Peter Thiel: Elon Musk has given up on Mars | Hacker News Reader

Peter Thiel: Elon Musk has given up on Mars

unherd.com

28 pointselsewhen34 comments

I wonder how many people took the whole Mars colonization talk seriously. If Elon had been really serious about Mars colonization he would've had to commit a lot more resources to research, while reaching out to every major nation-state to get them to also commit on collaborating into making this a long-term reality. You can't brute-force a world-tier quest of this magnitude without significant global buy-in and without actually bringing in the absolute best-of-the-best of every relevant domain.

Also, Mars just kinda sucks. There's dust everywhere and it's nearly impossible to get it all off. Go outside one time in Mars and that dust will cling so tightly that it'll follow you into the cycle of reincarnation.

There is also no external motivation to colonize Mars whatsoever. I.e. if there would be an alien ship or alien structures full of technology there would be a permanent base(s) on Mars since 1980s and we would be racing who can send more people there to secure as much knowledge as possible. But because Mars is a cold desert then there is really no demand for a 1+ million city on Mars. Like building a city in a middle of Sahara. Sure it is possible, but what's the point?

Slow down there, Space Anakin.

Contra to Thiel and comments in this thread, something in my gut tells me Elon is still fairly serious about Mars. If humans don’t make it, then I’m pretty sure within 20 years he’ll be sending off teams of Optimus robots to walk all over it and set up a camp. Then who knows, even though Mars is inhospitable in the extreme. I think he’ll at least try and build the Mars base and then see. Also there’s no laws on Mars - Earth treaties are irrelevant at that distance so he really could set himself up as the overlord and Emperor of a whole planet. I think that’s actually his dream.

Also, anyone find it strange that he’s never been up in one of his own rockets? Unless he’s done it in secret without telling anybody (not impossible to believe even though he loves publicity) he seems pretty shy about taking trips himself. Or paranoid about dying in his own Promethean creation.

> Also there’s no laws on Mars - Earth treaties are irrelevant at that distance so he really could set himself up as the overlord and Emperor of a whole planet

I think there are at least 3-6 states that either have the capability to send a nuclear weapon to Mars or could quickly develop that capability. That possibility would quickly limit his power.

Get in the moon first for real or restore the 50 years old rockets to repeat the fake moon landing if current are not improved enough

Human foot on Mars is a multi-year research project, but NASA is still at the stage of planning the moon base.

This article is based upon an interview from NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/opinion/peter-thiel-antic....

That NYT interview with Ross Douthat is just a lame attempt by Thiel to rehabilitate his image. From the interview, regarding how we as a society entered into a state of technological stagnation, and his subsequent support of Trump in 2016 as a way to "redirect the Titanic from the iceberg it was heading to, or whatever the metaphor is, to really change course as a society":

"I didn’t have great expectations about what Trump would do in a positive way, but I thought at least, for the first time in 100 years, we had a Republican who was not giving us this syrupy Bush nonsense. It was not the same as progress, but we could at least have a conversation. In retrospect, this was a preposterous fantasy."

Really? You, arguably the most influential and successful inventor of the modern age, couldn't foresee that Trump is just going to leverage his populism to further cement the power structures that brought him into power? How was that ever going to lead to societal level change in a way that would bring about an explosion of science and technological innovation?

Nah, I'd believe that Thiel (correctly) sensed that Trump was a vessel through which he could accumulate much more power and wealth, due to Trump's brazen cronyism and corruption.

So now Thiel needs to somehow distance himself from Musk, Trump, and everyone else to try and recover whatever dignity he can. The only good news I can see is that, if he truly has any sort of crystal ball, he senses the winds starting to shift and the political power of MAGA waning.

I think we have to conclude that Trump's actual gift is convincing people he's easily convinced of things, so they're likely to support him.

I sincerely hope this is his best attempt at dignity, it's so quotable:

Thiel: Man, these things are so hard to score, but I think environmentalism is pretty powerful. I don’t know if it’s absolutely powerful enough to create a one-world totalitarian state, but man, it is ——

Douthat: I think it is not — in its current form.

Thiel: I want to say it’s the only thing people still believe in in Europe. They believe in the green thing more than Islamic Shariah law or more than in the Chinese Communist totalitarian takeover. The future is an idea of a future that looks different from the present. The only three on offer in Europe are green, Shariah and the totalitarian communist state. And the green one is by far the strongest.

[...]

[Tiel:]And when Charles Manson took LSD in the late ’60s and the murders started, what he saw on LSD, what he learned was that you could be like an antihero in a Dostoyevsky book and everything was permitted.

Of course, not everyone became Charles Manson. But in my telling of the history, everyone became as deranged as Charles Manson and the hippies took over ——

Douthat: But Charles Manson did not become the Antichrist and take over the world. We’re ending in the apocalyptic, and you’re ——

Thiel: But my telling of the history of the 1970s is the hippies did win. We landed on the moon in July of 1969, Woodstock started three weeks later and, with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress stopped and the hippies won.

This sounds less to me like MAGA dying as it does the last gasps of the libertarian compromise most conservatives tried to make with the liberals a decade or two ago.

Doesn’t science need to progress more before it’s economically viable?

We got to the moon 50 years ago and still haven’t been back. It’s expensive to send humans into space.

Let’s get those Tesla robots to Mars… and Titan

"Economically viable" is not a concept that even applies here. There is no profit to be extracted on Mars besides raw resources, and it will basically never be profitable to ship raw materials between planets with chemical rockets.

Any hypothetical money to be made on a Mars colony will take generations to become apparent.

However, the technological advances required to build a Mars base and put humans there is within our grasp today. The developments associated with such a program would be of incalculable value to humanity, but are not directly monopolizable and monetizable in the immediate term.

So, no. It will never be economically viable to go to Mars because that question makes no sense. It would make economic sense to invest in asteroid mining because there are returns to be seen within your lifetime. There will be no such returns from any planet-based colony for a long, long time.

> The developments associated with such a program would be of incalculable value to humanity

Compared to what? The cuts to medical and other research necessary to pay for the incalculable money pit that Mars exploration is? In fact, fund research that has some value for humanity now and some of it will be useful for planetary missions in the future, whenever it's possible to do it without strain.

It's insane to waste public money on boondoggles for billionaires, they can fund their Mars missions themselves. Bon Voyage!

Is it as yet economically viable to create AGI?

It's expensive to send anything into space, let alone make it to Mars. Chemical rockets are not cheap, even when you can recover the boosters and refurbish the engines. Comparatively, even visiting Mars makes a moon mission look like a cakewalk.

Inventions of SpaceX made space trips much cheaper: https://spaceinsider.tech/2023/08/16/how-much-does-it-cost-t...

Now it reaches just 2k$ per kilogram.

Hotel I’m staying in Fiji is using starlink for about 30 rooms. It works incredibly well.

There’s a fiber there too, but I assume someone is so incompetent to make it reliable and affordable that a $500 dish is able to serve entire resort.

Let’s have that discussion about manned vs unmanned space flight again.

It’s been 11 years since HN thought manned was better.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540279

Where’s the guy who told us crab fishing in Alaska is also dangerous?

Genuine question; what even would make going to Mars economically viable? It we mean by economically viable something like "when the amount of wealth we generate, where wealth is stuff that makes the lives of humans better, exceeds that which we expended to do it" there's not a lot that springs to mind that would make going to Mars an economic proposition.

This is unlikely. It's his life's mission.

I’m no Peter Thiel fan, but I love his critique of DOGE:

> I had a conversation with Elon a few weeks ago about this. He said we’re going to have a billion humanoid robots in the U.S. in 10 years. And I said: Well, if that’s true, you don’t need to worry about the budget deficits because we’re going to have so much growth, the growth will take care of this.

You mean you won't have to worry about the budget deficits because society will probably have collapsed.

Right. I guess either way, dystopia or utopia, if we have 1B humanoid robots in 2035, literally no one will remember saving $10M by cutting one scientific grant program.

Ah yes society is made up of folding clothes and cleaning up after cooking.

And construction, retail, warehousing, mining, farming, social services, etc.

We aren't going to have 1 billion clothes folding robots.

Let's solve that first maybe?

Robot arm vacuums were just released few months ago. It can barely pick up socks and some types of slippers. There's still a long way to folding clothes.

Folding clothes is notorious as one of the most difficult tasks. It will probably be solved last.

His life mission is control, Mars was just a means to an end. He’s not going to get to Mars, and he very publicly destroyed any political capital he had on Earth.

Like Thiel, just another power hungry tech bro wrapping themselves in the idea of progress and humanity for PR. Define “progress” and for whom.

https://gizmodo.com/peter-thiel-says-elon-musk-doesnt-unders...

https://www.independent.co.uk/space/elon-musk-spacex-mars-la...

People change

His life mission is to be filthy rich. He achieved that.

Everything else is just propaganda

I wonder if in 2040 after 100 Gigafactories are built, large majority of power planets are green and rely on batteries, and ICE vehicles contribute only to tiny fraction of all pollution, there will still be people saying "it was just for money, meh".

The fact you actually believe a failing company can build 95 more factories when there is falling demand says it all. The propaganda is working very well.

I don't think it was for the money. I think it was for the ego. The money exists so that he can do things that make him feel good about himself.

I think he would love to be the guy who saved the planet. And if he's accomplished that by 2040, I'll be grateful to him for that. He'll have deserved it.

I think he'd also love to be the guy who colonized Mars. I believe that if you could ask him for one thing he wants, it's to be remembered in one breath with Christopher Columbus.

Of late, he seems to be distracted from both of those approaches. For a while, he thought he could be the guy who drowned the US government in the bathtub, enabling him to pursue his other feats in peace.

If that is ending, perhaps he'll return to being the great green visionary, electrifying the country despite the entrenched power structures working against him. It would take a lot to revise my extremely negative opinion, but if he really can be the guy who defeats global warming, I'll applaud him for it.

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