By watching what the gamers do, SpaceX could get valuable insight into what might work better for building a city on Mars.
Even if you can map out the elements of a Martian colony’s technological, social and economic underpinnings, having a game reflect those elements realistically is likely to take a heavy toll on its quality as a good game- simply because the world is very complex. There’s only a limited amount of complexity even the nerdiest gamer wants to deal with. If you doubt me, try playing some of the older Paragon Studios games- and even then, e.g. Victoria 2 was a downright impressionistic take on 19th century geopolitics. An accurate rendition of a 21st Martian colony would be far worse. Your player base would be limited to extremely wonky enthusiasts, and those people are likely already writing papers on the subject regardless.
Regardless of all the above I like the idea and have thought song similar lines myself in the past. But I can see why it doesn’t stand out to Musk as an important use of his time. He seems to feel someone else will come along to solve the actual colonization problem, as long as he just provides the rockets.
Approaches like this may work for urban planning and such things here on earth, where we DO know all the parameters and tech available and it's a creative problem to find a well balanced configuration. Simulating those known parameters and letting people play with it can then lead to valuable insight.
However the "city on Mars" problem is not such a "how should the streets be layed out" type of problem, but an issue of even inventing the tech to pull it off. So we do not even have a framework we could put in a game.
in short: If we had the knowledge required to create a simulation that would satisfy the requirements, we wouldn't need that simulation at all as this knowledge in itself is what we are still missing for "how to city on mars"
Funding research along these lines wouldn't be the quickest, or most headline grabbing way to get things done, but it would be efficient in terms of launch costs and risk of human lives.
This could be done in stages. The first of which is to build something that works here, on earth, in anyone's back yard. It just has to collect resources and refine them sufficiently to make it possible to build another one.
SpaceX is solving the big constraint right now: cheap high capacity transport.
But I just don't see mars being colonized without considerable robotic labor. Elon would probably agree and say Tesla is doing a lot of pioneering work here (for it's factories and for autonomous cars).
Source: I did it 100 times
Hypothetical question: Would this game be realistic enough to get some understanding of the psychological and physical risks? e.g. Player has a mental breakdown and damages a pod. Everyone in that pod not in a space suit suffocates and their account is deleted. To that end will players be vetted for psychological aptitude to take the mission seriously? Assuming they get past that barrier will there be somewhat random events that test the players ability to adapt, improvise and overcome mortal risks, testing their knowledge of science, space technology and all other facets of living on a hostile planet?
Would there be a training mode and a realistic mode described above?
E.g. a moon landing simulation in 1969 (with todays software and hardware) would not have taught us that moon dust is very sticky due to electrostatic charges, and that it heavily impact operations on lunar surface. Any simulation game that did not take that into account would be heavily biased and misrepresent reality.
Have a look at the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nis2t9EubBs
Then have a look at how seriously people took it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hv6RbEOlqRo
I mean, i guess people can approach games like EVE Online seriously, in part due to the financial investment that they may have into them, but otherwise they're likely to just mess around for entertainment value.
On a different note, if you have such complete knowledge of all the constraints to be able to make a simulation the results of which would be useful, why not just run a neural network to simulate more outcomes than players for this game of yours would? Why depend on the game being interesting and successful when you can just automate the players away?
Like Minecraft but real life. I wonder why this hasn't been done already.
Also I have to point out that I don't know if SpaceX is going to build a city. I do think their mission is to build lift and launch capacity, but not to actually build cities.
(a reference to the title of the paper "the world is not a theorem" https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.00284)
Mars is incapable of ever holding an atmosphere that humans could live in, the surface is highly irradiated and liquid water can't exist on it, and the soil and rocks are full of highly toxic perchlorates.
Assuming those facts weren't the case, a video game could never model the insane amount of variables a real "city on Mars" would need to factor in for success.
Then why does he say so? The NASA has understood after Apollo that huge budgets require large political support, hence huge public opinion support.
Going to the Moon has cost 4% of the US budget during 15 years or so.
The world space community knows that humans do badly in space in general ; Mars is no better because of cosmic rays. A colony on Mars would have to be underground. In fact, the whole space community knows that robots are much more efficient and far, far less costly.
The International Space Station has a shallow bottom line in terms of Science, beyond the effects of lack of gravity on humans. I discussed of these effects with the official physician of an European astronaut: it's quite worse than publicly acknowledged. It's not a secret, it's just that journalists don't really do their job on the issue. They would not need to "investigate" in a Watergate way but just to circumvent the press departments of NASA and/or ESA in Europe.
The public opinion wants the dream. The NASA has heavily invested in filming and sharing the expeditions. And they are great at it.
In Europe, Thomas Pesquet is the incarnation of ESA: good-looking, super bright, truly a nice guy by nature, communicative enthusiasm... We all like him. But it would be fun if a journalist calculated the science / communication ratio of his time aboard the ISS. Something like 20% maybe and only because he needs to have something to talk about. Otherwise a robot could have conducted the experiments. Except for the experiments on his own body but... what for, since there is no scientific nor technical rationality for humans in space anymore?
But sending humans instead of robots implies a tenfold budget. So the dream of humans in space / on Mars / on the Moon is vital to maintain a large space industry.
The proof of this is... SpaceX. They do better than NASA and ESA for a fraction of the cost.
But SpaceX has an issue here: NASA, ESA and other space agencies are... its clients. SpaceX wants deep-pocketed clients. So SpaceX must participate in fuelling the dream of humans in space.
The ISS is old now and we have seen it all. The movie "Gravity" was great but also the coffin of space stations orbiting Earth. It's a bit like car races: for most people, me included, we only watch... if there is an impressive accident, on YouTube. On TV, following a car race is just a bore. Another live feed from the ISS? Well... who cares? Thomas Pesquet did super well the last five years, exploiting the ISS to its maximum. To fuel the dream.
So, what's next? The storytelling around robots on Mars surface was a great success. Rosetta and the comet was super exciting too. But we are used to it now... However NASA made a brilliant stunt of the tiny helicopter on Mars: first fly on another planet. I loved it. The Webb telescope... well super interesting for Science and technology guys like us here but for the public opinion... It's just OK. Children don't care for example and it tells a lot. And it's only a 10 billion-dollar project. The ISS amounts to 140 billions.
So what's next for maintaining the over-large space industry? A base on the Moon. That's realistic. And SpaceX rockets will enable it.
But Elon Musk can not been seen as a mogul so influential that a inhabited base on the Moon is budgeted. If he was on TV all the time selling us a Moon base - which is what he really wants - he would be stealing the dream sold by his own clients.
The NASA wants to be again the center of attention like during Apollo. And to get the hundreds of billions it needs. SpaceX? Just an efficient commodity provider in the dream, transportation.
But Elon Musk wants his share of attention too. He can't focus his communication on the Moon base? Let's invent a colony on Mars!
Everybody is happy: it promotes the humans in space, Musk is the dreamy visionary and the NASA... the much more responsible governmental agency with a rock-solid and reasonable project of a base on the Moon.
And, oh boy, press, media and social networks just keep on talking about Musk's Mars colony, endlessly.
Elon Musk has no project of a colony on Mars. He is enabling the NASA moon base, helping his client to get the hundred of billions it requires... SpaceX has rockets to sell and a rocket require a client with a need to send big payloads into space.
Robots are fun... for a while. Humans in space? A never-ending dream: Star Wars and Star Trek have been proving it for 50 years. Robots? Well, there was Wall-E.
Humans in space : tens of billions of dollars per year for the next fifty years. Everybody is happy in the space community.
It will certainly result in technological leaps. But for Science? Robots are better and much much cheaper.
Too cheap in fact. This is true for all space agencies around the world. China wants a manned space station to demonstrate that they are closing the gap with the USA and Russia. Purely technological and proof of power, not a scientific project.
Musk is also creating his own market by sending tens of thousands of satellites around Earth. Space observation from Earth will mechanically become problematic if not unfeasible.
And it happens that SpaceX has the rockets for installing telescopes on the dark side of the Moon. An old dream of scientists, since this is the best possible area for telescopes. But scientists have not been able to get the budgets for it. Don't worry, Musk is paving the way to get them, by privatizing the sky.
Let's build a simulator game for a truly ecological city on Earth. At least, we have many data already and very good reasons to spend evenings and weekends playing and dreaming for a positive future for all mankind, not just a few thousand people on Mars living underground to escape the cosmic rays.
Yeah, I'm no fun. Sorry. Just sharing what is common knowledge in the space industry.
Let's save the Earth. Elon Musk is very impressive but he doesn't care about Earth future. Google founders went the same path: from impressive innovators to CEOs needing to get their business going.
They are not even "evil", nor is Musk a conspirator. But capitalism has its rules and those guys are rich and perceived as successful among billionaires only if they go on along the rules of capitalism. Google needs to invade our privacy to get going. SpaceX needs clients for its rockets.
In a sense, Musk had to invent this bullshit colony on Mars. He needs to fuel the dream.
Hence the "there is no alternative way" stance shared by our "elites". They are the richest people on Earth and still have no alternative but fuel the system.
But there is an alternative, if all educated people like us resign from capitalistic corporations. Let's either go solo or join cooperatives. No need for a violent revolution. Little by little, big corps will lose their best resources and will shrink, opening the market more and more for cooperatives.
That is not socialism. It's just that open markets don't necessarily imply capitalism. We don't want too much of central planning, just a strong enough government to regulate the market.
Absolutely all serious economists know that a market need regulation to be efficient. By "serious", I mean decent scientists who study how inefficient unregulated markets have proven to be - except for making the rich always richer.
When confronted, the capitalists invariably explain that the markets were inefficient because the deregulation was incomplete. Yeah, they have no shame. And the data prove them wrong.
We don't need a game: we need to have fun. Let's quit our mostly not-so-well paid, boring jobs and earn our freedom. By going solo or joining others in cooperatives.
You know what is amazing in this path? People politically leaning on the left or on the right can both agree and join the movement.
It's not taxes that rips you off, but the insane profit margins of capitalists: They are the one taxing our work the most, and by far.
We are educated, so why are we acting like fools and believe that somehow we will succeed when 95% of people don't?
Let's stop working for guys that pretend that paradise is on Mars and that we have a 5% chance to get a seat on a rocket if you work hard your whole life.
You sound very dismissive. Starship is work in progress, but not vaporware. It has already cleared a lot of practical flight test hurdles and it does not seem to be stalled technically. (Regulatory approvals are a different story.) "Can't get into space" description would fit SLS better.
If any Musk promises deserve righteous bashing, Tesla "self-driving capability" comes to mind.