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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

What’s missing from your calculation is the current Mars plans from SpaceX or others. They plan on building a colony of millions of people. In order to do that, costs must be dramatically lower and return trips must be possible.

So all the current Mars-capable rockets are being developed with the idea that there will be return trips every synod.

Maybe those ideas will fail. But there are billions of dollars going toward this goal today, and more in the future. So I would bet very much that a return trip is likely within a decade.

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A 7-digit colony is a very distant thing, despite of Musk's nutty ideas. Guy can barely get his car things or his HLS things right, not sure why people trust him to lead on Mars colonization. His plans are not serious.

At current levels of technology and investment, colonization won't happen in our lifetimes. I'd wager we'll get, at best, a few very very dangerous and expensive crewed missions and some very basic infrastructure.

Musk is the MVP MVP

Minimum Viable Product Most Valued Player.

All of his projects have stalled at a middle ground where they are profitable.

Boring Company is actually just Boring. No Hyperloops.

Tesla isnt producing enough cars to really lower the barrier to entry for electrics. Makes a desirable luxury car tho.

Space X has nailed the orbital supply industry, but its space exploration days are still far in the future.

Starlink is an amazing tool for rural areas but has very predictable congestion issues when pointed at urban areas. Planned upgrades will reduce the networks redundancy as he slots in larger middle man nodes. Even then, theres only so much you can do.

Before a musk fanboy comes in here and says he is a futurist a lot of his hard firm dates were years that sounded like "2017".

That sounds like some serious "aim for the stars and you'll only hit the moon" kind of problem.

Every major auto manufacturer is scrambling to build an EV because Tesla left them sitting without any potential market in 5-10 years if they don't. Tesla's goal, stated clearly from the beginning, was to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles. In this it has definitely succeeded. Yeah, it hasn't moved downmarket as quickly as people hoped. But as long as the more expensive models are being sold faster than produced, that's a capitalism problem not a Tesla problem.

SpaceX launches more commercial payloads than every other launch provider combined. They are investing heavily in next-gen launch capability despite being blocked by lots of red tape for environmental issues tha, a few miles away over the border, nobody cares about.

Starlink - what exactly did you expect here? It was never going to compete with urban FTTH.

Boring company - yeah not sure what you expected either. IMO this is more about having something that can build habitats on Mars. Hyperloop works on Mars without active vacuum systems or airtight sealing.

And no I'm not a fanboy. I think he's very anti-labour for example, which isn't the way to build a stable society. But from a tech standpoint I don't think these are valid criticisms.

Yes you are. And the problem with musk, is that we have one guy. We could have, with a normal, not oligarchy concentrated enconomy, several Elons in competition. What he does, used to be the normal thing, if you were enterprising.

I agree this used to be more normal, but I disagree with the fact that it isn't normal anymore somehow being his fault.

There are plenty of people who made more money than him in the dot-com booms and just whittered the money away on building Facebook for Cats or some zero-commercial-application deep tech project nobody will ever hear about.

In the end we wouldn't be talking about him if the Falcon 1 had a single additional failed launch.

> And the problem with musk, is that we have one guy.

What does this even mean? Everyone is only one guy?

Starlink? It was always aimed at the Rural markets. Have you seen anything official claiming otherwise? You know there's a launch/hiring video in Seattle from ages ago?

Middle man nodes? Do you know how satellite Internet works at all?

"not sure why people trust him to lead on Mars colonization"

Uh, because SpaceX is a serious success?

The last year, they launched 10 times as much payload into space than China.

Not to minimize what SpaceX has done, but building reusable, reliable, relatively-inexpensive rockets is a far cry from building a sustainable colony on another planet.

Musk may be able to eventually manage the latter, but I don't think success at the former is a reliable indicator of that.

Reliable would be a strong word, but SpaceX has certainly demonstrated its ability to innovate and reduce expenses at the same time, which is a necessary condition to even entertain the idea of interplanetary flights.

They also seem to be fairly concentrated on development of new vehicles and don't distract themselves with anything else.

I also don't expect Musk to be able to build a sustainable colony on another planet, what I do expect is for him to be able to build the transport infrastructure that enables someone else to be able to build it[0].

And even then, most likely with a layer of indirection that puts Starship in the role of space truck which enables the infrastructure be built, but which isn't the main mode of transport itself: To really make a Mars colony viable, I think both Earth and Mars (for different reasons) would probably want a non-rocket launch system such as an orbital ring, which Starship could help build.

[0] assuming the von Neumann replicators don't eat us all first. He is literally building a bunch of general purpose humanoid robots and suggesting they may take on factory roles… and Tesla/Optimus isn't the only such robot under development.

Within the decade? I wish I was that optimistic. There are only so many windows in the next decade where it's economical to send/receive rockets to mars. The planets have to literally align for it can be economical to send/receive people.

https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/close-and-far-mart...

I'd say 50/50 on the launch (but not landing on Mars let alone returning to Earth) of a manned Mars mission this decade; Musk is famously over-optimistic, but his companies do tend to actually arrive at the destination.

Yea that sounds about right.

Things always take longer than expected. So I would bet that a return trip is possible within 50 years, but won't actually be done within 10 years from now.

Call me a cynic but I have zero trust for a man who becomes the wealthiest on the planet and, rather than have a little gratitude and actual try to give back, is then consumed by getting the f out of here before the crowd with pitchforks arrive.

And, no, personally I don’t think Tesla or SpaceX count as giving back.

Why can’t our billionaires at least just slink off to the lovely beaches of some island somewhere. Oh wait, egos…

But Mars? Mars? How does that sound enjoyable? I actually hope he makes it there.

And millions of people? I’m no expert but are there even anywhere near enough launch windows for that? And I’m guessing even just figuring out the cost of the fuel to reach escape velocity would show how this a non-starter for more than Musk himself and a few companions.

> I have zero trust for a man who becomes the wealthiest on the planet and, rather than have a little gratitude and actual try to give back, is then consumed by getting the f out of here

But that is not actually the order things happened. He was talking about mars colonies before he become the wealthiest on the planet.

> Mars? Mars? How does that sound enjoyable?

Nobody said they want to do it because it is enjoyable. Where are you getting this?

> millions of people? I’m no expert but are there even anywhere near enough launch windows for that?

In what way do you think the number of launch windows constrain the number of colonist?

> I’m guessing even just figuring out the cost of the fuel to reach escape velocity would show how this a non-starter

You are guessing? :)

> And, no, personally I don’t think Tesla or SpaceX count as giving back.

Yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man. Say what you will about the tenets of Muskianism but at least it’s an ethos.

> Why can’t our billionaires at least just slink off to the lovely beaches of some island somewhere. Oh wait, egos…

One person’s egotism is another’s genuine belief. I’m personally not surprised someone who had the ambition and luck to be a billionaire would continue doing things they believe in. I’m not even convinced it would be beneficial for them to disappear. What happens to the immense amount of capital they control?

> But Mars? Mars? How does that sound enjoyable? I actually hope he makes it there.

Does he actually want to go to Mars personally? I thought the idea was that he wants humanity to be multi-planetary.

> Does he actually want to go to Mars personally?

He said "I'd like to die on Mars, just not on impact." in 2013, no idea how serious he is though.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musks-vision-die-mars-16....

Much as I can appreciate the sentiment, and find problems of my own with the man, his wealth is mostly in the form of "how much money other people want to pay for the marginal cost of a ticket to ride on his coat-tails". Tesla and SpaceX have their valuations because of the things his teams did being valued by those who have money to spend on the investments; which isn't him directly doing those things (which is a general issue with corporate organisation), but it is the result of the choices he made that other leaders didn't make[0].

> And I’m guessing even just figuring out the cost of the fuel to reach escape velocity would show how this a non-starter for more than Musk himself and a few companions.

You'd definitely be wrong about that. Fuel costs specifically are very obviously fine, the hard parts are (1) "can they make the superheavy/starship combo as reusable as they hope?" (2) "solve in-orbit refuelling", and (3), "kiloton/year Sabatier process ISRU without human supervision or maintenance, growing to megaton/year when humans become available for such tasks".

[0] Which is also why a criticism I see others making, "Musk didn't found Tesla!", isn't a big deal. It's true, but also Tesla had delivered no more than 147 individual cars by the time Tesla took over as CEO.

> They plan on building a colony of millions of people

Right. Sounds cool, maybe they could commission someone to make a scifi tv show but that’s about it.

Why would you want millions of people on Mars? What purpose that would achieve? There is no way this colony could be self sustainable… (also good luck raising the inconceivable high amount of money required to get them there in the first place)

It would literally be the most wasteful and poi thing humans have accomplished (on purpose at least) ever.

"Why?" is given as a backup against a global catastrophe on earth.

Myself I doubt this, there's very few which would affect all of and only Earth. Gamma ray burst? Also Mars. Paperclip optimiser? Probably also Mars. Pandemic? If you're moving stuff between planets, probably also Mars.

Nuclear war and climate change combined won't leave this planet anything like as uninhabitable as Mars, though of course the converse is that the capacity to colonise Mars means the middle of the Sahara, the middle of Antarctica, all superfund cleanup sites, and the top of Mount Everest, all become easy to turn into friendly and pleasant cities you'd be happy to live in.

I hear this and understand the human need to think this is logical. I don't see this as a reasonably back-up plan. The chances of a catastrophe on Mars is even greater considering the environment is not fit for humans.

The amount of ingenuity and co-operation needed to go to Mars may be greater than the amount needed to maintain Earth.

I don't see on Mars is safer than just an orbiting space station. Needing to go to Mars or anywhere other than Earth adds complexity to the issue.

Getting a million people to Mars, assuming Musk's price optimism is accurate, is somewhere around 10% of the upgrade costs Earth's electricity grids already need, or about half the material (not land, not planning, not political) cost of building a new circumglobal 1Ω TW-scale power grid from aluminium.

I would (if I had a say in the matter) go for the Moon over Mars or an orbital space station. An orbital space station (or collection of them) for a million people would be very hard, because we don't have a convenient small asteroid to mine for building materials and therefore can't ISRU. I'd pick the Moon because it's close enough that when the inevitable black swan catastrophe happens, it's only a few days travel so we'd have a chance of saving almost everyone's lives if all the water or food was lost to depressurisation/the outside environment/surprise mould.

Mars, to rephrase what I wrote before, is less hospitable than all the worst environmental disasters we can experience on Earth, even if those disasters were combined. Being able to colonise it means we can fix basically anything that goes wrong here.

Do you think there will ever be a point in the future where humanity will colonize the solar system?

Probably not? Besides potential mining and resource extraction whatever we do to Earth it’s still almost guaranteed to remain more habitable than any other place in the solar system. Also exponential population growth seems not a real threat anymore so it’s not likely we can ever run out of space.

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