That's a false dichotomy. We could explore and colonise space while also improving conditions on Earth. The same way we could shelter the homeless and feed the hungry; or build rockets/cars and treat employees respectfully.
> I'm not so sure Musk's vision is so exciting.
As an ineffectual prole, without PayPal/emerald money or political connections, I'm happy to watch someone kick the space industry back to life (after ULA & co. turned it into a pork barrel/cash-cow). I'm also happy to call out Musk's poor labour practices (and other crap, like pedogate), for whatever little good my tiny voice will have. If nothing else, I'm also happy to watch giant fuel tanks exploding and crash landing on YouTube.
> Musk is not much different than Bezos.
Of course. Probably worth pointing out Bezos has his own space company too (although I hear he's more focused on space habitats rather than other planets)
China has built cities basically from scratch in few years, and big infrastructure very quickly, as a counterpoint.
Big industrial equipment is really heavy btw, so you could fit at most 1 or 2 pieces of big equipment in the 100 ton payload of a Starship rocket. It could easily be a few hundred launches just to get a proper scale foundry going on mars, if you take into account all the required auxiliary equipment like ore scrubbers, cranes and forklifts. Don't forget all the solar panels and/or nuclear plants for power generation too. It would probably be at least tens of billions of support from Earth.
All in all, I would think that 5-10% growth rate is already pretty ambitious, leading to a doubling rate of 7 to 14 years. If you start your colony with about 50 people, it would rise to a thousand people in a little over 50 years.
NB I don't think private capital would ever be enough to get a self sufficient colony started.
The sheer population needed to run a complete supply chain for high-technology (on which Mars would be entirely dependent for basic life-support) is staggering. Having the entire thing built and operated underground would be an engineering and social feat of unprecedented scale in humanity's history.
Iamgining doing it in a generation is simply impossible. Its more likely to happen by quantum fluctuation in a second than by humanity's efforts in a generation with current technology.
Not certain to happen but a fair bit more than your quantum fluctuation.
Global warming, nuclear winter, asteroid hit, massive solar flare, supervolcano, plate tectonics - anything we care to imagine will leave the Earth much closer to being habitable than Mars.
Just playing along...
But how do you know this? Are there any papers or reports that say that a thousand years is the lower bound on a self sustaining colony on another planet?
It seems to me that this idea is a common wisdom that people often say because in their mind colonization is an out of reach idea so they just pick a random big sounding number like "a thousand years" as a placeholder for 'it is impossible" when there isn't any actual research that says it will take a thousand years.
Think about how economically unviable and hard it is to just create 1 new chip fab on Earth. And think about the fact that on Mars you would need to re-create the entire supply chain that already exists on Earth. Remember that the minerals that you need are probably about as spread-out on Mars as they are on Earth, so you will need a global network of mining stations and processing plants to get the various necessary metals - all this without any access to fossil fuels of any kind, and with all of humanity spending little time outside for fear of radiation.
Perhaps establishing a colony that gets the vast majority of its supplies from Earth is doable in a generation or two (though of questionable value). But creating a self-sustaining colony is entirely out of reach for the forseeable future. You don't need actual research to tell you this any more than you need actual research to tell you that humans can't flap their wings to fly - a little bit of back-of-the-napkin calculations will quickly elucidate it.
Minor nitpick: There are only very few plants that are able to extract nitrogen from the air. That's because N2 is a very stable molecule and it takes a lot of energy to use it chemically. Almost all plants are dependent on other nitrogen compounds they extract using their roots.
[That's the reason why the invention of the Haber-Bosch process, which fixes the N2 from the air into NH3 (ammonia), was such a big deal. It is estimated that 50% of the nitrogen atoms in your body once passed through the Haber-Bosch process.]
There's probably plenty of nitrogen in various minerals on Mars. Just not in the atmosphere.
So you would NOT want to colonize a planet first and then terraform it. Instead you would terraform it first. Terraforming Mars for example could involve sending a large number of comets to crash to the planet. If there were existing colonies on the planet, they might be destroyed by the impacts or be inundated by the torrential rains.
Isaac Arthur has some thought provoking videos about this.
By the time the government is able to assert force on mars, it may already be owned completely by companies.
edit: To be clear, I am interpreting the word "independent" in parent post to mean non-government controlled, as opposed to the interpretation of "self sufficient".
Well, the government could just blockade / close the launch sites on Earth.
After all, it used to be that ocean voyages took ages. So space travel is the new ocean voyages. And planets, the new country!
Full respect to him.
I somehow feel like this last line isn't well suited for this audience. Anyway, noone is doubting the impressiveness of his particular suite of skills or his business achievements. Thing is that as a leader he's a mixed bag. He gets impressive things done, but he has an occassionaly repulsive world view. What I personally like about him is that he picks projects that have social potential and at the same time are low hanging enough to be doable within a matter of decades. Power to him for that, but let's not idolize him.
"...the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must"
Thucydides
Note lithium isn't a rare earth element, it's actually pretty common but some sources are cheaper than others. As for Tesla, I believe they don't get lithium from Bolivia and have upcoming chemistries that don't use cobalt at all. Not sure about other EV or phone companies.
https://www.salon.com/2019/04/13/why-some-in-silicon-valley-...
There is a growing recognition in sociology and anthropology that whatever beliefs in how to lead a good life are left after you remove facts and knowledge about the world, are equivalent to religious doctrine, even if non-deist. Most people, including highly educated liberals, have such strong beliefs.
I'm guessing you didn't explain "after you remove facts and knowledge about the world" very well because removing facts would indeed leave you with beliefs in non-factual stuff by definition.
That is not too far from believing in the afterlife, if you come to think of it.
It’s extremely far. One has a chain of reasoning and supporting data. The other does not.
They’re both assumptions, since everything about the future is an assumption. But some assumptions are “better” than others, for lack of a better word.
On the other hand, believing that your actions have consequences, and that you will pay for your mistakes, is a very good assumption. But in the sense that you mention, it's "unsupported". This lack of evidence may lead me to conclude that societies are hung by a thread, and that collapse is imminent. It could be, but societal collapse simply hasn't happen after an unexpected, global, unprecedented turmoil.
Why some assumptions are "better" than others? THAT is a very good question. My take is that there aren't a priori: some societies believe some assumptions, and survive, and others don't. In a sense, to me, assumptions are only good in retrospect, and it's an idea that "feels" correct rather than something I can "prove".
Touching something too hot transfers excessive energy to your skin and registers as pain.
Walking without looking at where you’re going can cause you to not notice uneven surface and affect your balance causing you to fall.
Attending a higher education facility and obtaining credentialing and skills in a field with high demand in order to be able to trade it for money so that you can then use that money to pay for shelter and food and medicine.
The above are all assumptions until they actually occur, but they are different than assuming an afterlife simply because you feel like it (for example, it satisfies one’s ego to assume a piece of them is immortal. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, do whatever makes you feel good).
Ironically, basically all physicists of the last ~100 years went through university in order to study physics. What do you think was their "rationalization"?
I suspect most people who believe in an afterlife have a chain of reasoning and supporting data to back up their belief, too. Personally, I don’t believe that reasoning is sound or the supporting data is high-quality or convincing but I also don’t think the distinction you’ve drawn is really all that meaningful.
I propose an alternative: any arrant nonsense that people insist on believing despite facts and knowledge is likely to be willful ignorance, which people may seek to protect by calling it religion.
The arrant nonsense no one believes anymore is called "mythology".
For example, where I live, nearly all people wear clothes, and they generally think that wearing clothes is important - even if the weather is mild enough that you won't get cold or sunburn if you dispensed with them. Moreover, they will get upset if other people dispense with theirs.
What I find funny is that people will ridicule organised religions for prescribing certain clothing (such as Mormonism, Sikhism, Islam), blissfully unaware of their own quasi-religious attitudes towards clothing.
And sometimes these attitudes can be quite extreme. There is a man in the UK who has been in prison for years for indecent exposure. Every time he is released from prison, he strips off outside, and they call the police to re-arrest him.
I agree that this is true about human communities.
However, what each community chooses to affirm is important. Do they believe themselves to be the Master Race? Do they believe narcissistic creation fantasies? Do they assert an understanding of electricity, physics, evolution?
Only some of the above "principles" are true, regardless of what the community prioritises.
Maybe those are hard enough problems that you just can't tolerate employees not pulling their weight.
It's a free country, employees can work where they want, and TSLA employees got stock. Guaranteed if they toughed it out it was more than worth it financially.
Martin Tripp being an egregious example, who was held up for years as some poster boy of David vs Goliath whistle-blowing only to ultimately have been ruled against in court.