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The solution to this is for someone else to offer a more compelling vision of the future that is also practical and achievable.

Take Elon Musk for example. His vision of the future is more compelling than anything I hear any politician of any political party in the USA (or most other nations) putting forward. I find the standard issue right-wing vision of the future repugnant and the standard issue left-wing vision completely impractical and divorced from reality. (Aspects of it are repugnant too, but much less so than the right.)

What other non-billionaire visions of the future does humanity have? Xi Jinping's smile-or-die panopticon? Putin's theocratic mafia state?

The billionaires are leading humanity by default because they're on balance the only class of people offering practical workable visions of the future that are at least incrementally better than the present.

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If he wasn't sucking at the US Government's teat for funding for SpaceX, tax breaks for Tesla, and evading income taxes then I might admire the guy, but as it is, he's the same corporate grifter in a new set of clothes.

I mean, compare SpaceX against, say, SLS, and it looks like a pretty cost-effective form of government spending.

There wasn’t the political will in Congress to make SLS a success because it’s not a voting issue for most of their constituents. This is the fate of any ambitious tech development unless that technology can be used to incinerate half of the world in nuclear-fueled hellfire (moon race), spy on the American people without a warrant, kill brown people in the third world, or be give secondhand to the police to fight the war on drugs.

However, never underestimate Congress's undying political will to give bucketloads of American taxpayer dollars and money the government borrowed to rich people with no accountability.

Really makes you think…

SpaceX seems to have quite a bit of accountability; I'm a big fan of how Commercial Crew and Commercial Cargo projects were run (fixed costs, especially, which is biting Boeing in the ass right now...), and hope NASA uses it as a baseline for future projects.

A successful SLS would have been a failure. It costs far more per launch and is not reusable.

NASA could have built a reusable space launch system better than the shuttle, but they didn't. That's exactly my point about billionaires leading by default. It took a billionaire because nobody else did it.

Elon's vision is being the king of Mars, where the only law is his own. I'm not sold.

When did he say that?

Even if that is his vision, it won't work. You can't be king of a frontier for very long unless your rule is very competent, minimal, and low-cost. The tighter your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.

Everybody likes to imply that Elon is going to make some sort of shit new society in space. Perhaps they'll get as far as trying, but the odds of it working out are questionable on social grounds alone.

In general, people living in hostile environments develop higher levels of trust and social responsibility. When you live closely with people, where everyone's choices impact everyone else, when a single person intentionally screwing things up could doom the entire community, you get societies that are pretty much the polar opposite of the archetypal billionaire libertarian vision.

You're right, and what if that's the point?

Elon hasn't talked a lot about the social aspects of a Mars settlement. Maybe he doesn't care and figures that's up to the people who go there and his mission is just to get people there. Maybe he would agree with you and that's the point. Who knows.

I highly doubt he's naive enough to think the social outcome of a Mars settlement would be some standard issue Earthly political outcome or one that would exclusively favor him. If he is that naive he will be disappointed.

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