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Comment by njharman | Hacker News Reader

More people remember Ford, than remember Goddard.

Electric cars have been done before, for over a century, and would be done without Musk.

To drastically lower the costs of space launch so that Mars(!) expeditions can be done by "just" billionaires is new. Just add what is happening in drones and the solar system will finally be ours.

[Edit: If it isn't clear:

Electric cars seems to obviously be arriving, if two conditions are fulfilled: (a) better batteries (metal-air, etc) and (b) that solar cell costs continue go down and/or more nuclear power. The time has come, it is so simple...

People have been talking for at least four decades about lowering launch costs, but it has gotten nowhere. Maybe that time has come now, when NASA doesn't have a shuttle to protect and hence no motivation to knife all competition in the cradle by their political clout? Maybe, I just note that this dream finally is successful.]

And Ford didn’t invent the car. Industrial car production would most certainly have been done by someone else if he hadn’t done it. It’s not like industrialization was something new during Ford’s time, it had been done for a century before him, just not with cars. (This is not to diminish Ford’s accomplishments. I just want to demonstrate that you can talk any achievement small if only you want to.)

Spaceflight is immensely cool. Much cooler than cars. But cars had a much bigger impact on humanity than spaceflight. I would predict that trend will continue for quite a few decades.

And toilet paper have a bigger impact than cars.

I did not mention "cool", I mentioned lower launch prices. That is more important.

The usual argument, since decades, is that with low launch costs, there will be new use cases and new markets -- the first private projects has been announced for mining and detecting "dinosaur killers", etc.

(I am not certain if I'm trolled here. Or if I was unclear in the GP?)

And? What’s the use case? Cars have certainly done more to lift humanity up than spaceflight has (unlike toilet paper, which is neither cool nor has it done much to lift humanity up). I don’t see how that can change within the next few decades, even if everything Musk plans works out.

If everything he plans works out (and I hope it does) it will be very important and very cool – but cars are the much more pressing issue. Put another way: there is much more potential for doing good there.

I argued (a) electric cars would get popular without Musk anyway, like over a century ago (everyone and their dog in transportation is working on that) -- and (b) cheap launch costs is new and will change the world.

If you wanted to do a serious counter arguments, you'd have asked for sources, or something. You're a troll using a new account. Good bye.

I’m really saddened that you think I’m a troll. I’m honestly not. I’m trying to understand you. I just cannot see how spaceflight could be more important for humanity in the next, say, half-century than transportation. Cool, sure. (Maybe also scientifically valuable if the cost of payloads decreases – but those payloads are actually already most of the cost, so I don’t foresee much change there.) Important? Don’t think so.

I’m also not sure why making electric cars work in the market is any more obvious than slightly cheaper space launch vehicles.

For decades people said they can make electric cars work in the market. They couldn’t. Maybe Musk will.

For decades people said that space launch costs will decrease. They didn’t. Maybe Musk will.

The difference between those two isn’t so big and transportation has the bigger immediate impact on humanity. I mean, both SpaceX and Tesla have many competitors.

(I’m also not sure what sources can tell you here. Comparing two so completely different things is a bit of a fool’s errand, a single source will hardly be valuable. You would have to cleverly combine date to make this somehow work – and much of this is open to interpretation.)

"I just cannot see how spaceflight could be more important for humanity in the next, say, half-century than transportation."... 50 to 60 years is the difference between 1904 and 1956. Do you really think your models of what space "exploration is" in 2012 will be the same in 2062?? In 2062 probably no one will commute to work. All transportation may be purely for socializing personally and travel or adventure. 2062 is so far away that even futurists consider it beyond their comfort zone of dreaming up stuff. How are you so sure of Mankind's priorities in another 50 years?

Exactly. You can't predict it. I can't predict it. All we can do is speculate — which we do.

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