Elon Musk's mission to Mars
m.guardiannews.com
m.guardiannews.com
Of the people alive today, I suspect Elon is probably one of the few who will be widely remembered a thousand years from now.
Perhaps most of all by the inhabitants of Mars.
NB I freely admit it having a romantic fascination with the colonization of Mars after reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and Robert Zubrin's The Case for Mars:
As with any highly risky enterprise, I think he should be increasing his odds by raising one or more prodigies of his own, that would be able to carry on with his work, if he himself wasn't able to.
He does have 5 children. :-)
László Polgár had a thesis that one does simply raise a prodigy and managed to do pretty well on that score, given that he and his wife Klára proceeded to then raise three female chess prodigies.
Of course one swallow does not a summer make, so it could just be blind luck, but it is an interesting and fairly persuasive case.
Like in Judit Polgár's development; if a child was trained in a subject early on and provided the right opportunities, then "genius" can be developed. When I have kids, my plan won't be to focus extensively on one subject (like chess), but on several subjects, including Esperanto like Judit Polgár was taught.
http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0910707561 is a good source of insight based on it. However I would humbly suggest that consciously attempting to follow some of its advice would be legally actionable.
The Falcon 9 is a dead-simple 2 stage LOX/Kerosene rocket that effectively has a heritage back to the 1950s, as does the capsule based Dragon spacecraft. But SpaceX is continually trying to tighten their OODA loop and doing quite a good job of it.
It's a good model for a lot of startups. Build something, iterate on it, charge for it if for no other reason than to pay for continuing R&D, and just keep getting better until you change the industry.
It's great for rockets to have more effecency, be lighter, and carry more cargo, but it's hard to balance the design around what is overall cheaper and more efficient rather than just chasing better specs.
This is amazing.
Says a lot about integrity of our beloved Internet giants. Among the key supporters of FWD.us initiative, apart from Facebook, are Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. And also, HN's own PG :)
"The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We're obviously in a very upward cycle right now and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not. There could be some series of events that cause that technology level to decline. Given that this is the first time in 4.5bn years where it's been possible for humanity to extend life beyond Earth, it seems like we'd be wise to act while the window was open and not count on the fact it will be open a long time."
I find it really hard to imagine our society going back to a dark age though...
Consider science, for example. A lot of money was effectively invested into very esoteric sciences in the 18th through 19th centuries while the world was generally very poor, struggling to feed itself, struggling with disease, and so on. The seemingly logical, and compassionate, thing to do in those eras would have been to ignore esoteric pursuits and concentrate on dumping as much time, effort, and money into making everyone's lives better.
But that would have been disastrous. It would have meant that science would have lacked an understanding of genetics, of micro-biology, of chemistry, of electromagnetism, of physics, and so on. And that would have stunted the development of the industrial age (steam engines, and later electric motors), it would have stunted the development of new food crops, of fertilizers, of sanitation systems, of vaccines, of radio/television/networking, etc. Without which the entire world would be essentially as poor as it was in the 18th century, instead of with billions of people having access to stable food supplies, clean water, etc. and over a billion people living in wealth with a few billion more on the way to that level of wealth in the next few decades.
Why? It nearly happened on at least two occasions over the last fifty years through nuclear war.
Disease, volcanism, asteroid/comet impact, warfare, general econonmic collapse.... seems like quite a long list. Of course, none of these are terribly likely but I wouldn't rule them out entirely.
Do you though? World War I, World War II, etc.
I firmly believe there will be a WWIII in my lifetime. The US government is already a big boys club. You have money? You can join, we have money too. Look at how much the US is capitalizing off of student loans. Where do you think that money goes? It sure as hell ain't social services.
I really think that there are a few people running the country to completely militarize it at some point from a long time ago and their plans are finally coming to fruition.
All spending is going to the army. Police forces are more than equipped to fuck up nearly every city if they wanted to. At some point, the military/police will have so much force that the "people" no longer matter.
One day a switch will be flipped and it will become an entirely military country.
Once that happens, combined with Chinese forces, nuclear warfare, and global tension, I doubt anyone would survive a WWIII.
This is all just off handed bullshit-theorizing though.
http://www.amazon.com/Canticle-Leibowitz-Walter-Miller-Jr/dp... In the depths of the Utah desert, long after the Flame Deluge has scoured the earth clean, a monk of the Order of Saint Leibowitz has made a miraculous discovery: holy relics from the life of the great saint himself, including the blessed blueprint, the sacred shopping list, and the hallowed shrine of the Fallout Shelter.
In a terrifying age of darkness and decay, these artifacts could be the keys to mankind's salvation. But as the mystery at the core of this groundbreaking novel unfolds, it is the search itself—for meaning, for truth, for love—that offers hope for humanity's rebirth from the ashes.
It follows 3x periods: post nuclear, "rebuild" and discovery, and "surpass" technology.
Also, the production chain is really intricate. It doesn't take much to disrupt it. When was the last time you had to smelt copper?
A good example of someone who doesn't focus on one thing and is hugely successful is Richard Branson. Virgin Group has more than 400 companies.
Hmm, perhaps you're more right on a second reading - "as a testbed for developing solutions" might work.
...except Iron Man was created eight years before he was born.
That's what they say, anyways. Elon Musk isn't nearly as socially heroic as Tony Stark, he's a stuttering nerd. Not that that's a bad thing. He's a genius, but they're really nothing alike except for them both being overly ambitious and successful entrepreneurs.