests are inconsequential because they are organized and mostly attended by young people.
"I've had 10 cancers in the last few years and it hasn't been very bad. They just appear and grow. If you go to a good oncologist nearby, they'll take it out. It's just unfortunate for people who let it happen and it grows and grows until it's inoperable. I mean, nowadays, I think middle class and fairly wealthy people don't die of cancer."
What in the world?! I understand he is courting controversy, but to do in the most curmudgeon-y way possibly is new to me.
Mary Ann Cramer: I have to ask you the same question people back home are asking about space these days. Is it worth it? Should we just pull back? Forget the whole thing as a bad idea, and take care of our own problems at home?
Sinclair: No. We have to stay here. And there's a simple reason why. Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics, and you'll get ten different answers. But there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on. Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe, and Lao-Tzu, and Einstein, and Morobuto, and Buddy Holly, and Aristophanes, and all of this…all of this…was for nothing. Unless we go to the stars.
I don't think it's accurate thinking about space as a physical place out there you can simply go. It's more like jumping from one gravity well to another and what you have to think about is what part of the system you're aboard can do that by means of conservation of momentum. And that's the main reason why I don't think we have the technology nor the energy budget to think about feasible interstellar trips. It's a bit like telling techno fairy tales to children, only it's adults and we have a lot of other adult problems.
Let's solve one problem at a time. The nearest ones are Global warming, war, disease, asteroids etc.
Once you go to space, you will have new problems. We'll worry about the universe then.
Humans venturing out into space and establishing colonies is a big step in human evolution. It's a bigger step than when animal life left the oceans and ventured onto land.
If you look at all of life on Earth from far away, there would be only a few achievements you could see. Rather shortly after life began, it changed Earth's atmosphere by producing lots of oxygen.
Right now we are changing the atmosphere again (unintendedly).
When we leave the planet and venture out into the solar system we are taking the first step to establish a presence beyond the planet we started on.
The next big challenges on the same order of magnitude will be to leave the solar system and spread around the galaxy. And then make the jump to other galaxies. It's a long way to go. We don't know how long the window of opportunity remains open. It is open now. We should get moving. That's what Musk is saying and doing.
Anyway, to come back to your point: Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_galaxies we would start with satellite galaxies, the closest one is 25.000 light years away. Unthinkable for now.
(to the tune of The Specials' Enjoy Yourself)
> "DER SPIEGEL: Cancer is a silent killer that might get diagnosed long after the exposure, when it is too late.
> Lovelock: I've had 10 cancers in the last few years and it hasn't been very bad. They just appear and grow. If you go to a good oncologist nearby, they'll take it out. It's just unfortunate for people who let it happen and it grows and grows until it's inoperable. I mean, nowadays, I think middle class and fairly wealthy people don't die of cancer."
A very invasive procedure that has significant detrimental effects on your quality of life, and still doesn’t guarantee long-term survival.
A tough call for even the most rational of patients.
I’m not sure it is that tough of a call.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/appleinsider.com/articles/11/10...
Billionaires would probably spend quite a bit of money if they knew they might get a disease in 20 years.
Bill Gates is funding Alzheimers research. His dad has it.
1. He extrapolates from his own experience of cancer 2. He blames people for not taking care of it (so dying of it is their fault) 3. He talks about a disease group that kills a lot of people like it is a cold
According to the WHO cancer is the 4th leading cause of death for High-Income Countries [1].
[1] https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/the-top-10-...
Some of the richest people in the world have died of cancer. It kills anyone and everyone, eventually.
His answer is so ignorant that I stopped reading his words right there, I don't trust his information processing.
I stopped reading the article there. I am not interested in reading the crazy ramblings of someone disconnected from reality.
Sounds like James Lovelock has been pretty lucky in his experience with cancer...
The tsunami killed over 15,000 people. The nuclear disaster is estimated to eventually kill 100-ish people due to excess cancer cases from radioactive releases.
Not quite Gell-Mann amnesia, but something close.
That guy had won several awards for his "reporting".
He sounds like many other elderly folks who are very dismissive and opinionated, for instance putting climate protests down to kids being kids... well you're 100, you definitely don't have skin in the game, how can you comprehend the mind of a 15 year old?
You get set in your ways with age. Some of his responses are a bit too much of the type "young people these days!"
Young people may get carried away at times but important changes tend to happen due to young people. Young people led the French revolution and other revolutions advancing democracy and freedom.
A lot of the good things that has happened through the environmental movement has happened due to young engaged people. It is not enough to sit in a lab and invent solutions if nobody listens to you.
Sure I have seen environmental movement ebb and flow ever since the 80s. However it would be silly to suggest that this somehow invalidates them. These organizations helped save the ozone layer, whales and other species. They paved the way for the revolution within renewable energy.
That’s a pretty crackpot thing to say.
James Lovelock has been lucky, and it’s certainly true that early diagnosis improves your chances. But the idea that wealthy people don’t die of cancer is complete nonsense.
If people want to keep expanding as well as having more individual freedoms, we must get ourselves more room and resources.
If environmentalists want to keep planet Earth safe, having a place to send people and begin colonizing off-planet will in the long-term be best for Earth.
Lovelock is too close-minded in this case. Staying on Earth forever means the death of the human race and most likely the Earth's environment.
But for a really big one, the only solution is to be somewhere else when it happens.
A Mars colony is a first step.
These might give you a hand if any single of the settlements (including Earth) get into trouble. This could range from preventing the disaster in the first place (nearby ship deflecting a potential impactor) to helping the survivors (medical supplies being dropped from orbit, habitat with failing life support being evacuated).
Self sustaining off-Earth settlements go way beyond just "oops, Earth is gone, at least someone is still left".
'Lovelock: You see, when I passed 100, I thought, "What is there to do now? What is there to look forward to?" I don't have any more duties. I enjoy life now... When I wake up in the morning I often think: "Oh, it’s a nice world!" I live here with my wife, we are still in love, what more do I want?'
Overpopulation? The universe is nearly infinite and there will always be new frontiers to explore. Environmental destruction from mining and use of carbon as a fuel source? The universe is full of minerals and using fossil fuels in space doesn't really hurt anyone.
I don't know enough about the current status of space travel technology, but it doesn't seem farfetched to say that we could be mass-colonizing the moon and Mars by 2100 if serious percentages of GDP were put toward the project.
The only reason I could see doing this is if we knew of impending extinction events coming to earth that would pass quickly and then we could return and re-populate. Is there another reason to colonize a dead planet? Are we trying to find a root cause for something and need a team to stick around longer than a regular mission time-frame?
https://phys.org/news/2017-03-nasa-magnetic-shield-mars-atmo...
And I guarantee you that this isn’t the only proposal that has been worked out.
If you could somehow restore the atmosphere today, it would remain just fine over any reasonable human timescales. Giving Mars at atmosphere is of course very difficult.
X-Rays: The magnetosphere has no effect
UV: The magnetosphere has no effect
Cosmic rays: While both the Earth's magnetic field and the sun's magnetic deflect some cosmic rays, the Earth's atmosphere is mostly opaque to cosmic rays.
Solar wind/coronal mass ejections: The Earth's magnetic field does block these, but if it wasn't present, the atmosphere would block them (but of course be slowly stripped away in the process)
The fact that the magnetosphere does deflect some particles but isn't what makes life on Earth possible (other than protecting the atmosphere) is made most clear by the ISS being well within the magnetosphere but still receiving hundreds of times the amount on Earth.
The atmosphere is very thin, yet should be enough to get rid of most micrometeorites (a possible isue on lunar surface). Also thanks to the atmosphere, you can do various orbital maneuvers (aero-capture, aaero.breaking, aero assisted plane changes, etc.) that are not possible on a body without atmosphere. IT even makes some very specific aircraft designs work. Also with an atmosphere, you get less insane temperatures, you can mine it for CO2 for fuel and other uses.
All in all, Mars is a frozen desert, but still a very useful frozen dessert providing many benefits in comparison to a barren rock floating in space.
Theoretically at some point it should be possible to make this somewhat permanent with minimal maintenance. Depending on technology it could go from a station that lasts a hundred years to millions of years.
I think it's especially useful to draw attention to the benefits of nuclear power when it comes to combating climate change and pollution more generally.
I also agree with his observation that the way we teach science (as separate, independent subjects) is really limiting. This, as a matter of fact, goes for all other subjects.
Is this (roughly) true? I've never heard this before, and I want to believe.
We can survive global warming for sure. If we can build habitats on Mars we can do it on Earth. However there are many conditions far worse than global warming which we cannot protect ourselves from: All out nuclear war. Asteroid hitting earth etc.
It is stupid to put all eggs in one basket. Colonizing other planets in the solar system safeguards our future.
You got to start early because it is a very time consuming effort. You cannot suddenly begin colonizing Mars once you discover an asteroid on collision course. It will be too late.
It is an effort that will likely take far more than 100 years to complete.
Humanity also risk regression. Global warming while not killing us could cause such regression in our technological ability and science that we simply loose the ability to send things into space. We have been in dark ages many times before in history. It can happen again.
Really, for most planet-wide disasters the thing they do is force us to live a little bit like we'd have to on non-disaster-stricken Mars.
[EDIT] for the record I'm not against Martian exploration or even a Martian colony—I'm susceptible both to the "because it was there" and the "we'll come up with some cool tech in the process" arguments—I'm just very unconvinced Martian colonization is a good path to better survivability for the human species.
Why not allocate 0.00..001% of our resources to ensure that the only intelligent life we know of in the entire universe, has a life insurence.
For health reasons you'll want to avoid people spending too much time on Lunar gravity. A similar issue exists on Mars, but causes the opposite result. Due to the time scales involved with sending someone to Mars and returning them, it will be a larger health risk for them to return to Earth than stay on Mars (3-9 month trip to Mars + mission time + 3-9 month trip back).
Think about the impact on culture as well. The sort of perspective you have working at a job site that you will only spend 4 months at is very different from the sort of perspective you have working at a home you expect to die in 30 years later. People that don't expect to come back to Earth may have kids on Mars. Most of the Martian kids will not be able to come back to Earth because of cost and health reasons.
A Mars research station is far more dangerous, more likely to fail, but if it succeeds is far more likely to result in long term habitation of an other planetary body.
The immediate parallel that came to my mind were the first European settlers that came to America.
For instance, Jamestown where they started the winter with 500 people and made it to spring with 60 [1]
It may be an "advantage" but it's also very high risk.
It does, but not much, only 1% the volume of Earth's atmosphere and it is 95% CO2.
But still, I believe, only 1/3 of the gravity that the Earth has.
This is the insurmountable problem with human habitation of Mars - we would need to become, in many ways, a different species in order to withstand the very greatly reduced gravity - and humans, as we know them, would succumb to all manner of disease and physical maladies until that transition (millenia ?) took place.
Any discussion of colonizing Mars that does not discuss gravity, front and center, is just silly.
Well, you don’t know that humans can’t survive indefinitely at 1/3 gee. I know that because no one knows that, so let’s not speculate on what the threshold gravity would be before we need to “become a different species” would be.
But I’ll admit, unlike radiation and resource concerns, gravity is something we’re never going to overcome. If humans can’t thrive at 1/3 gee, we will never permanently colonize any terrestrial body in our solar system. However, given the range of adaptations humans present, e.g. to extreme altitude, continuous saltwater diving, or long-distance running, I’m willing to bet we can handle, and adapt to, reduced (not micro) gravity.
Yes, you are correct.
However, I think you'll agree that all evidence points in the direction that 1/3 earth gravity would be highly detrimental, somewhere along the scale that zero-gee appears to be...
Also CO2 can be used with electrolysis of water and sabatier reaction to produce methane which can be used as rocket fuel. The fact that the atmosphere is almost pure CO2 makes this much easier to do than on earth. This is also important feedstock for producing plastic.
If you want to build any advance industrial base, you need to be able to produce plastic. This is a huge disadvantage of the moon. You are limited to metals and rock.
Nothing is going to be growing on Mars either, outside of pressurized chambers, which, in the event of a loss of pressure, will kill everyone inside. The atmosphere is so thin that you really aren't gaining anything by not just bringing the carbon with you.
Frankly, the idea of colonizing the Moon or Mars, except in the sense of a temporary science post like the ISS, is a sci-fi fantasy that will never make practical or economic sense. Why am I going to want to build an industrial base on Mars? Why is it economically feasible? How many people are going to want to live in a cramped cage their entire life, never able to go outside, afflicted by low-gravity diseases? What can be produced or gotten on Mars that can't be on Earth for 1% of the effort and cost?
People don't want to live in Antarctica or the bottom of the ocean right now, and these environments are much more survivable than the Moon or Mars, and more economically feasible to boot. Why is anything going to change?
Agreeing with your comment but to add: To my knowledge, the biggest problem the athmosphere is causing is the dust storms which can go on for months and which occlude the sky. This means you have to be able to hold out for that period. The Moon has pesky dust too (which got everywhere, it's so small it got through the joints in the space suits).
I'd be curious to hear about events which would wipe out Earth and the moon but leave Mars intact.
Does this need to be put at a lagrange point to be stable?
It's a very interesting idea but seems like this could have enormous unintended consequences.
This approach has a big advantage: If it has some unwanted side effects we can rather quickly stop doing it. That's unlike some other proposed solutions such as creating clouds by spreading stuff in the upper atmosphere.
As for actually colonizing Mars, he should perhaps read more Phillip K. Dick.
It was never a "plan B" against global warming. Its a "plan A" in case of a catastrophic natural event.
> "Oh, it’s a nice world! I live here with my wife, we are still in love, what more do I want?"
On the subject of Mars etc., how are billionaires, especially the older ones, not already bored with all that Earth has to offer? Surely they must have experienced everything, natural and manmade, and crave for something more than the accumulation of wealth by now.
I think Lovelock is missing that Musk is also doing some of that -- he thinks that electricity storage is the key. I suspect Lovelock knows that -- the "Mars" and "Musk" aspects are a tiny fragment of the interview, and perhaps if he'd elaborated he's have talked more about that. Lovelock is right that there's much more to do, though.
Musk is perhaps understandably self-centered in that he wants his adventure to include a clean-sheet planet, an adventure open to humans for most of history until the last century or so. There are lots of adventures here, but they're messier and harder, and it's not as if Musk is opting completely out of them. So I think Lovelock is partly on the mark and partly off it, and I think it's a mistake for the headline to focus on that one tiny part of the interview.
Although I question the conclusions, I feel that having read his original work "The Gaia Hypothesis"[1] is required to be broadly literate in our age.
It's a short book.
NASA never gave up human missions to Mars as a goal (and not just supporting the search for life, but as a goal in and of itself, with permanent presence as the goal). Apollo was wound down in favor of Shuttle, which was to lay the groundwork for Mars by lowering launch costs and establishing Space Station Freedom (which became ISS) as a platform (in part) for building and launching missions to Mars. The Soviets were pursuing a similar path. After losing the Moon race, they chose to refine long-duration human spaceflight instead, developing the Salyut space stations built with logistical support from many launches (a first for spaceflight, and considered a prerequisite for Mars). Salyut was considered a kind of precursor to a Mars transfer vehicle. Salyut expanded to the Mir program, whose spares and follow-ons ended up contributing to the critical propulsion elements of ISS. But like NASA, the goal was still eventually Mars and space settlement. (And around this time in the US, there were also space settling enthusiasts focused on just scaling up space stations to be large, permanent settlements... a kind of rival for the Mars sect).
In the 1980s and 90s, there were a group of Mars enthusiasts in industry and NASA that started pushing Mars settlement hardcore after a few decades of post-Apollo disillusionment. They saw ISS and space stations in general as a kind of distraction, a needless cost and time tax for missions to Mars. They were (are) led by Robert Zubrin, who developed an architecture for Mars exploration called Mars Direct that could do cargo or crew launches to Mars in just one launch, with rendezvous with the different elements happening on the surface of Mars, not in orbit. They also did some important work on in situ resource utilization (ISRU), i.e. the idea of producing the vast majority (or all) of the fuel, oxidizer, and even consumables like water and air from resources on Mars (initially relying primarily on Mars' CO2 atmosphere, but later incorporating surface ice as knowledge about the extent of water on Mars expanded), convincing NASA to hesitantly baseline ISRU for future missions (previously had been Apollo-like all-up missions bringing all supplies from Earth). They were more vocal about permanent settlement on Mars as the end goal than NASA. Robert Zubrin and his group established The Mars Society in 1997, with permanent settling of Mars as a primary goal. Today, The Mars Society has Mars analogue research stations around the world where volunteers dress in mock spacesuits and live in mock space habitats (naturally, modeled after the ones from Mars Direct) and conduct mock Mars missions, including studying rock samples from the surrounding area (usually some kind of remote desert). This has been going on for decades, now.
Elon Musk, shortly after selling Paypal and getting rich, became kind of converted into this Mars settlement vision. He donated a bunch of money to the Mars Society (they named a telescope at one of the Mars analogue research stations after him), and they convinced him to try to send a greenhouse to Mars to kickstart the public's imagination on Mars, with the goal of increasing NASA's budget and focusing them on the humans to Mars goal. Long story short, he tried buying ICBMs from Russia on the cheap, was rebuffed, and so ended up starting SpaceX (and the ambition has grown tremendously from that point on).
So I'm not surprised not everyone is on the Mars settlement train. You've got to catch the Mars bug. It's not for everyone. But it's much bigger than Musk alone. It's an old dream going back over a century. Here's the Mars Anthem, with words written by Robert Zubrin, describing in grandiose terms the goals of the Mars Society: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj8-NcyULps
To me the whole Mars thing looks like an attempt to find unclaimed territory. The earth has been claimed, there are no vast riches on a mysterious far away continent anymore. The digital, as the extension of the world, has been claimed. Where to expand now? Mars.