If you are still unsure about the scale of SpaceX' plans for Mars, here is a very concise summary by Robert Zubrin (president of the Mars Society):
It's not Apollo. It's D-Day.
It is from an interview with Zubrin who, among other things, discussed mini-Starship with Elon Musk at the Boca Chica job day recently. It can be found here [0], with an automated transcription at [1]. Discussed in /r/spacex at [2].
This is by far the most interesting aviation/rocketry development I've ever seen. After watching the two Falcon 9 lower stages come back simultaneously from the first Falcon Heavy launch, I realized how different things were going to be.
Starship, even if Musk is off by quite a large factor on the cost to launch, is still going to be extremely cheap to fly compared to everything else out there.
Other people copycatting the ideas off of Starship will drastically improve the space industry costs, regardless if the Mars venture is successful or not (and I want it to be). This will literally put us in a different era. It wouldn't surprise me if Starship spins off other industries for vehicles not focused on Mars, but elsewhere in the solar system, or based on much longer space voyages.
The next hurdle for deep space, aside from shielding, will be power. Lower solar flux in deep space and the interest to save weight will likely see the use of more nuclear power.
Regardless, I'm much more hopeful about the space industry that I was in early February, 2003...
Probably not. It looks like that's primarily for gamma. In space, cosmic rays are much much more powerful and catastrophic for cells.
Water is actually probably the best shield, because you'll need it to support humans along the way. Gamma still is a risk but I think the concern has mainly been higher speed subatomic particles.
Anything with heavy nuclei actually produces significant and also highly damaging secondary radiation when hit by fast moving, heavy nuclei, cosmic rays.
Another interesting thing: Apollo astronauts could see sparkles in their eyes from the radiation effects of getting hit by cosmic rays travelling through their skulls.
I stood by this cosmic trays detector [1] in a station of the metro of Naples, Italy, for a few minutes. I saw quite a few cosmic rays passing through the detector.
When talking about big rockets, it is hard not to talk about Sea Dragon. It was a rocket where the entire design is based on the "bigger is better" philosophy.
The design was simple. No need for lightweight, high-tech materials, because it is big. No need for highly efficient high pressure engines, just make one that is bigger. That thing would have dwarved the Saturn V. The name "Sea Dragon" comes from the fact it would have been launched from the sea, it would have been too big for a ground-based launchpad. It would have been built in a shipyard like a submarine that can stand upright.
An early draft of 2001 A Space Odyssey had Discovery as an Orion, but apparently Kubrick having just done Dr. Strangelove didn't want to do another film with nukes.
Personally I think it'd be interesting to compare the expected price/weight to how much it cost to cross the Atlantic back in the 1600s.
Does anyone happen to have any good references for goods/people crossing back then?
For instance, one person writes on Quora[0] that between 1600 and 1800 one could cross the Atlantic from Europe by becoming an indentured servant, working 4-7 years for someone. By looking at the average US income, this corresponds to roughly $2-300,000 per one-way "ticket".
This is somewhat comparable to Musk's aspirational price for a one-way ticket to Mars, no?
On another note, I'm sure there were discussions back then about why bother to spend months crossing the Atlantic..!
I imagine indentured servitude path should be dramatically more expensive by the end of it than paying straight up -- it's like taking money from a loan shark; it's not actually a good deal -- but you don't have the resources to get anything better.
I imagine the actual cost of buying a ticket would probably be like 50÷ the cost of indentured servitude
That's a good point. Though it's worth remembering that the Americas held valuable resources just ready for collecting (eg furs, timber). So far, that's much less true of extraterrestrial lands (yeah yeah, He3).
I'm incredibly curious as to how much that cost will be vs. a mid-career employee's 401k. If a middle class family with a decade or so of experience could cash theirs in, would they be able to afford to go?
"Hey honey, let's cash in our retirement plan and doom our children to a life where they'll never see the sky except through a visor or viewscreen and never again feel the wind on their face."
Not everyone wants to be pioneers, but thankfully for humanity, a small fraction of us do. And on a planet of 7.5 billion people, that fraction is pretty substantial...
I'd like to help maximize the opportunities for that small fraction, personally.
> while storage tanks can be built from local materials
Just use the starships themselves. Actually,to further reduce cost, I would design starship to be useable as a Mars habitat: even fuel tanks could conceivably be converted into living quarters,I guess. Further the efficiency by recycling other parts of the starship as building materials.
Also, most of the reasoning in this article revolves around power plant mass. I wonder how a nuclear power plant would affect the outcome.
The trouble is that the Starships need to refuel very quickly after landing to hit their return launch window. If you need to generate all the fuel right then, you need a much larger fuel plant. If you can store the fuel ahead of time,before the Starship has arrived, you can use a much smaller fuel plant, but you need storage space.
You build a version of Starship which produces fuel. You launch a fleet of them to Mars and have them operate for a year or so.
Then, you send the human-carrying version.
I think the way this is going to work, is when there are 1000 Starships on the surface, some of them with workshops, some with power plants, others with science labs, human quarters, and so on .. and they land in a big field.
These are good questions... i suppose if you’re flying under the flag of the East Valles Marineris Mining Company, your ass belongs to them. But if you charter a private flight to your own homestead well then parder I guess it’s just you, me and this here cosmic ray gun.
> Has SpaceX even had a successful manned space flight yet?
That flight will likely happen in the next quarter.
Meanwhile, while SpaceX has been wading through NASA design reviews and red tape (some of which is probably good for them!) for Falcon 9 + Crew Dragon, they've been hard at work on this next-gen rocket for years (the engines since 2009, the rocket itself since 2014). We will likely see a SpaceX Starship reach Low-Earth Orbit within a year, so it's time to start considering what other requirements for getting to Mars might take longer to build.
Apollo 11 was a little less than twelve years after Sputnik-1.
The rush to get people into space and men on the moon was because of politics. If Musk wants people on Mars, he doesn't need bodies in orbit, he needs ships capable of carrying bodies in orbit. It's fine (and unnecessary) if they're unmanned. Which SpaceX has already done, docking with the ISS. NASA and the USSR were hasty putting people into orbit because it was a political necessity, not because it was important to the goal of developing ICBMs, surveillance satellites, or whatever else. They each needed to be the first to put an object in orbit, a human in orbit, a human on the moon, etc. Musk needed cheap, reusable spaceflight as an intermediate goal and a maned Martian capable profile as goal number 2. He doesn't need to take his picture at all the road signs along the way.
Musk at some point said he wanted to launch a human toward Mars by the 2024 launch window. I think this is optimistic, but it's not that far off. I would be surprised if they don't launch in time for the 2029-ish launch window.
If things go moderately well for SpaceX, the colony will be started within 15 years. In the larger span of history, that is just a blink of the eye from now. And most of the people reading this discussion thread will still be alive, some would like to go.
We better start thinking about the legal issues now, as they are complicated, rather than just doing it in a rush when it starts happening.
> Synthesizing that much fuel would require about 1 MW of electricity for 500 days, requiring in turn 5 hectares of solar panels. Per Starship, per launch window. At 50 kg/kWe, the solar farm would weigh 50 T.
Given those power and mass requirements, would it make sense to deploy the PV in earth orbit and use it to power an ion drive? Those things need a lot of electricity to be useful, but 1 MW is a lot of electricity — not the 200 MW for the VASIMR 39-days-to Mars proposal, I’m still thinking of a standard “slow” journey, but this could also mean only one LEO refuel (for powered landing) required.
1. economies of scale: if you manufacture 12 engines smaller by a factor of 10, the total manufacturing cost is not going to be 20% higher, but most likely 2-3 times lower.
2. engineering knowledge: more smaller engines means more engineers. Some of whom would leave to start their own startups, or to join Blue Origin, or Skunkworks, or some other aerospace company. That's not necessarily good for SpaceX, but it's good for humankind. Maybe some would go and fix Boeing's problems :)
This seems to completely miss the point of the Starship architecture. With orbital refueling, staging as discussed in the article, or a smaller Starship isn't something that would provide a big savings anyway.
Big Starship or small Starship, you get the same Delta-V assuming both are fully fueled. In fact, you'd probably get more Delta-V out of a large Starship since you might be able to get a better mass fraction.
Is 'Starship' even a real thing? Last I heard, it was an empty stainless steel can ('aerodynamic model') that blew over in a strong wind. Has that changed? Are they actually going to try and make this a real launch vehicle?
The Starship Hopper flew a couple hundred meters up into the air using the new Raptor engine, hovered, and then landed. A full size prototype had a fuel tank fail a pressure test due to some bad welding. The most recent fuel tank pressure test succeeded, so it's looking like a 20km altitude test flight will happen in the next few months.
I have a few interesting questions ... to be fair, I've done no science or math to make a conclusion but there would certainly be a sense of irony involved.
1. Could the green-house gases produced to launch a civilization to Mars be the final straw that breaks our eco-system's back?
2. What are the moral implications of terra-forming Mars and moving a small population there, knowing that the population remaining on Earth is doomed?
3. If you're willing to allow an epic depopulation of the Earth, why not stay here and let it happen?
4. If any of the above are true, why would you expect the (current) larger population of the Earth to fund the colonization of Mars?
I realize this is a very dystopian view ... and that I read/watch too much science fiction, but if this is a novel (or a Netflix original), the Mars population moves back to Earth after it's "recovered"
EDIT: I'm not against the StarShip, SpaceX or Musk at all - in fact I'm a big fan as I was in elementary school during the Apollo missions and believe that SpaceX in particular has reinvigorated the passion for engineering and tackling big problems. This is only a Gedankenerfahrung.
> 1. Could the green-house gases produced to launch a civilization to Mars be the final straw that breaks our eco-system's back?
That seems very unlikely to me.
> 2. What are the moral implications of terra-forming Mars and moving a small population there, knowing that the population remaining on Earth is doomed?
Even if we spent half of our resources on sending people to mars and hurting Earth's biosphere in the process, Earth would still be much more habitable than Mars.
Heck, even worst-case scenarios for man-made climate change "just" reduce the areas where humans can live on earth (and that's a huge catastrophe for everybody), but there's literally NO PLACE on Mars where you can survive at all without pressurized residence etc.
Methane-oxygen propellant can be near carbon-neutral when using huge solar farms to produce it from CO2 and water in the surrounding air. No net increase in greenhouse gasses. However, the ingredients of this process would be redistributed to the upper atmosphere - the effects of this should be carefully studied.
I want to use a Starship to put a solar sail factory on an NEO and send the sails to Earth-Moon L1 to block sunlight to buy us some time.
If you think you can change human nature fast enough to curb climate change you should think again; introduce new energy sources that are cheaper than fossil fuels and you can make them.obsolete.
"buying some time" would be the most underwhelming use of such a technology. If you are putting large enough sunshade to change the climate, you can use it to actually control the weather, make sahara green, make siberia warm, melt greenland ice sheet in controlled way moving it to antarctic.
Making the Sahara green is a good idea, Siberia warm, much less so. Actually the thawing of the perma frost is currently one big danger, as it would release a massive amount of greenhous gases (mostly methane).
Increasing CO2 is very bad for the oceans and has mixed effects on crops. We may want to remove carbon with biochar, iron seeding, etc.
Fast or thermal breeder reactors with a high outlet temperature (e.g. Fast Flux Test Facility) coupled to a low cost gas turbine generator set could push fossil fuels out of the market in some places.
The system is harvesting methane from Earth and converting it to carbon dioxide (another greenhouse gas, but less potent).
If the system uses the Sabatier method to produce methane from CO2, then it's using solar power (I can't imagine doing it in any other way sanely) to convert CO2 to CH4, which is then converted back to CO2 by the rocket. Net gain of no greenhouse gas.
Each launch puts a few hundred tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, not counting emissions during construction. So each one is not a disaster, but if they're doing a ton of launches per year that adds up quickly.
In the grand scheme of things I doubt enough people will go to mars to make a significant positive difference, but that's nearly synonymous with saying I doubt there will be enough rocket launches to make a difference.
Im no less a science fiction fan than the next person but the whole “colonize Mars” thing is stupid and wasteful and arrogant and really pounds the message that billionaires are deeply deeply out of touch with the rest of society.
Not only will colonizing Mars never work, there’s no reason at all to want to. What a dead, barren place.
And in the meantime back down to earth people are really starting to care about inequality. Meanwhile billionaires pour resources into childish flights of fancy when the world is literally burning.
Ugh. I really think billionaires have a place in our society but these sorts of projects make me understand why others question whether some people should have such huge control of resources.
No one is even visiting Mars, let alone colonizing it.
What a short-sighted attitude. Colonizing Mars opens the door to a lot of advances in many, many fields. At first it will be difficult and expensive as it has happened with every new advance in the past. Precisely because of it, people will think of ideas to improve all the process and related problems. And presenting those new problems that we aren't facing now can lead to solutions that could be used in other common areas that we are used to and are kind of stuck.
I’d say do like bill gates and put the billions directly into worthwhile causes instead instead of suggesting the trickle down will be unquantified but amazing.
I'd say let's do both; let's try every approach, in rational proportions.
There is likely an optimal ratio of spending between humanitarian causes and existential risks. What is it? Is this ratio, and others that have the potential for shaping the future of humanity, openly discussed somewhere?
Bill Gates is funding some humanitarian ventures without thinking to the next decades externalities it has. 100% feel good and PR actions, yet questionable in the grand scheme of things.
One externality I have seen mentioned goes as follows: fewer childhood malaria deaths in sub-Saharan Africa mean more unemployed or under-employed young men being tempted to cross the Mediterranean, exacerbating political tensions in North Africa and Europe. But obviously, if you are a philanthropist and saving every human life is your chief concern, then such thinking can seem repugnant.
Can you give some examples please? I'd be particularly interested in ways colonizing Mars would help us solve the serious problems we already have like bigotry, inequality, the climate catastrophe...
Mars is significantly less hospitable than either the summit of Mt Everest or Antarctica; by developing the necessary tech to colonise Mars, you could re-populate the Earth after any environmental catastrophe short of the planet being physically dismantled.
One more immediate benefit is that the ability to refuel on Mars is identical to the ability to take CO2 out of the air and turn it into (un)natural gas.
Well you said it's not helpful because everyone would be dead, this response seems like moving the goalpost, also do you think these people will be born mostly on Mars?
For a start, people having a problem with our current society on earth can build a life away from it. Have you ever noticed racists yearning for "their own" homeland? With a self-sustaining colony on mars, the tech should be available for them to build one. I'd love reading about their attempt to govern something independent with no one else to blame.
Many people also like having bigger goals to strive for, and this one might cause less conflict than those wanting to reorganize society in whatever direction.
At the same time I also hardly see it hurting us. The cash is certainly better spend that way than putting another few billions into entertainment, cosmetics or the likes.
But yes, the direct impact on your own backyard will be limited, if that is all you care about.
We've got plenty of land on Earth that we don't exactly consider habitable but still beats Mars. That is not why sending our racists to Mars is a ludicrous idea.
> this one might cause less conflict than those wanting to reorganize society in whatever direction.
Is that the "go to North Korea/Chile/Somalia" argument on steroids?
The difference is that all the unhabitable land on Earth is still nominally owned by someone, and human society has committed itself to treating these claims of ownership with a lot of respect. Modulo a few famous and very small exceptions, even stretches of hundreds of square kilometres of empty desert far inland belong to some country and building an earthbound sovereign "Mars base" there will quickly result in missiles and dudes with guns raining down on you with the full backing of the international community.
Hardly anyone who suggests that the racists move to Somalia believes that the racists, after doing so, should be free to take over the place and rule over, displace or genocide the Somalis. Conversely, if this offer were actually on the table, I'm sure plenty of racists would step up to take it.
The ability to build a Mars colony is not the same as the ability to seastead, but there is some overlap. I suspect that the 2/3rds of this planet currently treated as international waters would become habitable on a similar schedule as a Mars colony.
Not that I have any reason to believe racists can be convinced to go away no matter where or how appealing the destination is. If anything, I would expect the contrary.
Of all the wealthy 'out of touch' people to complain about, you choose the one guy with a risky but rewarding vision that will benefit all of our species if achieved, instead of everyone else sailing on their super yachts and buying elections and molesting children?
The whole point of the parent comment was that there is no benefit for 'our species' if a handful of us get to visit Mars, or even if there were a small colony there.
What would benefit our species is drastically reworking the economy to stop the massive waste and production of greenhouse gasses (which Musk may have slightly improved with Tesla, credit where credit is due).
Also, putting more economic and political power in the hands of the many instead of concentrating it all in afew hundreds or thousands of people would go a much longer way towards improving our species than some 'colony' on Mars.
> The whole point of the parent comment was that there is no benefit for 'our species'
Spreading across n>1 planets would literally move our species up on the Kardashev scale. Achieving that is one of the very few things anyone is doing on this planet, which is fundamentally beneficial to our species.
> Also, putting more economic and political power in the hands of the many instead of concentrating it all in afew hundreds or thousands of people would go a much longer way towards improving our species.
“The best argument against Democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” - Winston Churchill.
I'm not defending the actions of most of those wealthy individuals, but handing the reigns of power to the masses is a historically proven recipe for failure. Moreso now than ever with the advent of ML driven voter manipulation.
And singling out Musk is laughable. Musk and Gates are perhaps the only two that aren't cartoon level evil villains. I don't understand how anyone could possibly be shitting on Musk for his Mars vision, even if it's folly, when all the other people with comparable wealth are too busy rigging elections, fucking up the poor, and destroying our natural resources.
The Kardashev scale is essentially sci-fi. In a couple hundred years when we have an actual chance of having a functioning colony on a planet and not some playground for a handful of people, there will be a measurable advantage to humanity for this.
And democracy, even as limited as it is today, has been the only system which has brought any amount of peace around here.
And I'm not attacking Musk specifically, he is just very visible, and happens to be the subject of this article. But I do not believe anyone is worth a billion dollars in their own merits, even if Musk is perhaps not the worst one.
Okay. And we're embarking on a mission that would achieve an 'essentially sci-fi' objective. With the funding of a billionaire that you chose to shit on over the rest, that instead embark on.... Sex crimes? Petty regional politics? Rent seeking? Expanding their empires? Setting their offspring up to follow in their steps?
Again, I'm not particularly hostile to Musk, he was just the one who came up. Do you want me to list some others I dislike? The surviving Koch brother, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch, and many others are very bad as well.
To me, a Mars mission is going to be as impactful to the vast majority of humankind as a fraction of how important the discovery of the Americas was the peasantry of Europe (since the Americas were at least immediately habitable). It would be little comfort to know that there is a little colony on Mars, completely dependent on Earth exports while the Earth itself is declining around us. If we don't solve the climate crisis on Earth, there will be no Mars colony, not in th curent world, I hope this much is clear.
Whether individuals shouldn't be worth billions is orthogonal to whether governments or companies should spend money on opening new technological and territorial frontiers.
The Kardashev Scale is just a scale, like the Richter Scale. It's not sci-fi, though there being aliens at higher levels on that scale is.
I think you’ll get downvoted but I largely agree with you about the futility of the exercise. The complexity of the Earth’s system for sustaining life still far exceeds our understanding, and I think going to Mars will at best turn out to be a powerful way to learn that we cannot replicate it.
The typical moral justification is that the Earth may be threatened and so it would be prudent to have some humans somewhere else in the solar system.
Well the number one threat to Earth is an impact event. If we can hypothesize a rapidly growing lift capacity, why not use that mass budget to develop a solar-system-wide system for detecting and if necessary altering the trajectory of potential impacting objects? It would be WAY better to protect the Earth than any other backup plan.
The other big threat to the Earth would be a fast gamma ray burst but that would very likely get Mars and any other human colony as well.
The reality is that people want to go to Mars for the same reason people want to go climb mountains: because it is there. Our economic system provides a very few people with the resources to pursue those dreams. Whether that takes away from everyone else depends on how you think about the economy—to what extent you believe it is zero-sum.
Personally I think we should go to Mars for the simple purpose of going—I like exploration and climbing mountains too—but not fool ourselves about establishing a new human society there. To me it’s like say let’s establish a new human society on the summit of Everest. Which would be way easier than doing so on Mars, by the way!
> Well the number one threat to Earth is an impact event. If we can hypothesize a rapidly growing lift capacity, why not use that mass budget to develop a solar-system-wide system for detecting and if necessary altering the trajectory of potential impacting objects? It would be WAY better to protect the Earth than any other backup plan.
Detection is a solved problem.
Altering the trajectory of an asteroid requires a large amount of lifting capacity to be available on relatively short notice. That is, it has to already exist when the crisis is identified.
Congratulations. You've identified a positive externality of Starship.
Conversely, of course, the trajectory of a non-threatening near-Earth asteroid can be known well in advance, but there’s no obviously benign reason for anyone to bring a lot of delta-v to one.
So having a steady traffic in commercial heavy lift could be a positive externality as well, for whoever wants to find a close-call asteroid that has been recently marked as 100% safe and give it a little nudge.
I don't think a purpose-built capability is anywhere near as good.
It would be a massive drain on the economy that chose to maintain it, there's no guarantee it would actually work when the time came, and it wouldn't benefit from improvements in design over time.
Being profitable, Starship has none of these limitations.
In the absence of a thriving civilization in space, I don't have any confidence in governments to actually maintain adequate asteroid defense for the long term.
> Well the number one threat to Earth is an impact event.
Challenged— that’s the number one natural threat to (human civilization on) Earth. Or maybe the number one threat assuming we survive the next thousand years.
The number one threat at this moment is deliberate annihilation of the ecosphere by a very small number of insane humans.
The number two threat is negligent annihilation of the ecosphere by a plurality of merely shortsighted humans.
Not only is a Mars colony uniquely susceptible to these existential risks, the process of building one could plausibly make them worse.
Space folks like to talk a lot about how the technology you use to survive in space is technology you can use to live better on Earth. They don’t like to talk about how the technology you use to get to space is the same technology you use to murder human civilization anywhere it hides.
First of all, the SpaceX plans on colonizing Mars are not built onto the asumption, that the project is funded by the taxpayer, that is, draining the resources of a nation. They plan to fund the project by the money they are making, like for example enabling global internet access via Starlink. So even if SpaceX never makes it to Mark, it would be a benefit. And of course, reaching Mars would indeed have many benefits for humankind. First, there is science of course. Why are people living at the south pole, there are nicer places on Earth? Science.
Then there is the huge gain in perspective. Even if the direct utility of all the space missions might not be large, looking onto our planet has given us a clear perspective. That we shouldn't waste this precious place.
Finally, not at least trying to go to Mars and beyond would have a negative impact on the long-time development of the species. We either eventually leave this planet or eventually will be consumed by the expanding sun. Sure, there is plenty of time till then and I hope there are others why try to make humankind eventually an interstellar species. But if we don't even try, because it is "stupid and wasteful", we already have lost.
And I am sure, even if the colony on Mars might not do anything useful in the short term, just having space launch capability available as the article describes, will find many other beneficial uses.
If we assume a great filter exists and that we haven't passed it already, it follows that we should be concerned about events that could wipe out humanity (or human civilisation). Establishing at least one self-sustaining human colony outside earth, preferably followed by one outside the solar system, drastically lowers the number of possible doomsday scenarios. Everything from asteroid impacts to thermonuclear war and biological warfare to pandemics becomes much less likely to wipe us out if we live on more than one planet. The independence wars of those colonies might become brutal, but the small risk from interplanetary warfare is dwarfed by all the scenarios that are solved by inhabiting more than one planet.
It's entirely possible that the Great Filter is behind us. If life itself is extremely rare, then the only life that exists will necessarily have passed through it, and will look out on a near lifeless universe.
Should we wait until we get a warp drive engine? Because thinking of reaching anything further than our solar system with our current physics (not technology- that we can improve by building stuff) is more silly than trying to cross the Pacific ocean with help of a floating rubber duck.
There's no point waiting for something which may never happen. Traveling outside of the solar system is 100% possible with our current understanding of physics and is just a matter of resources/ logistics, meanwhile "superlight speed" is currently 0% possible with no guarantee that it ever will be possible.
The next solar system is a mere 4 lightyears away. We have engine designs from the 1960 capable of reaching 5% the speed of light (Project Orion and successors). That's 80 years travel time, completely viable with current technology.
Of course it makes more sense to colonize at least one other planet in our solar system first to learn on a smaller scale with lower stakes. But waiting for entirely new physics is unessesary.
Even at (way) sub-light speeds, it's probably possible. Whether it's automated self-replicating ships (possibly carrying humans as gene sequences), or generation ships (seems pretty hellish!), a number of people have estimated mathematically that it's doable. Estimates vary wildly, of course, as there are many unknowns, but basically exponential growth gets unintuitively fast. Some links (there are many more pages too):
This is not "travelling" any more. This is sending spores hoping they will take root somewhere, but they will be forever disconnected from us, in space and, more importantly, in time.
What's this mania you have of disseminating yourself? Even if you build ships that carry human genes sequences and send them on a million years trip, who is going to benefit? The sequences you sent?
With fusion rockets, we could get to at least one percent light speed, and maybe ten percent. At one percent, assuming exponential growth, we could colonize the entire galaxy in a million years or so, barely a blink in geological time.
We could also colonize objects in the Oort Cloud, just gradually hopping outward from rock to rock, with fusion to power our little colonies, ultimately reaching interstellar distances. It'd be a little slower, but it'd happen without any special effort.
Why do you think it is even possible to effectively redirect and utilize those resources for the projects that you don't consider to be childish flights of fancy? It sounds like you're making an argument to stop tangible progress in favor of just trying something different because the progress being made isn't the right kind for you.
It’s "only" a three months travel. In prehistoric time or even modern times it was dream to even go to space, yet people step on the Moon. It will be costly, there will be deads but it the next frontier humanity has to cross before spreading further.
> these sorts of projects make me understand why others question whether some people should have such huge control of resources.
It's worth pointing out that, had Elon Musk not dedicated 17 years of his life to building those very resources, they likely wouldn't now be available to anyone at all.
Running out of room on Earth isn't the issue here. And as the other comment notes, we are pretty good at colonizing deserts if we want to (we are also good at making deserts, but that's another problem).
> The Gobi had a long history of human habitation, mostly by nomadic peoples. By the early 20th century, the region was under the nominal control of Manchu-China, and inhabited mostly by Mongols, Uyghurs, and Kazakhs.
This argument only really works when there's less inequality. There's a focus on what these ultra wealthy people are spending their money on because they have world-changing amounts of it.
To put it another way, myself and Bezos are not equally free to spend Apollo mission money on solving problems.
“A new life awaits you in the Off-world colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.”
Add it to the long list of things Blade Runner got so right about the future.
I stopped reading this article because in all the rocket talk, nowhere did it acknowledge just how completely inhospitable Mars will be once you finally get it there. Every single aspect of the planet is not conducive to life. I don’t doubt that one day extremely rich people will (very far in the future, far past Elon Musk’s lifespan) live there and the toil of humans here will fund the exotic ways they deal with the massive radiation there etc. Just so they can not be around the poor serfs back on the planet custom made for life.
The author didn't write about that in this particular article because, as mentioned and linked in the first line, he has a whole series of space articles.
> nowhere did it acknowledge just how completely inhospitable Mars will be once you finally get it there
And you really legitimately think that they did not know about this piece of information from the children's book about space? They don't mention it because it is so ubiquitous and common sense that they assume everyone knows it, not because they managed to "miss the memo" about Mars. The idea is that we terraform Mars with technology to make it liveable, not that we just go there and try to build a hut from dirt and call it a day.
I think the idea of colonizing Mars only makes sense in the head of a teenager who read to much bad sf. Our whole idea of spaceships crossing empty space and founding colonies on other planets is just a projection on the past successes of the age of discoveries, when actual ships crossed the oceans and reached new continents. But those continents were perfectly habitable, with tons of resources, plants and animals that forever changed the way we live. While Mars is utterly barren, inhospitable and dead.
On the other hand, I admire Musk for being a great engineer and businessman with the dreams of a teenager; even if the idea of thriving colonies on Mars is a cheap fantasy, I understand that you need to set yourself exciting goals to drive your ambition.
There is no fundamental law of nature discovered so far that would stop us from colonizing other worlds. The problems seem to be related to either a) financial b) psychological c) engineering or d) physiological domains.
Once a human society learns how to thrive on a single colony there is no reason it could not spread across the planet.
You are right of course that interplanetary colonization is completely different thing from the European colonization of Americas.
But it's quite silly to think it is childish. The thing is, we don't know what it would be like.
So you could be proven right ("what a silly idea this was, let's go home") or you could be proven wrong (it turns out humans can thrive elsewhere and we become an interplanetary species).
I always wonder what threshold people use for this term . This is a site where a person with 4 weeks bootcamp experience call themselves a software engineer
Just listen to 15 minutes him answering questions in any but the most mainstream (thus: time-limited, chunked into 10-seconds slots) channel and you will see that he has most accurate technical information and numbers and tradeoffs and materials etc. in his head than most engineers with 10 year experience. Say what you want about the stock price, about whether you agree with his policies, about his personality, but if you say something so blatantly obviously wrong as "he is not an engineer", it just tells everyone that you haven't done even a 15 minutes of proper research about him.
Musk neither graduated from an accredited engineering program, nor is he is a licensed professional engineer. Being able to convince someone on the comments section of a website that he's an engineer isn't the same thing as having credentials or a license.
It's not Apollo. It's D-Day.
It is from an interview with Zubrin who, among other things, discussed mini-Starship with Elon Musk at the Boca Chica job day recently. It can be found here [0], with an automated transcription at [1]. Discussed in /r/spacex at [2].
[0] https://www.thespaceshow.com/show/11-feb-2020/broadcast-3459...
[1] https://hastebin.com/raw/ozimiqenop
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/f34fqm/zubrin_share...