Futurists have their heads in the clouds
erikhoel.substack.com
erikhoel.substack.com
Strong, strong disagree that there will be any kind of "colony" on Mars by 2050, and my prediction is that we won't even have our first manned mission to Mars this century.
We haven't been back to the Moon in 50 years. We haven't left LEO in 50 years. Surely we would need to build a colony on the Moon first, as a trial for building a colony somewhere that's three orders of magnitude farther away. We are nowhere close to doing this.
...because until basically now, the tech for doing so was an immensely expensive, one shot, disposable rocket, which could only carry a return vehicle, one lander and a small crew. As a result, the only use for moon missions was (1) to do trivial kinds of science such as could be done with the very limited kinds of instruments that could be carried, and (2) for national bragging rights.
With the science done, with the missions becoming routine and boring, the only entity that could afford to go stopped spending its money.
This is all right on the cusp of changing.
A number of the other observations also seemed to be a stretch. I'm not sure AI will have the level of impact he expects in less than 30 years. the death of the local store and getting any product delivered in an hour or less seems way too optimistic when you consider all the small rural towns in the US that can't even get decent broadband today.
Starting with that, SpaceX would send at least a hundred Starships to Mars with every launch window, each able to carry over a hundred tons of cargo. Price per passenger depends on how many you can safely pack in and maybe Musk is being overoptimistic on that, but he's shooting for half a million dollars.
Humans haven't been to the moon in 50 years because nobody has decided to go in 50 years. Right now there's a man with more resources than almost any man on earth and he has dedicated his life to ensuring that people go to mars and live there. He is so to used on it that he has focused on creating novel technology just for the purpose, and demonstrated that technology. It is going to happen.
In space, distance doesn't really matter, gravity wells matter. Going to mars is not much different than going to the moon. You don't really need a trial, the people are stuck there no matter how far away it is.
Travel time and therefore distance matters. Months of increased radiation exposure, low gravity, and calorie restriction is very different than a few days going to the moon and back.
Either way, a pilot program on the moon offers virtually no benefit. It amounts to dipping your toe in when you know the water is cold; you're looking for an excuse to back out.
Couple years ago I worked out what the cable mass would have to be, and it really wasn't bad. There's even a Kevlar-equivalent that stands up well to space radiation.
And IMO, the more SpaceX progresses, the more people will get excited about space and investment money will be thrown at space technology. I invested some money in Rocket Lab, because they are a public company and the next best thing after SpaceX IMO.
2022/08/07 - Assume no transit
2024/09/26 - First uncrewed launch (X tons of supply)
2026/11/15 - Second uncrewed launch (X2 tons of supply)
2029/01/03 - Third uncrewed launch (X3 tons of supply)
2031/02/22 - First crewed launch (X4 tons of supply, Y tons of people)
2033/04/11 - Second crewed launch (X5 tons of supply, Y2 tons of people)
2035/05/30 - etc...
... [2]
This way we can compare progress and keep pushing the schedule out as each transfer is missed to give a more realistic sense for what we're trying to do here.
My sense is that if people would really to dig into the numbers (and I'm sure someone has) to calculate out the tonnage and delta-v required and how that translates to resources (money, energy, humans) over time (esp considering regulations and safety factors) then I think we would get a more realistic sense of we're trying to do here and realize how insane it is to think we'd have anything resembling a "colony" by 2050 (14 transfer windows).
A 2050 Moon colony is a far more realistic prediction, though also somewhat far fetched unless we've solved the problem of economic and political instability.
There are absolutely exploitable resources there; they are just irrelevant to an Earth-centric economy because of the prohibitive cost of hauling them out of Mars' gravity well and down to Earth. But if you've gone to Mars to be independent there, Earth's economy will become similarly irrelevant to you.
Radiation on Mars is actually not that bad[1], it's comparable to the radiation levels in Ramsar, Iran, where people live happily to a normal age without elevated cancer rates. The perchlorates in Martian soil won't be hard to deal with either[2].
[1] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/20/omg-space-is-f...
[2] https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/04/20/even-the-dirt-...
> Excitement cannot overcome a lack of exploitable natural resources at the destination.
In context ("the more SpaceX progresses, the more people will get excited about space and investment money will be thrown at space technology"), I assumed your point was that natural resources on Mars cannot be economically relevant to Earth-based investors, and therefore no such investment money will be "thrown" at Mars colonization regardless of how "excited" people are about the idea. Hence the substance of my reply.
Did you instead mean to say that air, water, food, and radiation shielding are intractable problems for Mars colonization?
Without local resources, whether economic or life-sustaining, you're not really a colony, but a scientific expedition or military outpost or both.
Both of which put you under the political authority (and reliance for survival) of your sponsoring entity, which to me largely quashes the whole sovereignty appeal.
That isn't to say that there won't be "true believers" who buy into the idea of starting a colony, as it's sold by Elon or NASA or the US Space Force or whoever. I'm sure they'll find volunteers.
My original comment explicitly (see: "if/when independent survival is [...] feasible") takes no position on this matter.
Since "independent survival" will never be feasible on Mars, your comment sounds like pure fiction.
It's not like you can just go out in the wilderness and kill an animal for food, or find a river to drink from. You can't even breathe there.
"Independent survival" is barely even feasible on Earth.
You will always be dependent on the facilities, supply ships, etc.
Then there's the question of protecting what you have, without having any authorities, law enforcement, etc. to help you.
If you go there, it will most likely be an experience as in the old mining towns, where a single company owned everything, (factory, shops, residential areas, recreational areas, etc), and the workers will mainly be paid in "company bucks", that can only be used there.
For most people, it'll be like a dystopian neo-feudalistic nightmare, you can't wake up from. One where you can't even quit your job, because there's nowhere else to go. Indentured servitude on another planet.
But the Elon fan boys will no doubt be happy to sign up for it anyway.
Beyond that, I'm not sure what you think I mean by "independent survival", but just to be clear: I'm not talking about, like, one dude striking out for a life of rugged solitude in the great Martian outdoors.
> There are absolutely exploitable resources there; they are just irrelevant...
Because I haven't read of any human-sustaining resources except some ice. Rather that analyzed samples of the soil and atmosphere are too toxic and radiation at the surface too high.
I'm not convinced it's intractable, though, especially with a few more decades of progress in industrial automation.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1461235511511633922
... the second richest man in the world is existentially dedicated to building the a city in Earth orbit.
Well that's a wacky prediction. What makes you think that?
We haven't been back to the Moon in 50 years, sure, but we've barely been trying until recently. We're very close to having vehicles that can get to the Moon and Mars.
I think everyone overestimates the public interest and "excitement" over going to Mars. The reason we haven't been back to the Moon in 50 years is that the public lost interest after the ~third or fourth launch, and stopped tuning in to the broadcasts. With ever-improving VR technology, I'd predict that more and more people would be satisfied enough with a VR experience of Mars, and be done with it. The need to physically "go" to a place and claim it for yourself will be a thing of the past.
I just think 80 years is a massive amount of time and we'll have feet on Mars by then, which is what my comment was specifically referencing.
Almost all of the energy and effort is spent on getting things off of the earth to begin with, everything after that point is comparatively easy, especially if you are willing to take a long time doing it.
The major problem with a Mars mission is that the constraints of getting things into orbit are so oppressive, its hard to send enough supplies and equipment to orbit, due to the exponential explosion of the rocket equation.
So you send hundreds and hundreds of tons of stuff. You need tens or hundreds of thousands of tons of stuff to have any hope of making a colony that can survive for a few years, never mind become self-sustaining.
Multiple spare parts for every single thing, food, water, machinery, power sources... the list is almost endless.
Until there's hard information about what's possible on Mars - exactly what does and doesn't grow, how the seasons really work, how to deal with ecological issues, how to deal with waste, and on and on - you don't even know what you need to send.
There are also the political and psychological problems of keeping relatively small numbers of people in a relatively small space with relatively poor privacy and no natural resources.
It's basically going to be the most expensive and least fun picnic in history.
Elon Musk is planning on sending a Starship along with 100 tons of cargo to Mars in September 2022. He'll probably miss that window and send it October 2024 instead.
Musk also plans on building 50 Starships per year.
Also predicting that most education will be online after everyone spent a year and a half discovering how terrible both Zoom school and Zoom university are is a bold (and likely wrong) prediction.
I buy that the future is female given current trends, but basically the whole list of predictions in the second half of the article is exactly the mistake he explains futurists make in the first half!
You’re probably right about Zoom school—it has sounded pretty terrible to me, too, especially for younger children—but I think the jury is still out on Zoom university.
I teach at a university in Japan where most of the teaching has been conducted online since April of last year, and we’re now debating what to do next year if infections stay low. (After a frightening spike in August, they are very low in Japan now.) When faculty in my department were asked their teaching preference for the next academic year, about a third said they want to return to in-person only, a third want to teach a combination of in-person and online, and a third—including me—want to keep teaching online only.
When I’ve discussed the issue with undergraduates in my classes this year, about half have said they prefer to stay online for many or most of their classes. However, they do strongly prefer to socialize with other students in person.
The reasons many teachers and students prefer online classes range from the mundane—such as avoiding long commutes on crowded trains—to the perception that, for some types of classes, online learning can actually be more effective than classroom teaching.
For me, the game-changer for online classes has been the ability of students to take part in classes regardless of where they are. Most international students have been unable to enter Japan since April 2020, but, at my university at least, they have been able to continue their studies online. After I taught a graduate seminar last year in which more than half the students were in other countries—Indonesia, Thailand, China—and all were able to participate in the discussions on an equal basis, I came to think that it will be hard for in-person-only universities to remain competitive in the future.
To be honest I think it will likely happen before 2050, but it also might also come and go before then as well. Getting to self sufficiency is a very, very long shot, and up until then something has to foot the bill which is where the endeavour is most likely to fall over.
In any case, we get to watch some cool looking hardware go up in the mean time - https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=54984.msg2...
Kill me now :(
That's how I know it's an realistic and mostly unbiased prediction that's relatively accurate: it looks kinda like today, except more of it. Barring a black swan event that drastically changes our system of values and incentives, that's probably how it's going to play out. We just had a black swan play out and... it's all the same, just six feet more of it.
Most social revolutions either up reshuffling the deck or in disaster. The low hanging fruit in most technological fields has been picked and "priced in" during decades past.
Hope for the best, expect the worst.
I very much doubt that Hoel has properly thought through in detail what it would take to operate a permanent colony on Mars and what would have to happen to set one up. If he has, he has not troubled to write down his thoughts.
As an example of what I'm talking about, Brian Potter, on his blog "Construction Physics", has delved into the detail and explained some of the mass of physical, economic, informational, institutional, organisational, and cultural factors that result in the building construction industry and construction costs being what they are.[1]
I have never seen its like from any futurist.
It hasn't been the case at any point in human history (other than extremely small minorities). This is not going to change now. Humans don't work that way on a mass scale.
The same with education. Education does not exist to educate, it exists to babysit children (parents have to go to work! look at the last election in Virginia), and be a hoop to jump through for accreditation. Online learning will be hugely inconvenient for these purposes, and traditional in person education will remain the most common form well into the end of the 21st century
Nothing ever changes
things do change. we can change them more.
i agree that throuple is an unlikely emergence from those efforts :D
Case in point: "Anti-aging technology will extend the health-spans of the rich."
There are myriad ways in which this statement will be true and yet it's completely useless today. As long as there is any tech (biotech, medicine, plastic surgery, etc.) that extends people's lives by even a little bit, or improves their QOL into a slightly older age, then this is true.
It's unactionable, unclear, etc.
I'm constantly looking for good, verifiable, and actionable forecasts for this stuff, if anyone has them. And if you are interested in doing such a thing, please reach out. :)
Business logic is about getting very tiny details and edge cases correct: "if a, b and c but not d and e, unless of course f and g"... I don't see how that code can be created by an AI in a way that doesn't create even more work for someone fixing bugs.
We have barely scratched the surface of what tech can offer in most brick and mortar industries because this business logic is so incredibly difficult to automate. It seems unfeasible that a magic AI will come along and do what humans cannot do alone.
I think we'll see programming evolve and software engineers will probably be among the first workers who learn to work in truly collaborative ways with AI.
What about the 29 years between 1912 and 1941?
The pace of recent history is not a good indicator of future change.
Heck, I only know the 70s onward, and remember the mid 70s only in child's eye, me centric ways. I remember my aunts being upset about Elvis Presley dying, but I wasn't quite sure what the fuss was, and that was 77; I was 5. Someone died, but how did they fit into my world? Oh, that guy that sings? But we can still listen to him? Then what is the big deal?
My wonderful Usbourne Books of the Future were still promising me personal spacecraft and tours of Saturn's rings as late as 1980. The robots would take care of the garden back home. On the space station.
A whole way of looking at the future came unravelled in just the 12 years between then and our prognosticator's birth. By 1992, everyone was dreaming of cyberpunk, of uploading our minds, and fiction had the rich living in LEO. The stars had stretched out of reach.
Our cynical futurist, age 33, has not meaningfully experienced social change with an adult perspective over 29 years. Every 30 year period ever has been a mad scramble of change. I am sure that was true between 1000 and 1030 even. Big shit was happening.
Like my 1972-1980 world view, his 1992-2000 world was likely pretty personal, and coloured by a narrow range of life experiences. So I am skeptical he has the breadth of experience needed to extend 29 into the future.
This is, I think the heart of the issue. Human nature is pretty constant. We can change our environment or trade offs (for example at one time if you wanted to avoid pregnancy, the trade off was don’t have sex, now it is take a pill, hence the leveling out of our population).
The problem with this analysis is that the rate of change of the world is accelerating; the world is changing faster now than it was in 1992. Fundamentally, this is driven by the fact that all the changes from the past cause further changes, in an exponential process. Thus a straightforward linear estimate of the future will underestimate how much things will change in the future.
Any accelerating trend can't be sustained indefinitely. We know that the accelerating rate of progress is because of computers (which reduce the feedback loops on various processes which then help make better computers, and so on). When we reach a point where computers stop getting better, the rate of progress will stabilize. We've already observed stagnant clock speeds for over a decade. There are still worthy investments to be made, like in miniaturization, affordability, and heterogeneity, but without a breakthrough as monumental as the transistor we have no reason to assume that acceleration will continue.
Just because something seems crazy, does not mean it is wrong.
But techno-utopianism is a form of art in Silicon Valley.
Your average SV techbro feels superior to regular people who enjoy other forms of art such as music or sports or poetry or even film making.
Label those activities as a "waste of time" but they end up completely falling for the BS performance art that scum like Elon Musk and Elizabeth Holmes put up.
And they elevate them too! Where normal people see art in an Hendrix solo or an Eminem verse they see it in the obnoxious self-promoting BS spewed by such characters.
Of course the window dressing for all the above is nonesense marketing terms such as : "showing passion" or "produce a strong narrative" or even "tell your story to the world"