He's espousing a fantasy and sucking in money and time and labour which could be better used.
It's a giant Ketamine fuelled boondoggle. LEO is making money and strategic sense. Mars is multiple decades off for a small group of scientists maintained at 10,000x the cost and effort of Antarctica.
I love watching the rockets launch. Nothing about the actual space mechanics right now is awful. His sense of time, place, purpose and outcome is truly bad, by repute since like 99% of people here I know only his projected persona.
Their Starship is barely going to the orbit and then blowing up, and people are seriously considering going to Mars now ? After all, people believed him when he said they solved FSD 10 YEARS ago.
We are several decades away from flying humans to Mars. Maybe if it's a one way trip and they don't need to arrive there alive, we could go within 10 years. Maybe.
The thing I really fear, is that Musk will manage to siphon effectively infinite amount of money from the US government for this project. Which is all this is about.
Despite the caveats above, building a sustainable earth-to-orbit-to-various targets is probably the most significant thing that could happen in the next few decades.
If the goal was Venus, or another cool(pun not intended) planet, sign me up!
Also, don’t want to live in some off world fascist dictatorship. The whole thing should be run as a Swiss style democracy. Don’t want to get purged out of some airlock for wrong think.
I see your point, and I'd appreciate it even more if you could elaborate further. If you could point me to some resources (articles, documentaries, books) that could excite me in a similar way, I’d love that.
My understanding of this topic is limited—I can see the value in mining remote planets or other astronomical bodies for energy, precious metals, etc., but I’m not sure I fully grasp the hype around Musk’s vision of "occupying Mars." This could be because I haven’t been following him closely enough.
I think this blog did a good job of trying to find different perspectives: https://dailynous.com/2021/02/22/philosophers-on-space-explo...
There are others who believe space colonization and exploration are unethical pursuits: https://vce.usc.edu/volume-7-issue-3/space-colonization-and-...
Here is a recent text, but I’ve not read it: https://www.routledge.com/The-Philosophy-of-Outer-Space-Expl...
In all such discourse, there is a danger of being convinced by poorly-reasoned and incomplete arguments, but if one adheres to principles of parrhesia, the conversation becomes more manageable.
To me “good” is letting human cognition seek out its limits, and to understand reality and fundamental truths. We cannot do that by confining ourselves to a singular region of the whole universe.
We are the only intelligent and capable beings (that we know of) who are self-aware and can question the nature of reality. I would say that it’s a moral duty to be both stewards of truth and knowledge, and seek to understand what we know, and what we don’t know.
> The Martian government was directed by 10 men, the leader of whom was elected by universal suffrage for five years and had the title of “Elon.”
is that nobody would elect Elon to Elon in secret and fair voting. He would just take this title and then you have political turmoil for the rest of this episode.
So even if it would be technically possible, nobody would join him.