Elon Musk is pushing the human race forward
murtza.org
murtza.org
This article, for me, is somewhat bittersweet. I look up to Elon Musk and what he's doing, because it's really making a difference in the world. That's what I aspire to do someday. But my day to day job is as the first engineer of an advertising startup, where we make boatloads of money helping compagnies better monetize and promote crappy mobile games. Sometimes I wonder if I'm creating any value in the world.
Hopefully this'll be a stepping stone towards financing a startup that'll be a little more meaningful.
I think almost everyone thinks this, but y'know what?
It's a lie. People keep saying they'll do what really motivates and engages them real, real soon... just as soon as this obviously-must-be-done thing is done.
But life, life is a series of obviously-must-be-done things. At some point, you need to stop doing them and start doing what actually matters to you.
You can break away from the grinding routine in a responsible, steady way. Easiest way to start? Wake up 1-3 hours earlier, and spend your peak creative time on something incredibly meaningful to you. Could you do that?
I don't trust the future. Everyone says they're going to do things in the future, and most people don't do 90% of them. If you're really serious about changing the world, the best time to start is yesterday, but the second best time to start is right now.
You just contradicted yourself. Being motivated to do something means wanting to do it.
The problem is that "What do I want to do" actually has two meanings. It means "What would I like to be doing each day" and it means "What do I want to have done". These are very different questions, and they have different answers. I'd like to have fed the poor, but I would not enjoy standing on the street asking for donations from passers-by. I want to be designing computer games, but I won't be particularly proud of writing Battlefield N+1.
I've spent years optimizing for how my life will look in retrospect. This came as a revelation to me, but if I look back at my fondest memories over the past few years, none of them have involved big goals. Instead, they've all been things that were fun to do, like gamejam and trapeze lessons. This year I've got a new plan: -Ofun. I might not change the world, but maybe if I'm enjoying myself a lot more that'll be ok.
This is where Personal Development resources like Neuro Linguistic Programming, Hypnosis, etc. can be very useful. I know it's not particularly scientific, but I, and several of my friends, have personally found visualization exercises to be extremely helpful in aligning my motivation with my long term goals. Here is a starting point that worked well for me: http://www.petermichaud.com/essays/5-steps-to-overcome-procr...
I'd like to reiterate that connecting emotions with rational, long term decisions is not especially easy, but it is by far one of the most useful skills I developed.
The people who are revered here (justly or not) are people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Richard Branson. All in their 40s and 50s.
And yes, if you're going to do a startup you might as well do it in your 20s (all of the people above did!) because you have fewer responsibilities when you're young, and when you're older you often can't afford to put your life on hold.
Many people enjoy this website and just because someone tried to add wind into someone else's sails don't mean it's your job to tell them to stop inventing and dreaming because they're not somewhere glorious.
I hope gizmo is the first person to land on Mars and I hope just to spite you they start after they're 30...
I think an initial startup exit gives you that kind of confidence.
Anyway, save some money and then get the he'll out of ad space.
Tesla started less than a decade ago and has sold out of both the Roadster and the Model S. That's pretty incredible for such a young car company.
I don't think Elon is just "making money on what's hot." Building a car company isn't in fashion, and an energy revolution is a pretty clear vertical right now (see Khosla's invetments). Likewise, building a rocket company isn't very fashionable. If you look at his vision--he's playing a 20-year game--the true market for SpaceX doesn't even exist yet.
I spent some time at Orbital at a time when they were trying to launch ORBCOMM. What they were doing seems similar in feel to SpaceX. I also noted that ORBCOMM is one of the first scheduled launches for SpaceX.
Interestingly, Orbital was started by an entrepreneur with a vision of small launch vehicles and he managed to actually pull it off- it was not some huge spinoff of an existing giant. I wonder how much the two are talking.
Friends of mine who worked on the early days of Orbital's Pegasus described a situation that sounded very startup-like to me. (I worked there in the late 90's, but on Hubble, not Orbital's commercial projects).
Orbital had modest success (if an IPO can be considered modest). So it seems not only plausible, but likely that a new approach is what is needed here. Perhaps SpaceX is the next iteration of a leaner approach that will actually scale to the meet the grand vision.
Let's not forget Elon is also Chairman of the Board for SolarCity as well, which is leading the distributed solar PV market.
He's pushing the human race forward in many areas, all at the same time. Pretty remarkable
Mars is not somewhere to live, it's somewhere to explore.
As for SpaceX, I think they're doing amazing work and it was about time the private sector got into this field with ambitious goals.
There are at least a couple reasons: 1) A lot of the conflict that destroys so many lives is motivated by limited resources such as land. Getting off this planet could make that kind of conflict disappear (eventually). 2) Diversification. If climate change/oil scarcity/nano/GE get out of hand, it'd be good to have someplace else to go. Even if you're sceptical about the environmental risks from climate change and oil scarcity, GE and nano pose big risks. The easier nano and GE get, the more likely some bio-/nano-hacker somewhere creates an irreversible problem for us (whether accidentally or intentionally).
The way i see it we 're still in 'space exploration' not colonization. Perhaps if we master biology, life and intelligence first, we 'll have our drones do that for us.
Typical coal -> electricity is 33% efficient, but can be up to 50% [1], electricty to battery is 75% [2], and electric motors are about 92% [3]. The typical efficiency will be .33 * .75 * .92 = 23%, with a maximum of 35%. Gasoline engine efficiency is 25 - 30% [4], so we aren't really improving pollution much with electric cars, until wind/solar makes up a substantial part of our grid.
Now it will certainly _move_ the pollution from the cars in the cities to the power plants elsewhere (which is a good thing), but it really isn't preventing pollution.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil-fuel_power_station#Basic...
[2] http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/006554.html
[3] http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/electrical-motor-efficienc...
Less than half of electricity in the US is from coal. Also, because of how power plants / grids work, there is excess capacity available that electric cars can use (overnight charging) without increasing power generation.
And the rest is from Canada :)
1-Coal is not the only power source there is 2-Batteries are not the only energy storage device there is 3-It is difficult to upgrade a whole fleet, as we can see by the difficulty of changing it to be a electric-only fleet. Power plants are much easier to upgrade by comparison - all cars are then instantly more efficient. 4-Electric engines do not have to be kept running while the car is stopped (heavy traffic, or traffic lights). This benefits them greatly in heavily populated urban centers. 5-You can have regenerative breaking and recover some of the lost energy. However small, this is something gas engines cannot do. 6-Several components are not needed. Electric engines do not have the same lubrication requirements of internal combustion engines. So no oil, no heat sinks and water pumps (except in some implementations, to cool batteries while charging), electric generator (unless hybrid), exhaust pipes, fuel catalysts, spark plugs (and no high-voltage coils), fuel pumps.. the list goes on and on. In some implementations you could even get rid of the differential transmission and drive the wheels independently. Some do not even need to shift gears, as electric motors can reach very high RPMs (and have a large power to weight ratio). 7-Less sound pollution
I just find it difficult to believe that converting three times (electricity source -> electricty -> storage -> mechanical energy) is going to be more efficient than converting once (gasoline -> mechanical).
- As you said, pollution from power plants have less effect on humans, because of distance and filters - You are comparing vehicle best case efficiency with Electrical worst case - Electrical power can be produced from clean sources, gasoline can't be used without creating pollution - Electric can potentially be smaller and lighter because of a very simple mechanism compared to the gasoline engine and all the components around it. (But batteries efficiency must be improved to really reduce weight)
If not now, is that a technology that's moving forward fast enough to be a partial solution in the future?
Now that said the overall win is still probably smaller than marketing would be willing to admit.
The sum of the different parts being greater than the individual components...
POWER: 1088 hp
MOTOR TORQUE: 3.800 Nm
BATTERY CAPACITY: 92 kWh
RANGE: 600 km
ACCELERATION 0-100 kph: 2,8 sec.
TOP SPEED: 305 kph
For reference the one in Model S is 42kWh and the Nissan Leaf has a 24kWh unit. This is expected given the audience, which requires a practical car, so volume has to be surrendered by the batteries to the passengers and the boot.
All in all it's not groundbreaking by any stretch of the imagination and you can safely "meh" the GP on the distance-on-a-charge ground. By saying so I'm not downplaying the most important fact here and that's each one of those cars show a nascent market expanding both ends, and I'm looking forward to that.
[0] http://www.rimac-automobili.com/concept_one/performance-10
Here are two more tidbits about the Concept One:
1. You may see it in (very limited) action here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkpetEjePUo
2. The company is from Croatia, where Nikola Tesla was born. ;)
"For every 100,000 employed in research and development, or just plain thinking, one probably will make a breakthrough that will more than pay for the other 99,999 fellowships".
Uh-huh. I said it before, got downvoted, and will say it again, because I think it's important.
> The number of dead people whose ashes got a known-to-be small but definite odds at being put into space by Elon Musk? 208.
It's well known that new launch platforms fail a lot initially. Soyuz still fails after 757+ launches, and the fatality rate for humans is still 2%.
So, when you get on launch #3 of a new platform for which launch #1 & #2 failed, you've got no excuse for to complain about failure.
Links:
http://www.spacelaunchreport.com/log2011.html#rate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spaceflight-related_acc...
1) Soyuz is a government project with the pride of a nation at stake. SpaceX is a personal project with the pride of an egomaniac at stake. If SpaceX fails, it's merely another startup gone bad. If Soyuz fails, it's quite a lot more.
2) Did Musk spend any of his billions on purchasing any of that hard-earned Soyuz flight data from Russia? If not, then he does not care to learn from history, which means that the long-term failure rate of SpaceX vehicles will likely be higher than that of Soyuz.
3) If I am right about #2, then the fatality rate for humans under SpaceX will be higher than 2%, and even 2% of a million people is already quite high, especially when you consider that most of them will not be trained to the levels of the people who have already gone up.
4) If Musk was grounded in reality, he would shoot for the moon, then Mars. Risking fewer people, closer to Earth, is certainly a much better strategy than what he has announced. If something goes wrong on the moon, help is a few days away. That might still not be good enough, but it's far better than the stretch of time required to wait for help on Mars.
5) Musk has very little experience building rockets, and none at all when it comes to building habitats for extreme environments. Take the full documentation (parts, computers, software, maintenance, and whatnot) of the latest Boeing jet, multiply that by about 100, and you might have what it takes to successfully fly to Mars and live there. This kind of endeavor will require a deep rethink of how we handle big projects. SpaceX does not have this ability.
A few years ago, we had the era when Google could do no wrong, and any criticism of Google would not be tolerated by its many fans. Now, that same mindset applies to Musk, except this time, people will die.
The difficulty of defining what probability is is not a defense.
People are able to calculate a value called "probability of launch success" and use this number for useful things like pricing the insurance of the satellites being carried. I assure you that no one involved expects part of a satellite to go up.
> SpaceX's record is abysmal, and you forgot a few facts.
Your facts seem to be (angry) critiques of Musk/SpaceX, but none of them address the original point of discussion i.e. that a new rocket platform had launch failures.
Let me skip to what seems to be the important bit...
> A few years ago, we had the era when Google could do no wrong, and any criticism of Google would not be tolerated by its many fans. Now, that same mindset applies to Musk, except this time, people will die.
If that's what bugs you, here's my criticism:
- Electric cars: can't take off until there's a breakthrough in battery tech. Oh, and the breakthrough can't use elements which are rare/expensive.
- Mars: we don't have enough energy and raw materials to send more than a handful of people.
I still admire Musk for his combination of genius & entrepreneurship. He's attempting, rethinking and achieving way more than most people.
Will he succeed? Highly unlikely. But I'm glad he's trying, and anyone who kills themselves on one of his rockets will know what they're getting into. Flying in space is inherently dangerous.