Musk, Twitter and the future: His long-term vision is weirder than you think | Hacker News Reader

Musk, Twitter and the future: His long-term vision is weirder than you think

salon.com

8 pointsjensgk7 comments

> Why does he want to fix climate change? Is it because of all the harm it's causing (and will cause) for poor people in the Global South? Is it because of the injustice and inequality made worse by the climate crisis? Apparently not: It's because Musk doesn't want to risk a "runaway" climate change scenario that could snuff out human life before we've had a chance to colonize Mars

So instead of caring about everyone suffering and humanity being wiped out, he should only care about the suffering of "poor people in the Global South"? And we're meant to believe that this author's moral compass is better calibrated than Elon's?

lol

I really don't like Elon Musk, but I think you're correct on this point.

If we survive long enough to colonize Mars, and then Earth becomes uninhabitable, what fraction of the human population do you think we can transplant to Mars?

That is, "99.99% of the people died, but the race survived, so we're all good" is a worse moral vision than "only caring about the poor people in the Global South".

If we survive long enough to make a self-sustaining colony on Mars, I would think that transporting humans to Mars could happen cheaply enough that basically everyone could afford it.

For example, Elon believes that Starship's launch costs[0] will be $10/kg, and the average human adult weighs about 70kg, so they would need $700 to pay for a ticket (ignoring food costs). Over 90% of the world's population earns more than $1.90 per day, so it would take about a year for them to buy their ticket.

(Okay, admittedly, they will probably end up having to pay for their ticket with money they earn on Mars, since the currencies of an uninhabitable Earth won't be much use to their Martian rescuers, and thus these refugees will effectively be indentured servants in a horrific twisted parody of the transatlantic slave trade, but this awful moral vision would only have to last for a couple of years while they paid off their debt.)

[0] https://wccftech.com/spacex-launch-costs-down-musk/

Food and oxygen.

But even that isn't the issue. Here's what I think the real issue is: Let's say Earth is going to be uninhabitable in 100 years. There's 8 billion people. OK, are you going to be able to move 80 million people a year?

And, you've got a self-sustaining Mars colony? That's nice. Can it sustain 8 billion people?

Uh, you're both completely missing the picture I think. If we can figure out how to survive on Mars, which is "uninhabitable", then we can apply many of the same technologies on Earth even if it becomes "uninhabitable". Technological progress seems to almost always proceed by doing "cool stuff" and "hard stuff" (or at least "war stuff") and then applying the advances to the mundane. Musk knows this. He gets to do the cool stuff, humanity benefits; the two don't have to happen in the same way. His worldview says this is an ordinary and morally good way that people benefit from each other; even though this seems incomprehensible to more... collectivist worldviews.

This is an unhelpful article because it straw-mans every argument, and mischaracterizes the primary material.

> More recently, Bostrom has said that "unrestricted altruism is not so common that we can afford to fritter it away on a plethora of feel-good projects of suboptimal efficacy," such as helping the poor, solving world hunger, promoting LGBTQ rights and women's equality, fighting racism, eliminating factory farming and so on.

If you actually link to the article, the quoted sentence does exist, but the following implications very clearly are absent. There is no such suggestion that "fighting racism" is a "project of suboptimal efficacy". This is very clearly a disingenuous argument.

As are many of the other of the article's points. There's plenty of room for honest and productive critique - this is not that.

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