Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

My pet theory is that Musk basically unraveled when the study came out that there does not exist enough CO2 on Mars to terraform the planet:

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/mars-terraforming-not-poss...

Note the date on that: it was published in Nature on July 30 2018, and it wouldn't surprise me if somebody would've sent a preprint to Musk up to a month before then. The "pedo guy" tweet during the Thai cave rescue was July 18 2018. Musk's "funding secured" Tweet that the SEC sanctioned him over was Aug 7 2018. His appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast was September 2018. Most of his children and extramarital affairs post-date 2018; at that point, he only had the 5 with Justine Musk. Pre-2018, most of his ideas were crazy but at least engineering-focused on reasonable causes.

Musk has repeatedly said his ambition is to die on Mars. After a reputable scientific paper came out saying that if you step off Starship, that will be the very first thing you do, he doesn't really have anything to live for. Meanwhile he's given up so much for that goal (most notably, his first family) that it must feel pretty bitter to have invested so much in something impossible.

For that matter, the psychology is likely pretty similar to the core MAGA demographic, many of whom work hard all their life to achieve the American Dream and then find that the American Dream is going to other people.

I always thought Musk's turning point was in the pandemic when he was wrong about how dangerous it could be (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/13/business/Elon-Musk-tesla-...). And from there the decline began, but now I realize and remember that before 2020 he was already doing some crazy things...

Love his response. Makes total sense to me.

This paywall is crazy.

Nah, terraforming has never been Elon's immediate plan. He knows that it's difficult and very slow process and won't happen in his lifetime. Their goal is to set up a self-sufficient Mars settlement, which doesn't depend on terraforming at all.

Also, impossible with current technology doesn't mean that it's impossible in the future.

He actually talked about this on his latest Diablo stream, here: https://youtu.be/wzIJDU8SPMM?t=2066 He seems to think that terraforming is possible in the long term, with solar reflectors in the orbit which warm up the planet.

Using mars as a long shot target to develop real affordable space capabilities which will help us learn how to stop asteroids and launch cheap internet satellites is cool. Being serious about living there being a near term important and realistic goal is lunacy.

These billionaire fuckwits...

Why not see what we can do about Earth so it might be livable 100 years from now?

Naah, lets spend all our money on a desolate frozen rock 140 million miles away.

I think you mean: many of whom work some of their life to try to get richer than they already are and then continuously watch Fox News and Newsmax for 20 years and therefore believe brown people should suffer.

People can come back from shattered dreams, and he can afford any therapist.

Being a billionaire makes pivoting to executing on new dreams easier.

Newfound empathy could give him a new dream of making that American Dream happen for others.

Right, if this is true (possible I guess, but does sound a bit Syndrome-from-The-Incredibles), even if there's really no technical way at all to terraform Mars it's hardly the end of the world, uh, planet.

Not least, terraforming would take centuries in any plausible effort. If he goes to Mars to die, he'll die in a pressurised environment whatever happens.

Well, that's a crazy theory (but fun to think about). I don't think he ever believed that terraforming Mars would be achieved in his lifetime. It's not necessary for a colony, and he always talked about "window" in which colonization can be started. Like, there are many things that can set our civilization back, like nuclear war, pandemics, meteors etc., and technical progress isn't guaranteed (we've been on the Moon on 60's and can't do that now), so his philosophy is that we must do it as soon as we can because at any moment we can lose that chance. And starting a colony without terraforming is of course better than not doing anything at all.

I think his behavior is just the consequence of his wealth and success, of being literally at the top of the world in terms of money. And especially because his money comes from SpaceX and Tesla, both of which were considered crazy and impossible enterprises by most people (and there were many people people saying that it all will fail well before he became really famous and really rich). So I think he just started believing that since he was right with SpaceX and Tesla, and others were wrong (and he became the world's wealthiest person because he was right, so he was in a certain capitalistic way more right than literally everyone), he is right about everything and can do everything. And he was always kind of crazy.

Politically I think that maybe his actions are somewhat calculated, maybe he's predicting that Trump will win and be more willing to finance crazy big missions to space? Right now Tesla isn't dependent on American environmental programs as much as it was before, and SpaceX is in a position in which they'll get government contracts forever, no matter who's in power, so he doesn't need to please the current government. And I think he was always more of a libertarian, so that checks out with many things he's saying. His "anti-war" views can also be explained by desire to minimize the risk of closing that window in which Mars colonization is possible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com