Some of the comments here make me think of crabs in a pot pulling down the ones who try to climb out.
Nobody's making you participate in this venture. If you don't like it, then you're free to go do whatever it is you do like.
You might think Musk could better direct his efforts and resources elsewhere, but most other billionaires don't do anything all that interesting, they just invest their money in mundane stuff, outsource jobs, build hotels, run for President, etc. So why are you upset with this one and not all those others?
I've been annoyed by this attitude for quite some time now. You see it all the time. Same deal with Tesla an Model S. Because not everybody can afford it, and because not all power is renewable an electric car like Tesla Model S seems like some sort of terrible crime.
Whatever people level against Elon Musk he seems to have already done something about it. People say don't go to Mars, save the planet earth instead. So Elon answers I made electric cars. Then they are like, but they don't run on renewable energy but coal power plants. So he can reply I am also promoting solar power through Solar City. Ah whatever, people shouldn't be driving car anyway, they should take trains. Well I came up with Hyperloop, Elon can answer to that.
But somehow it is just never enough. He should have pushed out an electric car yesterday which everybody could have afforded while simultaneously have closed down all coal plants and replaced them with solar.
And his rockets are nothing because he hasn't landed on the moon like NASA yet so screw him.
Man these negative people just gets my blood boiling. I am from Norway, so I grew up with the Law of Jante. I am surprised that that law seems to have spread across the globe.
Oh it's progress, no doubt. There's no question about that. What me and other skeptics argue against is these kinds of overly futuristic announcements that have no ground in reality, yet have people praising them like they are some kind of achievement by themselves.
Elon Musk grandly announces: I'm going to make humans an interplanetary species. This is such a grand and far reaching goal that were it to be achieved it would be by far, by very very far, the most important achievement of the human species so far. So far I've seen him put a rocket in orbit and land it again.* So excuse me if I tamper my enthusiasm.
Hyperloop, as you so mentioned? Yeah, he announced he would try to implement a concept already thought about, that without absolutely major breakthroughs in several fields remains impossible or at a cost of trillions of dollars, by far the most expensive private undertaking in history. So excuse me if I tamper my enthusiasm.
*(Don't get me wrong, this is an amazing achievement, it deserves all the praise it can get and I will be the first to give it. It's when he starts with these talks of master plans, and multitrillionaire projects, and making humans a multiplanetary species, that my brow starts to frown.m)
"No ground in reality"? Sure, the plan is extremely ambitious. But it relies on no fundamentally new technology and comes from someone with a proven track record in the field. They're talking at almost seven years before the first Mars launch with this system. I'll remind you that seven years before Apollo 11, this was the state of the art for American spaceflight:
Further, Musk explicitly admitted that his ability to create realistic schedules is poor, and the timeline should be considered more aspirational than concrete.
To me, "no ground in reality" would apply if they had announced, say, plans for a warp drive, or a teleporter. This plan looks extremely grounded in reality to me, which is why it's so exciting.
The technology to put people on Mars is not fundamentally new. The technology to make such a colony self sustaining is. We've never built any habitat which is entirely self sufficient even just in food, water, and air. Even the ISS needs resupply to generate breathable air. Even simple problems like "how do we replace failed bolts" will require resupply from earth for a long time.
I'm also dubious of the economics of this venture. I simply don't understand how living on Mars is advantageous for anybody. Mr. Musk is welcome to set his money on fire if he wants, of course, but I don't see a Mars colony ever being a rational investment for those of us on Earth, nor do I see paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to live a hard life and die in a frozen wasteland to be rational. I suspect after the initial enthusiasm dies down, very few people will choose this.
Elon actually had to state this point explicitly on the livestream because it seems to be not getting to people - SpaceX is not in business of colonizing Mars, it's in business of getting colonizers to Mars (and back). I.e. transportation infrastructure. Elon leaves setting up a colony to other people. That's why he keeps repeating that the idea is to drop the price per person to ~$200k - he seems to believe that if he can pull this off, the rest will be done by others.
A very rational argument for colonizing Mars is, we're 1 solar flare, 1 gamma ray burst away from total extinction. Having presence on a second planetary body is the best way we have to insure ourself against planet-sized cataclysmic events.
Also, why would someone do this? Same reason people crossed the Atlantic, to take part in something greater than themselves. That's why I want to do it. Don't care it's cold and dry. It's obvious to me that it's the most meaningful thing I could do with my life. To each their own, but I'm pretty sure you can see how I come to this idea; it's not far fetched.
A solar flare or a gamma ray burst might knock out satellites and electrical equipment and damage earth's atmosphere. In the worst case, they could kill a few billion people. But Earth will still be more hospitable than Mars.
>Same reason people crossed the Atlantic, to take part in something greater than themselves.
People crossed the Atlantic because they wanted gold, or slaves, or timber, or land, or because they wanted to escape from religious persecution, or because they were slaves or prisoners transported against their will (by someone who wanted gold, or timber, or land). They received resupply, not as charity, but from companies which expected to receive gold, tobacco, timber, or other goods in return from their investment.
Colonization is driven by economics. That's why thousands live permanently in Norilsk, Yellowknife, La Rinconada,and Kalgoorlie, but nobody lives permanently at Amundsen-Scott, under the sea, or in LEO. If history is any guide, "how will this turn a profit" is the question any Mars colony needs to address if it is to have any hope of prospering.
> People crossed the Atlantic because they wanted gold, or slaves, or timber, or land, or because they wanted to escape from religious persecution
That was before the industrial revolution - the new world offered relatively mild opportunities; nowadays people still cross the ocean - but these are all people from third world countries, or countries destroyed by civil wars; i think that in order to move people from the first world you would need to promise to make them really rich.
This conveniently ignores the fact that people will do it just for the sake of it. Don't always need economic incentives.
For instance: I'll try to do it for the sake of it. Sampling folks around me, a dozen would. It's not that crazy or rare a proposition. Arguably my environment doesn't represent an unbiased share of the population, but it's still a certain amount of people.
These natural events are rare enough that, to me, they don't create a sense of urgency that we need to get off the planet in the next decade.
This is the big question to me... when is the right time to go? If we wait 50 years, wouldn't the technological progress make such an endeavor cheaper, safer?
And the counterpoint is, well... it's been 50 years since apollo and still we don't have the ability to get to mars, so if there's nothing driving the technology then it doesn't just magically happen, and there's nothing to say that it will magically happen in another fifty years either.
To me, it's not the natural extinction events that are driving this, but the thinking that there is a short window of perhaps 200 years between technological enlightenment (particularly in nuclear and biological engineering) where the risk of self-annihilition is considerably increased, and the only way to decrease it is to add the redundancy.
To be sure, we will not achieve redundancy during the first decades or even perhaps centuries of this colonization. I think that terraforming needs to happen first
We don't need to invent new physics to do this. The challenges are very real; by various definitions the Saturn V was the most powerful machine ever constructed, and Musk proposes a rocket with several times the thrust. Mankind has not stopped developing spacecraft and rockets since the Apollo era. Whether or not we colonize Mars, we have to start by getting there. I'm sure waiting for a space elevator would be ideal, but if we can do this economically with rockets there's no particular reason not to. We've done this "build a big rocket" thing before. The only thing really standing in the way of it happening again is sufficient motivation. It's not yet extremely politically useful for US politicians to do more than talk about going to Mars, but so far aerospace has proven to be a pretty good source of pork and high-paying tech jobs, and NASA still has a pretty good public image. The only thing we've really been missing is a popular, charismatic leader who can get common people excited about space again. A national threat wouldn't be bad either, but those are pretty easy to gin up.
>This is the big question to me... when is the right time to go?
Could a natural extinction event happen in the next 50 years?
If the answer is 'yes', I think we should go as soon as it is possible.
Humanity has been much closer to self-annihilation in the past. That gives me hope that we wont nuke ourselves before a giant rock falls from the sky ;)
Didn't he say that you get to be the founding member of a new civilisation? Transforming the planet, mining, building cities. It all sounds very exciting to me. It's certainly not for everyone though.
Use that gray stuff in your head to think of a way to do it. It depends on the type and grade of bolt and how it's holding the things together. You could broach & thread the hole and replace your broken bolt with a larger bolt.
Then you can collect your metals, melt them down, work the metal with some oils to imbue it with some carbon, and make reclaimed bolts.
With power, a lathe, and time you can build anything round. With some more tools you can build anything of any shape.
> The technology to put people on Mars is not fundamentally new. The technology to make such a colony self sustaining is. We've never built any habitat which is entirely self sufficient even just in food, water, and air.
This is, thank god, incorrect. We have closed loop systems for food, water and air.
I have in front of me a shelf of books relating to closed loop systems. They were designed for two purposes, space travel on one side, and on the flip side as a final resort against nuclear annihilation. I can give you sources to look up if you're interested.
The details were worked out in the 70s and 80s, but the projects were closed down when the West began to lose faith, no thanks to exponential energy shocks but that is a separate story for another day.
> Even simple problems like "how do we replace failed bolts" will require resupply from earth for a long time.
I would not call the manufacture of steel bolts a simple problem except in a colloquial sense.
This is something different to food/air/water, but we should be able to accomplish this in a new closed loop project.
The secret to space colonization and closed loop systems is not physics, but chemistry, knowing the correct procedures for the synthesis of new compounds from more basic elements.
> I don't see a Mars colony ever being a rational investment for those of us on Earth
This is another subject again, but many rare things exist in abundance in space that could be used to create an economy unlike that of Earth, such as platinum and the isotope helium-3. Then there is the ability to use nuclear systems in a way we cannot without political and environmental problems on our home planet.
To lift all restrictions on the use of nanotechnology, biotechnology and nuclear engineering would unleash a torrent of creativity from our society that is presently bound up in other things.
This is something that is not anybody's area of expertise. It is the area in which businessmen are going to have to come up with exploits.
And let us not forget one important thing from geopolitics. He who controls the skies, controls the earth. So going up is not really an option. The full weight of military support should be behind any spacefaring entrepreneurs. You want Iran or Korea slinging rocks at our cities? You do not need nuclear weapons if you have that much kinetic force on your side! You cannot be at the Apex if there exists a rock hanging over your head.
Fortunately our enemies disapprove of science fiction, or we'd be in a spot of trouble!
I'd love to see the sources on closed-loop systems.
Small note on helium-3: if you can get net energy from He3 fusion, you can also get it from the easier D-D reaction. The output of D-D is half He3, and half tritium which decays to He3 with a 12-year half-life, so you can breed He3 from deuterium and get energy in the process.
The D-D reaction does produce neutron radiation but it's lower energy than D-T neutrons and more easily shielded. The fusion startup Helion is attempting a hybrid D-D/D-He3 reactor, and says only 6% of the energy output would be in the form of neutron radiation.
Spaceflight Life Support and Biospherics Peter Eckart
Man-Made Closed Ecological Systems JGitelson
The Garden in the Machine Claus Emmeche
The famous Biosphere 2 project:
Biosphere 2 John Allen
The Human Experiment Jane Poynter
Life under Glass Abigail Alling
There exists other biospherics projects but not much information on them. The ESA and Russian projects have materials but in languages I cannot read.
I suspect a lot of this stuff is also classified under sources and methods for other secret government projects.
> Small note on helium-3: if you can get net energy from He3 fusion, you can also get it from the easier D-D reaction. The output of D-D is half He3, and half tritium which decays to He3 with a 12-year half-life, so you can breed He3 from deuterium and get energy in the process.
That is nice. I know it is an important subject but am ignorant of even the most basic physics. Nuclear engineering appears to be dying which is an indictment of our society.
> The fusion startup Helion is attempting a hybrid D-D/D-He3 reactor, and says only 6% of the energy output would be in the form of neutron radiation.
I saw that, I think sama posted something about it or it was on techcrunch. I wish them the best of luck, because like I said, it is dying on the vine. Society, at least in the West, appears to be turning its back on all forms of science that could lead somewhere and the inmates are not just running the asylum but adding new wings to it.
Social dysfunction to me is the most likely calamity to strike us down, which is why we need to go to Mars, we need some kind of control group!
Re: hyperloop: I think he specifically said he didn't have the time/energy/money/focus necessary to work on an implementation.
Musk is a visionary, and I think we need people like that. He said of Tesla and SpaceX that he went in with a fatalistic view: that there was a 10% chance of success.
In his talk yesterday, he repeated a phrase he used before, about moving the ball forward as far as he can.
So I'm an Elon Musk fanboy because he has real vision, tempered by reality and pragmatism.
I think what a lot of vocal skeptics react to is less Elon Musk (or whoever), and more to the seemingly mindless fawning of some of his 'followers'. That also bugs me.
As an engineer, I'm always looking for the ways something can fail. At the same time, I try to add as much vision as I can to my professional work, so long as its tempered with real engineering skepticism.
And Elon Musk appears of the same mindset.
By the way, did I note correctly that at the price tag was 'only' ten billion dollars to get the first humans on Mars? If close to true, that's pretty awesome, in my opinion at least. I and he suspect that once that benchmark is reached, the additional billions necessary to get a real civilization going there will flow more easily.
> By the way, did I note correctly that at the price tag was 'only' ten billion dollars to get the first humans on Mars?
Yeah, he did make that claim. I think the specific claim was meant to ONLY cover getting the initial transportation system running, not the cost of setting up an initial colony there. He is focused on the transportation problem and wants other people to figure out how to support human life there.
I was also particularly impressed by the assertion that they would start sending some vehicle in every transit window to mars. Regular cargo flights to mars will be crucial to getting started on the science required to support the initial colony.
He even did that with regard to the chance of surviving the trip to Mars: he emphasised that there was a high risk of death for the first travellers and that he wouldn't want to do it. He actually stated that the first travellers would have to be comfortable with the high risk of death.
He's not saying "I'll colonize Mars". He's saying "We should colonize Mars. I'll make sure people interested in doing it can get there."
Isn't the first step in reaching for a goal to announce it so people will hold you to it?
I feel that saying, "So far I've seen him put a rocket in orbit and land it again" is along the lines of when you come up with an invention called the potato peeler and everyone says, "But isn't that just a dull knife?".
People constantly downplay new ideas, they're only recognizing the similarity and not the genius the slight alteration an existing invention offered them.
On a positive note, Elon Musk has somewhat of a track record for executing on his dreams/goals and making it happen. :)
People praise him because he has a plan in the first place and is working towards achieving it. Whether he succeeds or not, he's atleast making the effort.
This is why people get irritated when he gets criticized because the arguments boil down to "this is so ambitious and will likely fail, so why even try?"
SpaceX is showing that this sort of thing is within reach. Before the last few years, I would have looked at the current state of the art and politics of rocket technology and space exploration and dismissed this plan as a fanciful dream that could never happen. SpaceX has been killing it, though. They've been building new engines, landing rockets, and it's only a matter of time until they re-fly one; this is the sort of real progress we haven't seen in decades, and it's all in service of solving some of the thorniest bits of the "new" plan. I think it's time to reset our expectations and believe that something like this is possible. Musk himself said it's a long shot, and obviously it is, but I don't think it's rational to dismiss SpaceX after what they've already shown us they can do.
Yeah, SpaceX is doing good work, being economical like many other space agencies and yet being able to land back the stage 1 booster. Of course, they haven't reused even one yet, and have not studied the effects of multiple reuses.
But going from this to imagining a space taxi and a space settlement? There is so much work that needs done first, effect of radiation on people? Effect of lower gravity? Effect of high concentration of heavy metals on plant life? Recycling everything? Making propellant on Mars? And so much more, he just hand waives it saying that is easy, all their idea relied on was reusing their booster 1000 times, even when they have not reused it once! If I wanted science fiction (not that I think it is impossible), I would read a book.
It's really like the Wright brothers doing their first test flight, and then imagining a commercial airline system, complete with Boeing 777, airports and hell even SR71 Blackbird. It's just too far off, and feels like a sci-fi con. Plus you can see what kind of people this thinking attracts, like that idiot who thinks that Burning man is what mars is going to be like, completely ignoring the thin atmosphere, lack of gravity, cold temperatures, and all its' effect on humans, plant and building materials.
I think your example actually harms your argument. The SR-71 is a nice plane, and certainly much more advanced than the Wright Flyer, but it is completely outclassed by the Saturn V. The space technology is much more complex, and much more energetic, and has far tighter tolerances, and less room for failure. You should have been making this same argument in the early sixties. Right now we do have the technology, the engines, the fuel, the deep-space communications network. We need to scale up the engines to rival the power of God Almighty, but we don't need new physics to do so.
Musk is pointing out, correctly, that this is possible with existing rocket technology -- at least the transportation. Keeping people alive once they're there is apparently somebody else's problem, but until we have the materials science for a space elevator, an obscenely heavy lift vehicle will probably have to do. Ultimately he's going to be asking a lot of people to climb on top of a monstrous Engine and hope that it explodes correctly, and I hope that his conscience is clear when that day dawns. Probably you are right that we're going to have a hell of a time keeping people alive on Mars, but we seem to have a tough time of that here as well.
This is not science fiction. There is no new physics required, just some fiendishly difficult engineering challenges. The Wright Brothers were able to build their plane because there was nothing physically stopping them. They had the scientific knowledge and the dedication, and everything else followed. Really it's not that people -- even Presidents -- haven't been talking about doing this and working on details and preliminaries for decades. This is news precisely because it's not science fiction. This time, it could actually happen.
I think there are some false equivalencies in here. There are real serious challenges to be overcome, especially (as you say) dealing with the radiation exposure over >= 3 months in deep space, and we've seen the serious health issues Apollo astronauts have suffered from after enduring the same sort of exposure for a comparatively short time. But overall, the science and engineering are largely in place; to do this it will take scaling, integration, and refinement all on a massive scale, but it really isn't like e.g. going from the Wright flyer to SR-71. The latter was unimaginable back in the day of the former, which simply isn't the case for SpaceX's plan or it would be getting a lot more flak from real experts than it apparently has been (though, let's be honest, SpaceX are the real experts now).
And, again, nobody's saying it's anything other than a long shot, not even Musk himself. But a lot of people seem to be pooh-poohing it for bad reasons. For instance, the awful quality of the audience at the Q&A does not in reality tell us anything about SpaceX's ability to execute on some or all of this plan. In fact, I think Musk was ready for much more challenging questions than he ended up receiving (how could he not have been?)
"No ground in reality" according to you. History is full of the success and failures of people trying to achieve such pie in the sky ideals. While past success is not a true indication of future success, Musk has a history of delivering.
Your argument comes across as "There are unsolved problems, and it's expensive, so don't try". Attitudes like that don't drive human progress. Society was not built on "it's hard, so don't try". I'm kind of surprised that this attitude has to be argued against on Hacker News, of all places.
I think people get excited about his plans because he has a track record of actually delivering. Self-landing boosters on autonomous boats? A lot of people could have thought about that, but he (and his employees!) actually did it!
So when he talk about stuff like this, people have begun to pay attention.
Yes, the plan itself doesn't deserve a lot of praise, but knowing Elon, it will likely happen eventually (though usually later than when he says it will :)
" What me and other skeptics argue against is these kinds of overly futuristic announcements that have no ground in reality,"
I am pretty sure this is exactly the kind things people said about going to the moon, build a machine that can add numbers together faster than humans etc... lol
"This is such a grand and far reaching goal that were it to be achieved it would be by far, by very very far, the most important achievement of the human species so far. So far I've seen him put a rocket in orbit and land it again.* So excuse me if I tamper my enthusiasm."
What have people see NASA do when Kennedy announced landing a man on the moon? Would they be able to accomplish if people would tamper their enthusiasm? I don't think so. They had to invent technology that didn't exist to accomplish it and I believe this needs the same thing. Hence the reason I am stoked about it.
Someone who grew up admiring the achievements in space and technology(I was born the same year the Voyagers left earth) that kind of dreaming and willingness, set me on course as a child to study science and work in tech. I am very excited to see announcements like this. Because without dreaming it up and setting a direction we would stagnate. Just like NASA did with the space shuttle program.
Helping out and working on a CubeSat project that is going to be launched in June 2017, I see how much work it is to even communicate in leo never mind beyond that(I can't even begin).
Yet I can barely contain my excitement :)
If "overpromise now and (under)deliver later" is the most effective and most efficient way of getting things done, isn't that worth all the disadvantages of such a strategy?
> So far I've seen him put a rocket in orbit and land it again.* So excuse me if I tamper my enthusiasm.
I think you and Musk probably have pretty similar views on his chances for success. He mentions that this is precisely why he likes the name "Heart of Gold" for the first one of these ships he sends to Mars: It is extremely improbable and the Heart of Gold ran on an improbability drive.
The attitude is probably focused at the generality of human activity. So many important projects become domainated by personal rivalries and greed. The irony is that Musk has found a way to avoid exactly this kind of problem. Mars can act as a unifying mission that everyone can work towards. There is something more important than the individual that justifies the effort.
And it could inspire a whole host of companies that simply try and do X on Mars. And perhaps in the process we will learn how to do X better on Earth also. Because the unique constraints of Mars are an extreme version of the sustainability issues we face on earth. Humanity has to evolve to be independant of ecosystems that we will otherwise destroy.
I agree with you a lot. Thanks for saying this, it's been annoying me too. Lots of anti-Elonism in France as well.
And even with solar power, I've heard criticism, stating that it's not renewable because you need rare earths possibly for solar panels (i don't know) but especially for batteries. And that it's only effective enough in regions where there is a lot of sun, even though Elon claims that it would work fine even in the UK.
> Man these negative people just gets my blood boiling. I am from Norway, so I grew up with the Law of Jante. I am surprised that that law seems to have spread across the globe.
I understand where you're coming from. But it is not about all negativity per se.
I am quite negative about our progress over the past few decades. But that is because I think we could be doing much, much more.
I think it is a combination of seemingly opposite attributes that is the most helpful here. Enough optimism to have faith in the future, and enough pessimism in another part of the brain to catch the bugs before you get taken down by the obstacles.
So please don't throw me in with the crab people! :-)
Elon Musk has given us a torch for the first time in a long, long time, and if he falters, our cadre shall pick up the fire and continue on.
Thank you for this sir. I'm with you, Elon has accomplished a breadth of amazing things fairly early in his career. If you don't find that astounding then GTFO IMHO
You're my hero! This attitude is why I quit regularly contributing to this site. Any time any single person does something positive, some armchair "expert" comes out the woodworks to tell you how it won't work or can't work.
What would you prefer? Rolling applause for every idea anyone presents?
One benefit of criticism is we might get to read an angle of attack we hadn't thought of and thereby improve our ideas and designs.
Sure, when people blow off an idea by saying "pointless, let's save the baby dolphins first" I don't find those comments helpful, but HN almost always has far more in-depth critiques.
Compared to reddit, you're 100% on the money. At least here, I'm looking at the news/writings I'd be looking at elsewhere, but the discussion is much closer to humane than some things I've seen elsewhere on this internet.
We'll all in this game together, learning how to be a single mind. Be nice to your fellow human-cells no matter their goal, if their goal is for the greater good. The thing is - we can save the dolphins && live on Mars, not mutually exclusive goals.
If somebody told Elon "don't go Mars, do something like cure cancers first" what would he say? Thye're missing the point altogether, right? People are curing cancer, saving dolphins, working on hunger. The reason Musk is so successful and iconic is because specifically he followed things that interested and mattered to him, i.e. energy and colonization.
If someone is following their passion and investing enough energy to be recognized on the level of these people, they're assuredly more cognizant of what's in the realm of reality in their scope than the average journalist/internet commentator. I can glean so much from just listening to the man react to the audience's question.. the one about the Funny or Die video, he's sending "you're wasting our time" body language... I get it, though, this is a pointed, focused thing they're working on; grandiose and monumental indeed, focused nonetheless.
Considering progress humanity made this letter is more actual than ever. So I wish more people understand that it's super important to work on what you like and can do the best since there always chance that space exploration help to solve other problems too.
> What would you prefer? Rolling applause for every idea anyone presents?
Skepticism is a good thing but it's unevenly applied in the weirdest way. Solar Roadways, it seems like the smallest amount of skepticism would have dismantled the entire idea. Two nobody snake oil salesmen from out of their garage were roundly applauded by everyone to such a degree that competitors opened up.
When Musk presents a design on a much larger scale following a career of related success, it's called down?
Therefore I appreciate criticism but I'm skeptical of its sources.
Exactly. HN is not a fanboy driven community usually, so it's where rational and educated conversation can take place. On the contrary I find criticism helpful in this kind of context.
As engineers (or hackers, whatever) we are supposed to be naturally skeptical, in the words of someone wiser than me, "good programmers look both ways when crossing a one way street."
Biking in New York City taught me that. I know it wasn't the programming, because that came second. Funny how many pedestrians look the wrong way when crossing a two way street...maybe they're going with 50/50 chances?
It's helpful when the critic poses at least a fraction of expertise and experience as related to the subject of the people who's idea is being criticised.
No but it would be cool if critics would adjust the language based on their realistic understanding of their level of expertise in the subject matter. Posting very arrogant and dismissive comments just because one had read a semi scientific book on the subject or watched a documentary is not very helpful.
For sure, agree with you here, and I just scroll past those comments that come off as arrogant and dismissive, maybe I down vote them. Definitely do a lot of up voting of those comments that are more in-depth critiques, in the hope they rise to the top and help sink the arrogance.
From the formal standpoint he is not, given his knowledge and expertise he pretty much is at least according to Space X engineers I know or that publicly spoke about it. There is obviously a very talented team at Space X and the things he presents are obviously a result of team effort.
And the negative comments help wipe out a great bit of future competition. If you kill an idea before it gets started, you reduce the risk of it actually working.
I completely agree with you. The frustration I feel, in the case of SpaceX, is that I am perceiving most of the criticism to be "It's hard, so don't try". That's not helpful or constructive.
> Any time any single person does something positive, some armchair "expert" comes out the woodworks to tell you how it won't work or can't work.
All public forums go bad once they reach a certain size. Since everything is on a gaussian curve (fat mediocre middle, and two asymptotes, one for greatness, the other for the opposite end), it's just pure statistics that junk comments will start creeping in once the population grows beyond a certain threshold.
In some ways HN is designed to combat this. You need to "earn" downvotes with contributions, and the sites UX is designed in a way to slow down low effort comments, and to make comments sit for a bit before allowing replies (with workarounds if needed).
The things that aren't features (like the lack of notifications) also help.
There's also a quite-active, and largely effective, moderation effort by @dang and ... I forget the other mod, scbc or something like that.
I've been making comparative studies of a few communities (HN, Reddit, G+, Imzy, Ello), and it's interesting to see how various ones work. In particular, there's a tremendous culture against the types of even indirect personal attacks at HN which fly in spades elsewhere. I saw @dang inveighing against a comment which began with "<sigh>", on the grounds that that is the equivalent of an internet eyeroll.
On G+, discussion quality depends very much on the host and how they manage a particular thread. I've got problems with Google itself, but the platform can support quite good discussions. Overall participation has always been small (6-12 million users posting publicly per month, a value I'd had a hand in determining), but in corners, that's still a good crowd. The best circumstance is to cultivate a small group ~30-100 members or so, set firm expectations for participation, moderate aggressively (that is, promptly), though fairly and starting with social nudges. There's a balance between topic drift and derailment.
Reddit varies hugely by subreddit, the good ones are exceptionally good. The site as a whole has some faults that leak through even to the good subs though.
Ello has a very small (~10k or so daily, ~200k or so monthly visits) userbase, but it strikes me as quite well behaved for the most part, something I've commented on specifically to the site's admins.
Imzy, the "kinder, gentler Reddit" has largely proven not to be. For reasons not entirely suprising when you combine an on-tap, ad libitum anonymity access, lacking leadership, overtaxed / AWOL moderation, exceptionally ill-conceived notifications, threading, and response mechanisms, and a community drawn from SRS and similar beds of vitriol. It's not the issues advocated for, but the methods of advocacy, including ample amounts of friendly fire and hypocrisy, which generate problems.
I have tried most of them and feel largely the same.
HN seems in that sweet spot for me where it is large enough to have a good amount of discussion but still has very good quality.
Most "reddit but more free" sites turn into imzy or even worse voat. G+ communities are too small for me, and finding a good community is proving to be hard. And I've given up on reddit for any larger scale technical discussion (there's just too much vitriol and "my team is better" sentiment there. It always seems to focus on the negative, and creating a "positive only" subreddit seems like a bad idea, and it attracts the users that will fight that idea on principle)
I'll need to try Ello though. Have you looked at lobsters? It's much smaller than HN but also more technical (and with its own share of bias against anything newer in my experience)
G+ communities, as a rule, are simply broken. I created one of my one with a carefully selected set of members, and that worked well for discussion. It's limited in specialised knowledge, though not bad.
Ello is tiny, though there are again some interesting folks. I'm simply impressed by the healthy socialisation.
I've done some rigorous "tracking the conversation" studies, which are based on terms I have interest in, across numerous sites. Blogs are still surprisingly relevant.
Lobsters is another technical-oriented HN-like site.
You need to be invited by someone there, and they actually show the full invite graph, and I believe will somewhat hold you accountable if you invite spammers or trolls.
That being said, if you won't cause trouble I'd be willing to send you an invite if you email the account in my userpage on HN ;)
<sigh> and what level of derailment would you call this thread? it has probably two comments on the video contents, and all the rest is about which community stays on topic better.
I'd comment on the video itself if I could watch it, but local systems aren't cooperating.
That said: discussions can be about the nominal topic, or they can drift, naturally, to other areas of interest. I find the meta-topic of "where is a good place to discuss the things I'm interested in discussing" to be generally on-topic. HN isn't a bad place for that.
With the ability to collapse threads baked into the HN page design, if you're not interested in a discussion, you can simply collapse it an move on.
On which: I'm increasingly hitting long threads from the bottom, for a few reasons:
1. The top-ranked post often isn't particularly on-topic, and attracts diversions posted for visibility.
2. It's easier to tell if a thread is of little concern if you follow it from the bottom.
3. It's easier to track a conversation from bottom to top and collapse going up, than it is to backtrack back to the top and collapse that. There's a subreddit which runs the collapse bars down the side of the thread, allowing a subthread, or entire thread, to be collapsed in one go.
4. There are often downvoted or flagged items which I feel are incorrectly tagged. It's usually faster to assess if something has some merits than to see if it's solid, and I'll nudge stuff up -- even if I substantially disagree with it -- if it seems it's been overly penalised.
HN, as with other online discussions, does poorly for deep and complex posts. One standout was The Edge Question issue a few years ago. There were a handful of comments on the first few essays, but given that there were ~100 - 150 total responses, it's not the sort of thing you can digest quickly.
I've tracked down other issues of the Question and gone through it. I have to say on balance I'm fairly disappointed in the quality -- much is narrow self-promotion of research, another large set is rampant speculation. The short an humerous responses are often disarmingly refreshing. And every so often there's something quite good. Sturgeon's quality estimate though seems generous.
And there is an aspect to that ability that I know people don't like.
The ability to collapse means you feel less bad about somewhat-off-topic conversation, which in a way can create worse discussion for the actual topic.
But at the same time some of my favorite HN threads have been offshoots of the submission's topic.
Pedantic point: not everything is Gaussian. Income, for example, doesn't go below zero. It may not even be log-normal, but rather a power distribution.
Pedantic point aside, you bring up an important point. Can behavioral incentives be aligned to avoid the bottom side of participation?
This is less of a pedantic point than might be assumed.
The Gaussian depends upon a notion of independence and identical distribution: independence can be dispensed of when one thinks about power laws.
If you can soberly state the assumption that the effects of a comment on any other comment is completely negligible, or falls into a couple of other strange exceptions that leads to the universal phenomena that generates the Gaussian, then and only then can you state that any quantity associated with comments is Gaussian. I do not think that this can be soberly stated as such.
If you measure income as change in net worth minus expenditures, it could go below zero. That might not be an appropriate definition in all cases, but, for example if you incur debts without acquiring an offsetting benefit (maybe by being compelled to pay damages to someone for something you did that you didn't derive much or any value from, like causing an accident?), it might be reasonable to say that you had negative income. Or maybe due to capital losses -- you own something that gets stolen or destroyed or damaged, or whose market value falls a lot.
(That doesn't mean that it will follow a Gaussian distribution, just that it could be defined in a way where it makes sense that it can sometimes be negative.)
This is what happened with Reddit. It used to be a lot more enlightened discussion and now it is a gutter of memes, paranoia, puns, and debased comments.
It's the puns. Some are funny, but it's just not funny anymore. I go on that site a few times a year, and the jokes never stop.
It's a pretty old website now. I thought the hilarious banter/play on words would have run its course. There must be some psychological thing going on?
I am reminded we are just monkeys, hitting buttons when I'm there. (No offence to monkeys. I like you guys. I think you're better than us.)
Some fads just take longer to run their course? Skinny jeans for men--done. Guys buying $500 tennis shoes--still going on. Guys that have the semi-Mohawk. Just enough on the sides to get a job--almost done. I can't think of anything that doesn't have a beginning, and end. All I can think of, right now, is life is too short. Depressing. This summer went by way to quick for myself. I wasted it.
I want to, but it got to the point where the hivemind has pushed me away. I have noticed recently that HN is becoming self-aware. More than ever, I'm seeing comments by good users telling the bad ones to take their bad attitude elsewhere. The contrarianism going on really drove me away. I started to believe that there were people feeling the need to be contrarian just to appear more intelligent than the other users.
It's a mistake to anthropomorphise HN. I've made it too. We're all in this together, and we're all individuals.
True, people here can be frustrating at times. But the mod team is one of the sharpest, and they cull abuse. And they do it well.
When the abuse is removed, what's left is substance. Sometimes that substance is disagreeable, and sometimes even hostile, but never personal.
It can be un-fun sometimes. But it's been rewarding to watch this place grow and see all of the new and old opinions intermix. Sometimes you end up learning about yourself more than other people, which are special moments. I haven't really felt that on other sites, so HN feels unique and worthwhile.
It's a journey. The community has ups and downs, but Dan (and now Scott) have always taken care of it.
The community has to take part in the culture to ensure it doesn't get corrupted too. The mods can't do everything.
Total side anecdote about this: I was at the airport check-in counter. At the only open counter was an obvious hoarder with many trash bags as carry ons asking all kinds of vague questions about if the TSA was going to take his stuff. The guy behind the counter kept answering his questions politely. I guess policy was never to tell a customer to get lost. This was taking a very long time, so a little old lady at the front of the line went over to him and told him to hurry it up. He looked a bit shocked and moved on. I guess companies are so scared of bad reviews or creating controversy that they indulge these people for as long as it takes and it's up to the other customers to put a stop to it.
>More than ever, I'm seeing comments by good users telling the bad ones to take their bad attitude elsewhere.
That's been happening since I've been here, since around mid 2007. Not to dismiss what you're saying, I just want to say that there have always been people fighting the good fight.
When a discussion forum discourages skepticism and criticism, you tend to end up in an uninteresting "That's awesome, bro!" echo chamber. There's a big difference between trolling / negativity and battle-hardened cynicism / constructive criticism. Good mods help sort it out.
It's these armchair "experts" which make hacker news interesting. It's certainly preferable to Youtube +1s or emoticons to say how wonderful someone's comment is. The root comment is fine and makes a good point about how most billionaires outsource jobs and don't think big like Musk does, but this reply I am not so sure about.
That's just part of the hard work of producing something and distributing it. You have to overcome criticism. Both armchair experts and real experts will shit all over what you do for different reasons. It's a necessary evil, you have to pick out the good feedback and ignore the bad.
While this does happen, I think it's because some on HN enjoy spirited argument and aren't intending to hurt anyone's feelings, just issue a worthy challenge.
It's especially exaggerated here -- almost comically so -- when the subject is JavaScript or when something isn't quite right with a project's website.
Being cynical comes with experience. You get exposed to tons of ideas and hype over time. Some of it is warranted, and some of it isn't. You realize that marketing and lowest common denominator play a big role.
Well I think it depends on what kind of code you work (or worked) on. My first two jobs were on decade-old PHP codebases with thousands of global variables and copy pasta galore. Only the damn cynical can survive in that kind of mess, because it literally feels like the system is trying to fight you. I imagine legacy COBOL programmers can also relate. Now if most of your experience is working with green field systems, such a level of cynicism is not needed and may even be detrimental.
I would never say "it won't work", but I do think we humans have a tendency to turn to technology to solve our most basic problems, while the real solutions lie within us (where most people never look).
I believe we should first learn to clean up our act on planet Earth before we export anything of our existence and what we do.
To me, the real revolution that needs to happen is a spiritual one - a statement that will only be understood by those practicing meditation. Our brain has so many "undiscovered" capabilities. Discovering them will change our behavior and ultimately allow us to survive on Earth.
It's weird for people to suggest that "we" as a human race should/can only focus on one goal at a time. There are enough humans on the planet that different people can focus on different goals at the same time.
It's not like Elon Musk building this rocket is at the expense of SolarCity (improving the environment through solar energy).
The more I look around, the more I'm opposed to that concept.
Sure, I've seen humans change - but only under heavy "brainwashing", i.e. internalizing an ideology that values being fair, helpful and truthful, and that only holds with a support structure of adherents. And I doubt it scales.
If you look at the world, a lot if not most changes for the better are technology-driven. Technology alters the economical landscape, which makes people do things better, even though they're still following the same behaviours as they always did.
TL;DR: I think individuals have much less agency than we'd like to think.
> the real revolution that needs to happen is a spiritual one
I think the only "spiritual" anything we need is to drop anything spiritual and focus more intensely on reality and evidence based reasoning. Spirituality has done plenty of harm and it is not hard to argue more harm than good if you can lump religion in there with it.
Your ridiculous claims about undiscovered capacities in our brains allowing to to survive is non-sense. Our ability to problem solve base on past experience/evidence is the real miracle and our gradual takeover of every ecosystem is why we have survived this far. Now we need to use this capacity we already demonstrated to not kill ourselves. Going to space is one possible option.
Meditation can go hand in hand with space exploration.
Besides that, Musk is doing two things at the same time. He tries both to protect the earth (Tesla, solar power), and initiate a base in case something happened to our home.
Spirituality alone won't help you survive winter, regardless of how developed your mind is.
There is no good scientific evidence that Hof's breathing techniques account for his ability to withstand cold temperatures, rather than some kind of genetic difference. Four people have died while attempting to follow his 'technique'.
It's sad, but also stupid, to be brutally honest. You don't do these exercises in water (btw, they always have these warnings everywhere in their material).
I'm becoming more and more convinced that these magical guru stories are the south Asian equivalent of the National Enquirer, except more aimed towards gullible foreigners.
Ultimately allow us to survive on Earth...until the next major extinction event. Meditation won't allow us to survive a massive meteor impact (which is just a matter of when, not if).
It is important to people do things whichever areas they are interesting. Everybody knows many problems around us, but nobody cares until it is a priority or if they are not interested.
So, let him do what he is doing, he is doing everything right, now if you are communicating with people through mobile phones is just because of satellites, that happened only because people explored the space and it's application.
So, the final goal of Elon is great, support people so that you will also get good support when you have a great idea.
True, technology doesn't necessarily make a person better, but it does make being a good person easier and more probable, and in a large population that probability makes all the difference.
I'm not saying it applies to all those commenting negatively, but one commonly held philosophy amongst some of my geek friends is this logic:
"the world is terrible and people are terrible" -> "there's no point trying to improve things" -> "I don't need to improve things"
It's essentially an argument that allows people to live a defeatist (selfish?) life without feeling guilty.
Anyone who stands up and says "we can make things better and I'm going to do it!" is an immediate threat to this philosophical position. If Elon Musk can make the world(s) a better place, then it's much harder for me to maintain that all humans are selfish and evil, and it's harder to justify living a selfish and cynical existence. Hey, maybe I'm wrong about things, maybe I need to mature and learn about the world, which means the stance I've held all my life is incorrect and that is a scary thing to contemplate. It takes great self-awareness to move beyond that position.
I don't know why these thoughts correlate with being a programmer. Perhaps it's somewhat related to seeing things in a very black and white manner: things are good or bad. Elon Musk is a hero or a charlatan or he can't achieve what he says he will and he will fail and therefore it's pointless.
Here's an example I came across recently: "people are individually smart and collectively stupid, therefore we are doomed wrt politics and climate change." But the mature, adult, response is to ask "how can we help people better make collective decisions?"
Overall, this thinking comes across as childlike, failing to appreciate the subtleties in how progress is made, and the reality that nothing is all good or all bad, all failure or all success.
I am upvoting you for your insightful comment, but I still think that in your comment's second part your speculation goes in a wrong direction.
"things are good or bad. Elon Musk is a hero or a charlatan or he can't achieve what he says he will and he will fail and therefore it's pointless"
On the granular level, considered from only one problem's prospective, decisions actually have a binary value. For a supposed genius like Musk it's no wonder why there's a backlash for the wrong ones. The judgment itself has a scale of tolerance for its subjects (even though this is harder to admit openly) and exactly this high bar inherently set for highly potential, highly resourceful people like genius billionaires is what we see here. This is a good thing, I think.
"the world is terrible and people are terrible" -> "there's no point trying to improve things" -> "I don't need to improve things"
This is kinda a stupid position to hold as statistically for the average human on this planet everything today is better then it was yesterday and most likely will be better tomorrow then today.
most people's lives are much more driven by their emotional opinions/decisions rather than smart, factual rational approach. compared to hard facts, emotions can be changed/manipulated rather easily. examples visible everywhere, all the time
> failing to appreciate the subtleties in how progress is made
What are these subtleties? Why is it better to invest energy into space instead of sustainability? It's just heartbreaking that we can't remotely get as excited about sustainability as we can about romantic memes of curiosity and history books. Is the 'subtlety' that we just got to accept this as a fact about human nature and hope for sustainability as a byproduct?
There seems to be plenty of excitement when big announcements are made for things like solar power, nuclear energy, energy storage, non-hydrocarbon transportation, and other such things. Lots of work is going into those things already, a big chunk of it being done by the same guy pushing Mars here.
I am not seeing it. People are following the super stimuli of rockets, history etc. while further contributing to pollution and resource depletion. We need a culture that is satisfied with much less, one that overcomes the tragedy of the commons. Tesla might contribute a bit in that regard, but SpaceX is outright opposed to it. If you want to convince people of the future, there are more effective and reliable ways of doing that (for example science, cryonics, education etc.).
As of right now, the top comment is complaining about the negative comments, the next 75% of the comments or so are positive comments (even calling Musk a hero and saying that this is a historical moment), and there's about 25% or so that are skeptical (many of those offering valid criticisms and not simply complaining about it).
Yes, excessive negativity can be a bad thing. But when a small minority of the comments being critical (comments mostly downvoted to the bottom) is considered too negative (to the point where people are advocating scripts that remove or auto-downvote comments deemed negative), it suggests that there's a danger of people being overly sanguine and reflexively hostile to any criticism.
I'm not sure how something as massive as this could ever be accomplished without taking it seriously. And I don't think it can be taken seriously without taking a good, hard look at the numerous challenges that face it. Mindless hype doesn't really get us anywhere.
If the comment split here goes 75% positive / 25% not, I think that's a healthy split. Even if it had been 50/50 I'd still consider that good.
A caveat: particularly in the case of someone like Musk who already has, conservatively speaking, some very decent stuff under his belt, if someone wants to post something against an idea they themselves have the responsibility, to make sure it is indeed well thought out, and not just knee-jerk negativity, pessimism or cynicism.
Likewise, people need to realize that excessive fanboyism really needs to be tempered and can really turn others off from supporting some of the truly great innovators of our time whomever they might be. No matter how stunning a person might be, they still gotta take a shit like anyone else, and you bet that shit's gonna stink too.
I don't see the complainers taking a good, hard look at the challenges. I see them taking a superficial glance and then basically complaining that people shouldn't like different things.
Maybe you're right that the numbers don't justify my complaint, but this isn't about silencing dissent or being hostile to criticism, I just want intelligent criticism.
We need a lot more like Musk, whether you agree with space or not. Investing their resources in crazy ideas of their heart, some might just work.
We don't progress the species with digging up more rocks, building more stuff, selling more stuff, or dare I say it, finding a new way to get a cab.
A few more vastly wealthy eccentrics building teams to play with space, fusion (carefully I hope), generation, or whatever pipe dream they have could easily make up for some of the global short termism.
Does it matter if he sells enough tickets to Mars to profit? I doubt it. I don't think that's the point. The moon landings were excellent for helping humankind dream big, Mars will be too.
What will the moon landing conspiracy theorists do then? :)
>We don't progress the species with digging up more rocks, building more stuff, selling more stuff, or dare I say it, finding a new way to get a cab.
I think you are assuming that being wealthy is just a state someone gets into magically.
While the things you mention aren't on their own crazy species changing ideas, the selling stuff, the getting a cab is what allowed some folks to become wealthy and go after crazy things. So don't discount the process of acquiring resources.
Hardly discounting. Or downplaying ability to make a successful huge business from formation - most can't after all.
It's the means to the end. Nothing wrong with that either.
Bezos was being connected with space as the destination in the 90s long before Amazon was even a certain hit or Blue Horizon. Amazon gave him the means to follow his childhood dream. That's not to trivialise an Amazon, but had Amazon failed, which it almost did, whatever came next would try to get big enough to make Blue Horizon. Selling books online wasn't unique, getting big fast was more so, at least for a while.
For Musk, he'd identified as having a dream of alternative energy, solar, and electric vehicles from years ago and mentioning it along the way. No surprise that as soon as he can he's founding Tesla. With SpaceX right after Paypal I cant recall hearing earlier mention, but I'm glad he did.
> Amazon gave him the means to follow his childhood dream.
Lots of people have wacky childhood dreams. Our society picks who gets to pursue theirs based on money. Some inherit it. Others execute magnificently on something daring.
For the latter, their dreams seem like good bets to bet on (but only given the prior performance). For the former, I suppose it's a plus they mostly remain in a holding pattern.
> We don't progress the species with digging up more rocks, building more stuff, selling more stuff, or dare I say it, finding a new way to get a cab.
Oh but we do. Statistically such things contribute a lot more to humanity overall, it's just less visible because the benefits are widely distributed. What enables projects like this is the huge amounts of human labour that have been saved by less glamorous projects, along with general innovation in manufacturing.
I think it's the opposite trend actually over the last two years. HN has become a lot more positive. Frankly I think it's reduced discussion quality a lot; people are unwilling to be frank and point out flaws.
I don't think this is a recent trend, look at the presentation post of Dropbox[1] from 9 years ago. On the one hand, YC is a relatively contrarian community. On the other hand, if you agree with something you may not have much to add, but if you disagree you'll probably want to express why.
> Part of me wishes HN had a really strong moderator that slapped down nay-sayers.
Slapping down dissenting opinions leads to an echo-chamber. One mans sceptic is another's "nay-sayer", I think community moderation (via votes) is filtering high value comments rather well,so specific moderation is hardly required: egregious flaming excepted.
> If you're not contributing something valuable, comment deleted
Just because you disagree with a given opinion does not make it worthless.
> Part of me wishes HN had a really strong moderator that slapped down nay-sayers. If you're not contributing something valuable, comment deleted.
What a load of rubbish. Note that HN already has strong moderation, and does delete "way out there" contrarian views. If this was taken to the extreme, only back-patting allowed, the comments would become useless. And I feel, like others, this already goes on a lot (e.g. the top karma posters all tend to agree/compliment each other, there isn't that much disagreement although it happens sometimes).
> I can't agree more. I've seen HN degrade into that kind of discussion over the last 2 years and it really disappoints me.
You say it's "degraded", but it's more likely that HN's audience has diversified as it's grown, and therefore it's less likely for you to agree with any given comment.
Just an idea: sentiment analysis has gotten pretty accurate.
What if HN included sentiment in the sort algorithm?
The post score you see would stay the same (upvotes minus downvotes). You'd just multiply the sort score by, for example, 1.25 for posts positive in tone and 0.8 for posts with negative tone.
So if two comments have about the same number of upvotes, the nicer one appears higher up.
Criticism or disapproval could still become top post with enough upvotes, but it wouldnt happen as often as it does now.
Hah, you just described the sheer drivel which is comments on LinkedIn stories. Good point - contentious and _well presented_ negative arguments are still helpful.
I am currently doing a (simple) sentiment analysis for the complete reddit comment set. Perhaps when I am done with that, I can have a look at the HN corpus (where to download?) for correlations between upvotes and users, though I doubt that rating post quality by sentiment is easy.
But it could be useful to look at the comment history of a user. When someone who is an overall positively minded contributor (with a high average positive sentiment) suddenly writes one scathing reply, this could mark a potentially interesting thread.
If that worked at all, it could be applied before the comment was even posted. Warn the user that their comment looks inordinately negative, and ask if they would like to revise before submitting.
I think hackaday is a good example of a community with similar (techie) people to HN that has gone further down the same path of negativity, cynicism, and salt. HN is great and the moderators here do a good job (I'm always impressed by the way dang handles issues), but I do think some sort of push is needed to get us off of that path.
Hackaday comments have never not been salty, and I say that as someone who's followed that site since before the pictures were in color. I'm not sure there is a useful comparison to be drawn.
At least in my case, I see trying to start a Mars colony as a death trap. It's the illusion of carrying on the human race, but it's really just dooming a bunch of pioneers to a grim fate in an extremely hostile environment. I think making a south pole colony would be hard enough, let alone a Mars one.
I mean, Musk himself is very upfront about the risks involved, especially for the first few waves of colonists. And indeed, there would likely be very little personal upside for them, even if they survived the grueling initial period. But you're making a false equivocation: considering the colonists personal risks in leaving against the species shared risk in staying. If there's even a small chance of success in establishing a self-sustaining colony off of Earth (and I don't think you can argue that success is inconceivable/vanishingly improbable), then any degree of personal risks levied on individual colonists are "worth it" from the species level perspective, which is precisely the perspective taken to justify the mission.
> If there's even a small chance of success in establishing a self-sustaining colony [...] then any degree of personal risks levied on individual colonists are "worth it" from the species level
No, the risk v reward curve has to be better than an equivalent risk v reward curve for a terrestrial species survival project to justify the mission.
I would argue that just about any PhD in epidemiology, disaster relief, or geopolitics will have a risk/reward curve far better than any Mars mission.
People keep making this argument that, absent any other information, a two planet species is more robust than a one planet species. But that's not the choice we're facing. The choice is a two-planet species versus a more prepared one-planet species.
I think no amount of geopolitics PhDs will reduce the chance of wiping out humanity through nuclear war more than Mars colonization does.
I think it may take some time - centuries even - for colonizing Mars to "pay off" in terms of reduced extinction risk. But I think in the long term - say 500 years from now - we will indisputably be safer as a species if we started colonizing Mars 500 years ago than if we didn't. And if we don't start now, then when?
There is no vaguely plausible scenario where humanity goes extinct through deployment of the current nuclear arsenal. I would put the probability at zero.
I would increase that number if someone could tell a story with even a whiff of truth about how it could happen.
I don't understand the abject lack of imagination, or optimism, or whatever it is, that makes some people believe that mildly complicated engineering challenges are somehow impossible. Do you think no one in SpaceX has thought about this for more than five seconds?
Obviously it's not completely trivial to sustain humans on Mars, but there is literally no reason to believe we couldn't accomplish it using current levels of technology, to say nothing about whatever we're going to invent over the next fifty years.
Keeping humans alive on Mars starting from now is vastly easier to comprehend than putting a man on the moon starting from 1950. I wonder how many armchair pessimists there were for the space program back then.
> Keeping humans alive on THE MOON starting from now is vastly easier to comprehend than putting a man on the moon starting from 1950
Fixed. Mars is impossible, for now. We haven't kept someone in space long enough to reach mars nor have we developed a sustainable model that's extraterrestrially tested. Mars has more problems than a moon base, not significantly less (there's a few small pros and cons but being so far away is a major con).
> there is literally no reason to believe we couldn't accomplish it using current levels of technology
Except that we have no demonstrable way to do it, any fantasy seems plausible in comparison. At least try to start a closed biological system with a rat and find out how hard that is, then add the lag-time to service problems and a low gravity high radiation environment, etc. The movies have really poisoned the reality for the US population, but maybe it's part of the PR to raise money. I can understand that, but I won't concede that it's doable yet.
> We haven't kept someone in space long enough to reach mars
A quick google search says a trip to mars varies between 150-300 days. The longest human spaceflight exceeds that at 438 days aboard the Mir space station [1] from 1994-1995.
They're not comparable. Life in LEO gets protection from solar radiation. Life in space, on the surface of the Moon doesn't. Life on Mars gets some protection, but it still needs to be managed.
Nope, I meant what I said. The moon was impossible in 1950. Actually impossible, not just expensive like getting someone to Mars in the very near future. The tech didn't exist.
> We haven't kept someone in space long enough to reach mars nor have we developed a sustainable model that's extraterrestrially tested
SpaceX claims to be able to do it in as little as 90 days. You can go a lot faster with more free fuel. We've kept someone in space for 4 times that.
> Mars has more problems than a moon base, not significantly less
What are you referring to? Mars has available gasses, water, and more easily accessible useful solids than the moon. It will be easier to get radiation shielding on Mars, as the surface is more amenable to building underground structures.
> Except that we have no demonstrable way to do it
You are aware that we have sent probes to Mars, yes? The only difference between that and the human is how much money you're willing to spend to increase the chances of the journey being survivable.
I don't think growing food in space is all that important, as long as you can grow it on Mars. You can pack supplies for 80 days, especially if you have an effective water re-usage system like the one on the ISS.
Once on Mars, we could probably use something like this:
Which immediately suggests a way to help with the Mars plan - in the time SpaceX and (hopefully) others are building the transportation architecture, someone should go out there and try to set up a self-sustaining colony on the pole or in the middle of a desert. Data and experience collected will be invaluable and directly useful for the Mars mission.
They actually learned a bunch of things from that. Including that the concrete took CO2 from the atmosphere in chemical processes that was unexpected, leaving the plants short and not producing enough oxygen.
The insects and plants selected didn't cohabit well, as well another issues. There was clearly lots to learn from the experiment.
Hear, hear. I can't for the life of me understand why that experiment isn't being tried hundreds of times, all over the world. Learning how to create sustainable sealed ecosystems is one of the most important things we can do. Quite apart from the valuable knowledge we'll gain, once we get that nailed we can seed those suckers all over the place - South Pole, Sahara, orbit, Mars, upper atmosphere of Venus...
The really weird thing is we already sort of know how - "bottle gardens" are a thing. It seems to be mainly a question of scale. So why aren't we building bigger and bigger bottle gardens?
>I can't for the life of me understand why that experiment isn't being tried hundreds of times, all over the world. Learning how to create sustainable sealed ecosystems is one of the most important things we can do.
Apparently, after giving it one little shot here in a convenient location and failing miserably, we think we can just skip straight to Mars and be successful there.
In Poland, there's a Mars-like base being built right now, though not aimed at testing self-sufficient ecosystems but equipment and work procedures of potential off-world colonists. My guess is there's more of such little-known projects happening.
The point being, the number of projects related to living off-world is slowly increasing, and my guess it will only go up as the perspective of Mars mission comes closer (SpaceX is doing a lot of good work making this close to "very soon" in peoples' minds). So we're definitely not "giving it one little shot".
>someone should go out there and try to set up a self-sustaining colony on the pole or in the middle of a desert.
>That's already been done. It was called "Biosphere II", set up in the Arizona desert. It failed.
>An experiment is only a failure if you don't learn anything from it.
It was a failure. Go back and look at what I replied to: the OP said someone should go set up a self-sustaining colony. That was attempted with Biosphere II. It failed. It was not self-sustaining.
It they learned stuff from it, that's all well and good, but it doesn't meet the requirement from the OP of being self-sustaining.
The OP says we should set up a self-sustaining colony on Earth as practice for something in space. We have not done that. We tried and we failed, and we didn't bother trying again. So the point here is: what makes us think we can set up a self-sustaining colony on Mars when we can't even set one up in Arizona? Cart before the horse.
You appear to be thinking of it as an attempt to set up a colony, whose purpose was to be a colony (or a simulation thereof). It failed at that, sure.
But it can also be thought of as an experiment whose purpose was to test the hypothesis "this is a good way to set up a colony". In the scientific sense of the term, experiments that disprove their hypothesis are as successful as those that prove it. A failed experiment is one that is inconclusive or incomplete.
You seem to be thinking of it as a scientific experiment. I'm not. In the context of the OP's comment, I'm thinking of it as a "trial run", to see if we can figure out how to build a self-sustaining colony here on Earth, where it's safe and we can cut the "simulation" short if there's a problem and try again, before we try it for real on another world. In that context, we failed. We did not set up a self-sustaining colony and prove that we can do such a thing successfully. Perhaps we could be successful if we tried it a few more times, but we have not been successful yet. Therefore, we are unprepared to attempt any such project on another world.
Building a habitat on another world is not a scientific experiment; it's an engineering project.
We live pretty cushy lives, so it's easy to forget just how difficult progress was at times. Read about David Thompson and what he went through to discover the northwest passage, or any of those guys who did things like that.
Doomed pioneers suffering grim fates in hostile environments is how the west was won.
You say a south pole colony would be hard enough as though we don't have one. We have a south pole colony [0], and there are a half dozen multi-million dollar experiments there that must be manned year round.
I'm not saying "don't try", I'm just saying "I think what you are attempting is foolish and that you are just going to kill a bunch of people", that's all. I can express an opinion about a potentially deadly venture, can't I?
I wasn't suggesting that you cannot have an opinion. It's a perfectly valid opinion. I was implying that as a society we have a tendency to impose our opinions on others through laws and social pressure.
A lot of large engineering projects have killed a bunch of people before succeeding. It's fine, as long as the people accept the risk, and aren't deceived.
If you don't like it, then you're free to go do whatever it is you do like.
Right. And as what appears to be the loudest voice in this discussion, it's also my prerogative to advocate for what I believe to be a better allocation of resources.
Lets not pretend there is not competition for attention, capital and enthusiasm for vision based projects. That I advocate for one over another - in competition - is exactly what is supposed to happen.So, bring the merits of both and have the conversation.
Just saying yay this thing is credulous and doesn't actually evaluate what are possible futures.
In my case I advocate for Transhumanism and AGI as our solutions to his existential questions and promote those (as does Musk actually but to a lesser extent).
You're free to advocate for other things, but most of the critics aren't doing this, they're just shitting all over this idea and then making vague waves in the general direction of other ideas.
Further, why so much focus on this particular billionaire, who at least is focusing pretty hard on driving progress even if you don't agree on the precise direction, and ignoring all the ones just wasting it, or being actively counterproductive?
That's the part that really drives me nuts. A lot of wealthy people are doing things that are highly questionable or are outright destructive, but they don't get this much criticism.
> That's the part that really drives me nuts. A lot of wealthy people are doing things that are highly questionable or are outright destructive, but they don't get this much criticism.
For one part, I think many people just expect wealthy people to do questionable and outright destructive things. If there's someone that doesn't fit these expectations he or she shatters that worldview because wealthy people can't at the same time be good people, too, can they?
This has a lot to do with a warped sense of equality and equity: People who aren't so well-off don't get to have these opportunities to change the world in one way or another so the ones who are in that worldview shouldn't get to embark on positive endeavours either, so everyone is equally miserable.
The fallacy with that of course is that with everyone feeling equally miserable everyone's worse-off whereas if people - wealthy or not - make the most out of the deck they've been dealt everybody (or at least society as a whole) will profit.
The funny thing about Elon Musk is that he actually accomplishes stuff. Which is not the norm among vision-driven people.
I regularly get approached by vision-driven projects, to help them make something concrete, and the vast majority of them will accomplish nothing because the people on them are not doers and they don't understand practical matters. Many, many people do not understand the difference between dreaming and doing. And many people will happily waste their entire life dreaming about things and then getting bitter when someone else doesn't realize it for dem and give them the credit.
I'm not going to name names, but I had a discussion with a fairly known "visionary" who has been trying to claim credit for something which he did not do. Simply because he fucked around with an idea without actually making any progress on it for _decades_. All he did was to make it ever more complex and unattainable by adding useless shit to it. Then when someone actually managed to strip the idea down to something that could be realized he first shit all over it and then tried to claim credit for it once it became successful. Yet he wanted everyone to recognize him for his "contributions".
I generally don't give a shit about what people who do nothing think. To me, they do not count.
Elon Musk does stuff. His critics don't. Let's start there.
> Further, why so much focus on this particular billionaire,
Personally, I'm worried by the fact that it's a billionaire driving this, nevermind which one in particular. If and when SpaceX colonizes Mars, what sort of life will the people up there live? Will it be a Musk dictatorship? A corporate fiefdom? Rich people remaking society in their own image wasn't exactly the space dream I grew up with.
There's a weird sort of fear of potential corporate dystopias that just ignores all the actual government dystopias that have existed throughout history. Plenty of government colonies were dictatorships, fiefdoms, attempts at building bizarre and broken societies. Many people reading this live in nations that originated in exactly that fashion.
There have pretty bad corporate dystopias in history too. The East India companies, Belgian Congo etc.
Many nations with dystopian origins are fine now, sure, but there was a lot of suffering along the way; I don't think it's unreasonable to want to prevent that.
The point is that there have been plenty of purely governmental dystopias -- far more than there have been even pseudo-corporate ones like the ones you describe -- but we don't have people fretting about how we shouldn't have the government run Mars colonization due to that.
Weren't Algerians citizens of France? Anyway, if we're no-true-Scotsmaning here, there also aren't any examples of dystopian colonies run by "corporations" that weren't joined at the hip with a national government.
I'm not ever so familiar with that history, but a quick look at the wiki suggests very much not; some of the elites were (and, at certain periods, the non-muslim population), but never the regular population, and indeed this was a major point of contention leading up to the war.
> Anyway, if we're no-true-Scotsmaning here, there also aren't any examples of dystopian colonies run by "corporations" that weren't joined at the hip with a national government.
Musk is explicitly talking about a "public-private partnership". I think any project on the scale of Mars colonization is necessarily going to be intimately entangled with one or more governments.
It's not like NASA or anyone else is going to make it happen anytime soon if this weren't happening. If anyone else wants to take a shot at Mars, they're more than welcome to. Even long after SpaceX's plans come to fruition (assuming they ever do), Mars is a big place and there will be plenty of room for other organizations to do their own thing.
> Will it be a Musk dictatorship? A corporate fiefdom? Rich people remaking society in their own image wasn't exactly the space dream I grew up with.
i see the possibility, with corporations there is always the option of quitting the job - that's the limiting factor, so that it can't get really totalitarian as it doesn't have the teeth for that. However you don't have the option of quitting up on Mars. There will probably be shortages and huge problems during the initial stage, so you might end up with a highly stratified society (provided that there are no robots that could do all the work for us).
Now there is always the option of a benevolent dictator who will actually quit after two terms; it has happened before. They might just as well put up reasonable institutions of government given that we have this tradition down here on earth.
i guess the colonists will not just silently comply with a dictatorship (that's a key requirement for keeping this system), just because they are not used to this sort of governance.
If that were actually the case, then there would be no poor people, and we can all at least agree that all other things being held constant, a society where no one is poor is better than one where some people are poor, right?
In the talk, Musk says that he plans on selling the ticket, not building the colony. The colony will be a product of the different interests paying to send people to the planet. Who those interests will be is anyone's guess.
Further, why so much focus on this particular billionaire, who at least is focusing pretty hard on driving progress even if you don't agree on the precise direction, and ignoring all the ones just wasting it, or being actively counterproductive?
Because there is nowhere to engage with them or around their capital allocation specifically? Also because the problem set they are trying to solve is not as ambitious. Remember the problem set for this Mars project is basically "Saving Humanity from Extinction."
You see similar conversations come up when large scale renewable projects are invested in - wherein people shout about how people should be investing in fusion or Thorium etc...
Also, if someone comes out and says "We're investing in Docker" and the response is "You should be investing in AI instead!!" it just makes you look like a crank - largely because they are different value investments.
My point is basically that it just makes you look like a crank regardless of whether the subject is Docker or Mars.
Sure, people do this stuff all the time. And it's ridiculous, and I can't understand why people are doing it here or why you're defending it.
You're saying that if people are highly ambitious and trying to do some good, that makes them more of a target. And furthermore, you seem to be embracing that. I agree with the former, but strongly reject the latter.
> it's also my prerogative to advocate for what I believe to be a better allocation of resources.
Honest question, not trying to be rude: what makes you believe you have a better idea of what a good allocation of resources (and Elon Musk's / SpaceX's skills) would be?
If you're so smart and good at allocating resources, what prevents you from pursuing that other project instead of demanding from other people to follow your lead?
what makes you believe you have a better idea of what a good allocation of resources (and Elon Musk's / SpaceX's skills) would be?
Same reason as anyone else I suppose. Not really sure how to answer that without sounding like a douche.
If you're so smart and good at allocating resources, what prevents you from pursuing that other project instead of demanding from other people to follow your lead?
You could have made the effort of reading his messages in this very sub-thread before answering. Not that I agree with him, but he has his 'vision' too.
> Honest question, not trying to be rude: what makes you believe you have a better idea of what a good allocation of resources (and Elon Musk's / SpaceX's skills) would be?
We all advocate for what we believe, advance our best arguments, and collectively reach conclusions. That's how discussion is supposed to work, no? Or are we supposed to pick the smartest person in the room and then ignore everyone else?
Let me argue that allocation of resources as a zero-sum game is a deeply flawed view of the situation. There is competition, but this is not a bucket-for-bucket transfer and given the figures displayed here as well as ballpark estimations, there is more than largely room for all of those to develop simultaneously. As mikeash points out, there is an untapped audience as well as boatloads of resources going down the sink that totally dwarf the resources put in any of those endeavours (and this extends way past "wasteful" billionaires)
The problem is that while what you say is true over a long period, it's not true in the time period necessary to make progress work.
This is especially biting when you go out to raise money - there is a limited pool of money out there that is looking to be allocated. Sure, some small changes open up small amounts - such as the introduction of crowdfunding - but generally speaking there are more companies seeking funds than there are funds seeking investment.
Said another way the pie grows too slowly to consider the market anything other than zero-sum over the window of time that a venture has.
Just pass a few laws. Outlaw the First Amendment, so people can't spread these dangerous ideas. Put people like yourself in charge of 1st world nations. Then confiscate the wealth of anyone who attempts travel to Mars. Anyone who attempts this dangerous idea in secret would be locked up, of course.
You're also free to critique an idea that's been put out there in public. The so called free market of ideas where people get to express their opinions on said idea. Or do you only want to see cheerleading? Because not all ideas are good, or feasible, or appropriate for now. The might be ahead of their time, and so forth.
My dictionary defines "critique" as "a detailed analysis and assessment of something." That is not what I'm seeing here, nor is it what I'm arguing against.
I have no problem with people arguing against SpaceX's Mars plans, either on the basis that the plan is infeasible, or that he should be doing something else. I have a huge problem with people arguing against it on the basis that the commenter doesn't like it and the whole idea is dumb.
I know, right? Maybe we can engineer a hardy Martian goat that can eat the algae that puts oxygen into the air. Martian goats produce C02 and fertilize the soil. Now you have a source of dairy and meat for our future colonists. Imagine kids in the future, growing up dreaming of being goat herders on Mars.
And then after many generations, those goat herders, having long since lost their spacefaring technology, will create a few different and competing religions. A couple thousand years later, when Martians develop more advanced technology and even manage to send Martian people to their moons Phobos and Deimos in primitive spacecraft, they'll still be arguing about which of those religions is correct.
I think you'd want the goat to consume CO2, not produce it. There's already plenty of CO2 there. Other than that, your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Kids, hell. As long as I could get a good enough price to make sure my folks were well looked after, I'd sell my indenture tomorrow to go and be a goat herder on Mars.
HN achieves excellent S/N, even with some negativity. It's run very, very well. I go back to USENET and pre-internet fora. In some cases it was impossible to have intelligent conversations because six users "owned" the list. Nah, this is really good. Negativity and all. I've run into moderators a few times and, in retrospect, it's always fair and justified.
This. I too go back to Usenet and Compuserve. I'm really close to giving up on Slashdot altogether. I've only recently come across HN and love it. Vast majority of discussions are polite, thoughtful, considered and interesting. There are almost zero personal attacks and very few content-free comments. It reminds me SO much of the early days of the net.
My greatest fear is that HN too shall fall to the trolls and numbskulls.
Reading this whole thread I'm reminded of something from my childhood that greatly impressed me. My mother emigrated in the sixties from a country which had undergone a communist-fomented civil war in which her father, a policeman, was killed (when she was four). When she arrived here she know no one other than my father. One of her first and greatest friends here was a woman that along with her husband was a card carrying member of the communist party. When I was old enough to understand these things I was pretty stunned that two people who by rights should probably hate each other, could get along and be so friendly. That has stayed with me to this day. We can seek consensus and argue positions and come together or stay in our corners. But the ability to do it without being dicks is very special.
It's human nature to attacks a reality-distortion field.
If he would have said "You know guys. We're going to Mars. But right now, we're working on making rockets that go up, on time, in one piece.
When we finish with that, we'll show how to go. It'll be hard. Here are the technical and sociological issues involved. When we're getting close to being ready to go, we'll get working on them."
He was completely up front about how early they are in this project. He even acknowledged his overambitious timelines, saying that the one he presented was the most optimistic and probably wouldn't happen.
I can't understand how this kind of openness gets labeled "a reality-distortion field."
Behind OldSpace? Im sorry that is an absurd claim.
OldSpace has not devloped a new rocket or rocket engine or rocket in a while. OldSpace has almost completely been pushed out of the international launch market. OldSpace launches cost at least 2x more, and for a number of missions more like 4x more. SpaceX is flying a young rocket that is seeing huge amounts of improvement still, while Old Space is flying Old Rockets that don't really improve all that much.
They are not just 'launching rockets'. SpaceX is flying an active Space ship, Dragon 1, and are working on another one. OldSpace company Boing is for 4.2 Billion for the Commercial Crew contract, SpaceX only 2.3 Billion. For that money SpaceX will have to perform extremely complex tests, that the Boing craft will not even be capable of. Plus, Boing has actually tried to get around even the more basic tests. Additionally to that Boing is already far behind on their schedule, even thought they were specifically picked over SNC Dreamchaser because 'they are the most likely to finish development in time'.
They are in space, orbiting Jupiter and Saturn, driving around the surface of Mars, flying by Pluto and escaping the solar system. And that's just NASA.
While its true that they haven't landed a rocket on a barge, I'd say SpaceX is far, far, far behind.
> OldSpace has not devloped a new rocket or rocket engine or rocket in a while. OldSpace has almost completely been pushed out of the international launch market. OldSpace launches cost at least 2x more, and for a number of missions more like 4x more. SpaceX is flying a young rocket that is seeing huge amounts of improvement still, while Old Space is flying Old Rockets that don't really improve all that much.
1. I consider Arianespace and Proton "OldSpace" - Old established players who exist to make a buck.
2. What counts is success at your business. If you're good at that, you can take time off to do R&D. If not, you're rightfully seen as a not-focused, unreliable company.
It's like if Firefox Os. If Firefox was a great, secure, light browser and then they want to also came up with an OS, fine. If their browser needs work but instead they write experimental OSs, they got their priorities wrong.
Now it's true that OldSpace has been tremendously lucky with the latest rocket incarnations, but except the three Delta_III launches, they were tremendously successful.
Delta II was 151/153
Delta III was 1/3
Delta IV is 32/33
Oh, he clearly stated that lives would be at risk for the first flights. I can only imagine the contracts you have to sign, when signing up. If those people do not read them, you cannot blame Musk.
He's very upfront about the risks to the first visitors/colonists. His first screening questions for applicants is literally "Are you prepared to die?"
Popular false beliefs always seem harmless until they suddenly aren't. The principle of explosion means that one false belief can justify literally any course of action, and by the time people start on a harmful course it's too late.
For the principle of explosion to work you have to actually confirm that a belief is false, or at least calculate a justifiable probability that it is false. You can't just assume that it is false and extrapolate from there.
The point is you can't assume it doesn't matter because it seems harmless-if-false. The grandparent asked "why do you care [whether the things Musk is saying are true]?", but the answer is that you have to care about anything that's likely to influence a large number of people.
Criticism is good and the world needs more of it to thrive. It's not going to kill you (or Elon Musk, for that matter) to have some disagree with them. Forums were made for this very reason!
1. Part of participating in humanity is being critical. Part of participating in anything is being critical. If people have complaints, it doesn't harm you to hear them out. If you only seek to have your beliefs validated via the internet, you're going to have a bad time.
2. Just because someone criticizes Musk doesn't mean they're not critical of anything else. They're just giving you their thoughts on the subject, which is better forum etiquette than just randomly going on about China when asked about NATO, so to speak.
Criticism is fine. I don't like mindless criticism.
I must have written my original comment poorly, because a lot of people seem to have come away with the impression that I don't want to see any comments that aren't fawning. That's not it at all! I just don't want to see knee-jerk stupid negative comments that add no value to the discussion.
These do cause harm, because they waste time and derail conversations that could otherwise go to more interesting places. It's not a huge harm, but the harm is on the same order as the good that comes of a site like this.
As for #2, I don't see this sort of negativity towards the more mundane projects of other super-rich people when their activities get brought up. I don't expect to see it in this thread, but there seems to be a lot more effort put into whining about why Mars is a terrible idea than goes into, say, doing the same for why Uber is doomed in China or whatever. (Those get negative comments but at least they're mostly well thought out!)
I agree, but the tension is healthy. HN wouldn't work if everyone was overwhelmingly positive or overwhelmingly negative. We need skeptics as much as we need optimists to keep our sense of reality in check. The 90's Dotcom Bubble was arguably driven by unchecked optimism.
I don't think knee-jerk negativity creates healthy tension, it just sucks down the conversation.
I have no problem with intelligent, well thought out negativity. It's just the "why would anyone want to spend $100,000 to die in a metal box?" stuff that I really dislike.
> If you don't like it, then you're free to go do whatever it is you do like.
You forget that Musk envision a public-private partnership for his insane project. That means public money will be involved.
I don't mind Musk building an interplanetary rocket. I even agree with him that it will be useful to visit other places than mars. But his project to build a "self-sustaining city" on mars sounds ludicruous to me and I don't wont any tax money to be spent in it.
Oh come on, if you dont want people to criticize why do you expect everyone to show enthusiasm? Some skepticism will not pull Musk down if he has the means to deliver what he's selling, and no amount of enthusiasm will make a pig fly.
This just suggests Elon chose to run forward to avoid any questions asked about the current and the past. He didn't revolutionize anything yet, made a few small dents in status quo but still far away from his plans and visions. Why talk about interplanetary travel in 5 years if SpaceX rocket has just made a single successful flight to Earths orbit? Why talk about revolutionizing transportation if Tesla cars are just a tiny percentage of all automobiles without clear grow path beyond fanboys? Same with battery industry - nothing meaningful so far, just plans and visions. Deliver first then build on that...now even a single critical remark about Tesla can make the company value go down and Elon mad - get some solid foundation first and then look at the stars.
Criticism and skepticism are fine. What's not fine is criticism based purely on emotion or lack of information.
"The timeline is unrealistic and major problems X, Y, and Z must be overcome." I welcome this kind of comment.
"Going to Mars is stupid. You'll just die in a box. We should focus on climate change instead." This is what I'm complaining about.
SpaceX has a bunch of rocket companies working on reusability when just a few years ago that was dismissed as stupid. Tesla has a bunch of major car companies working on serious electric vehicles when just a few years ago there was nothing of interest. Both of those are already revolutionary.
Every time I hear him talk about Mars (placing it before curing cancer), I think "if only he had grown up wanting to eradicate poverty." Still...rather than think ill of his idea - and work - we should celebrate his innovation and the way he will inspire others.
As I thought about how he is perfecting rocket technology, I wandered off on a tangential rocket technology (thought) that would tract nuclear rockets launched from the earth's surface and curry them off into space... and return home.Is it a good idea? It is if it works. Do I plan on working on it? I don't know shit about rockets, so probably not. The point it, we need more "Mars Men" in order to discover the ideas that will change things here on earth. Maybe Musk won't cure cancer or end wars but maybe someone inspired by him will.
This is also a thing I think we don't explain very well, because a frequent response is "oh those things would've been invented anyway" (with the implication they would've been invented more cheaply).
Which is not how it works.
The cost of the actual raw materials to build almost anything is a tiny tiny tiny 1% fraction of the cost of what the thing actually costs to build. Rocket fuel, titanium etc. are all cheap compared to the cost of actual rockets. So the question of course is, where does all that extra money though? And the answer of course is: into people, process and technology.
The cost of rocketry, or particle accelerators or fundamental science, is correctly viewed as a massive sponsorship and investment into people and tools to improve how they do something so they can do it better.
And that is why "spin-off technology" actually happens in the first place - because large projects mean that we have now skilled up, tooled up and improved the capability of vast numbers of people, companies and fields of trade - which is what makes new innovations possible, or changes the market dynamics so things become economical and then profitable.
Eradicating poverty is a political problem. Going to Mars is an engineering problem. Political problems are orders of magnitude harder to solve than engineering ones.
> Some of the comments here make me think of crabs in a pot pulling down the ones who try to climb out.
It's fine with me if some of my fellow crabs climb out, but it is very important not to lose sight of the fact (and to his credit, Musk gets this right) that unless all of us climb out (and we won't) then conditions in the pot are still going to matter to those -- almost certainly the vast majority -- who are left behind.
Yes, but there is more than enough effort/energy/enthusiasm available to do both things. Both things are valuable and we need them both. And we can afford them. What Musk presented costs about as much as an Olympic game.
Probably not even close to that cost. I think he said something like $10 billion to get it up and running. How much did Rio cost? Even if that estimate is way too low, I think it's a lot more money poured into people running around in tight clothing.
I came here to learn from "armchair experts" about the challenges that lie ahead for such forays. Instead I am seeing that the discussion devolved to over-sensitive drivel. This might not be your initial intention, but you caused this.
HN bunch is courteous and precise and that is generally best applied to topics which require expertise. You triggered them to defensive mode and by now most are accusing you of fanboyism in the most courteous and precise way possible.
I hope you set an example to future commenters on what not to write.
I'm going to go one step further. If there is any private space exploration company who ever needs a programmer/engineer for long-term in-space missions, I'll do it. I doubt that you would find any candidates but I'd like to volunteer anyway.
I don't think I can do anything as valuable to humanity here on earth as I can by even helping space missions. Even if there is a 50% chance some system fails and I'll die in space I still think its important to do so.
And on a side note I've also always wanted La Forge's cool visor so if you can throw that in too I'd be very happy.
Augmented reality for spacecraft operations is probably one of the more immediately likely things for us to do. Filling those things with as many location sensors as possible so you can get context information of what's around you at all times would be a big important help, especially with how space messes with a lot of our normal 3D visual cues.
It's not directly your fault, but I wish there were more discussion of making humans a multiplanetary species and less discussion about the discussion here.
Yes! Everybody on this commenting forum that knows about the science or has any technical questions or doubts must shut up. Only adoring reverent fawning must be allowed.
I'm not talking about those comments. I'm talking about the mindless knee-jerk "Mars sucks, you'll just die in a box" comments that contain zero substance.
In the same way nerds got beat up because the jocks are just jealous of their brains?
There can be criticisms of a plan to send a few people to die in a metal box millions of miles away at incredible cost that do not require jealousy as a motivator.
This (almost) as accurately describes the Apollo program. Are you saying we should not have gone to the moon?
*There's criticism: "Maybe it would work better with Type A rather than Type B"
and there's _criticism_: "Thats stupid and you are stupid for thinking its not stupid"
Apollo was dangerous, expensive, and didn't accomplish anything that couldn't have been done more safely and cheaply with probes. It was cool as shit too, but I'm not going to pretend that 'cool' is a real basis for public policy.
Mr Musk is welcome to spend his money as he wants, of course.
And if someone would like to post those criticisms in an intelligent fashion, I would welcome them. I have nothing against contrary views, I only dislike contrary views presented purely for the sake of being contrary and with nothing interesting presented.
And yet there will be many capable people lining up for a suicide mission to Mars if that's what it comes to. Not just to be the first, but so that their potential sacrifice will change the future of humanity.
My lack of skills necessary as a programmer to help, and my health issues mean that I can't really do anything but cheer from the sidelines. There will be mistakes, but sometimes you have to jump into the river with both feet if you wish to cross.
There is pretty much nothing we can do to this planet to make it less habitable then Mars short of filling it with self sustaining death robot armies set to kill all humans or something. Incredibly severe global warming? Still a better temperature then mars. Nuclear Winter? Still can breathe the atmosphere.
"Self sustaining death robot armies" gets me thinking. What if the biggest threat is bad ideologies? Humans make pretty good self sustaining death robot soldiers if you can shape their brain accordingly.
Depends on how messed up it is. Earth ravaged by global warming and pollution? Yeah, still a lot easier than Mars. Earth ravaged by a strike from a gigantic asteroid that sterilizes the crust to a depth of three meters? Mars is probably easier.
The chances of the second one are pretty low, but some people think that any chance is too high.
Earth is still more hospitable in the case of your giant asteroid. Those in nuclear submarines and bunkers will survive unless they're very close to the epicenter. When they emerge, they'll find temperatures and atmosphere which are much more hospitable than on Mars. The survivors will also be able to scavenge abundant refined metals from the dead for rebuilding.
We can also start improving these facilities today, if we care about the survival of homo sapiens. Even out the gender ratio at Cheyenne mountain, give it a small nuclear reactor, a hydroponic farm, and a seed bank and we can be reasonably confident in it weathering anything but a very near miss.
As far as we're aware of, the crust of Mars is even more sterile.
I'm pretty sure humanity currently possesses the knowledge and resources to build multiple underground shelters around the Earth (as seen in Hollywood movies) that can sustain a population of at least one million indefinitely. Food can be grown with artificial lighting. Air and water can be brought in from outside, purified and recycled. If you need anything else, send robots (or people in protective suits) to scavenge the surface. The only thing we lack is political will.
Yeah in a lot of circumstances that is true, but the degree to which it is messed up is important. Eventually it will be too messed up right? Eventually the Solar System will be too messed up as well, but we need to start somewhere.
Just comes down to how well prepared you want the human race to be for a planetary or solar system wide disaster.
> So why are you upset with this one and not all those others?
Because most others aren't constantly being worshipped by people on HN and the like. Musk worship was the reason I stopped bothering with the technology subreddit.
Bingo! Aside from his dot-com successes, his other ventures are still in the early stages with uncertain futures. History could prove him a visionary or merely foolhardy. I don't get the hero-worship.
This seems unfairly negative. It may strictly be true that his ventures are "still in the early stages with uncertain futures." But the ambition and degree of difficulty of those ventures is also relevant. If you look at Tesla and SpaceX, I'd say the degree of success so far, relative to the degree of difficulty, is quite remarkable.
I don't think it's unfair. How would you view a person in the 1800s who invested a large fortune in electricity or automobiles prior to certain critical technological innovations that made those things practical. He had the right idea and wanted to move mankind forward but he was 50 years too early. Was he foolhardy? Was he arrogant? Was he admirable? I don't know. Mostly though I think he's not worth giving much of a damn about, and definitely not worthy of some kind of cult of personality of devoted fanboys.
I could buy that a few years ago, but EV adoption is taking off and some big automakers are now chasing Tesla's lead. Even if Tesla keels over and fails, their impact will be felt for a long time. Similarly, SpaceX kickstarted a new age in space launches by showing that the old ways really could be improved, getting reusability out from the long shadow of the Space Shuttle, and getting private companies into the game as more than extensions of the government. Like Tesla, they've made a big impact now even if they collapse.
The hero worship should be pretty simple to understand: he's built (with the efforts of thousands of people working for him, of course, it's a huge group effort) amazing things. Every time I get in my car, I marvel at it. He's landed an orbital rocket on a barge in the ocean. Several times! Even if somehow these things somehow fade into absolutely nothing, they're amazing accomplishments.
In addition, I'll bet that if he ended up broke, but having significantly pushed forward various technological ideas, he wouldn't consider it a failure.
Some folks who only focus on wealth would call it foolhardy regardless, though.
Not yet, although that is apparently the plan. If someone argued that it should be entirely privately funded, I'd be fairly sympathetic, although I don't agree.
(It is indirectly funded through some tax dollars with things like their ISS resupply missions, but that's money the company would get with or without a Mars plan, and could easily just take as profit instead.)
To me, reason for this is that most of those HN posters are people with progressive-left tendencies. They will never like the idea that a capitalist will be the one doing this kind of job far better than the collective (state).
> ...most of those HN posters are people with progressive-left tendencies...
If you have data about this, please share, otherwise avoid making unsubstantiated generalizations about the community. It's a predictable rhetorical device that doesn't move us towards gratifying our intellectual curiosity.
This is just my theory based on my previous encounters, call it generalization if you will. Sure, I cannot prove it as I cannot make a poll in HN about it.
> If you don't like it, then you're free to go do whatever it is you do like.
Well, maybe they like to shout "the King is naked". Or maybe they want the interest in space exploration to go towards what they think would be more realistic and/or reasonable plans.
> So why are you upset with this one and not all those others?
I'd venture that's because it somehow silently challenges the humanocentric point of view that many (unconsciously, mostly) hold onto. Why would anyone seemingly cling so much onto that pale blue dot unless it's held as deeply special in some way?
Because we don't have access to another pale blue dot. Turning Venus, Mars or one of the gas giant moons into a livable planet in any way comparable to Earth is a gigantic long term undertaking.
Who cares if it's a long term undertaking? The people capable of bringing about something. So miraculous won't be looking to achieve it all or see the fruits of their labor in their lifetime - a start contrast to the 12-30 month timelines that most modern software projects follow..
I didn't mean "special" in a practical way but in a "spiritual" (for lack of a better term, not necessarily tied to religion) one.
We have no chance of achieving that if we keep on endlessly postponing each step towards it. And as far as rocky space dots go, Mars looks incredibly close to Earth.
We could ask ourselves why aren't we attempting such a difficult task as space collonisation as a collective entity. Why are we busy fighting each other over limited resources when we could collaborate to build a better future for ourselves..
Well, man is still a teritorial animal driven by instinct, and as any animal, it perceives the unknown as dangerous and it will attempt to stop, in a knee jerk reaction, anyone who will try to change the status quo.
We're still driven by the past, by what we know, than by the future. We're not used to thinking in terms of probabilities and possible outcomes, but Elon does.
This is why most great breakthroughs have been made by exceptional individuals that fought through resistence and brought progress for the rest.
We are still not ready to act like a single consciousness. I wonder if we will ever be..
Alot of people react negatively to overt emotional manipulation. Musk's live stream is called "Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species." The only actual information in his talk was about the new line of rockets he's building. Transportation is certainly Musk's specialty, but with the information given combined with what we already know about the man's companies, he cannot even begin to address the scope of the opening promise. Human colonization, in this context, is a bait-and-switch.
If getting stuff to Mars becomes cheap enough, then the rest becomes pretty easy.
He's proposing a system for getting stuff to Mars cheaply enough.
Characterizing this as "emotional manipulation" is ridiculous. You want to see what emotional manipulation actually looks like, watch an Apple keynote. This is a guy risking his fortune on a crazy dream and presenting his efforts in a technical and factual manner.
Successful terraforming becomes easy once we can send alot of rockets to a destination? We are emperically terrible at sustainably making our own planet more hospitable to human life, how is Mars easier? I'm actually bewildered here; just baby me and spell out how the Mars colonization process works if the only significant requisite is being able to move things from point A to point B. Do not dodge by saying we've colonized land on Earth.
Remember, the talk was about a method of transportation, not colonization as the title suggested. Optimism is great; don't let it be a means of deception.
Terraforming isn't necessary. Growing food is probably a necessity, as even this cheap transport isn't that transport, but you can do that in greenhouses. Water is available. Energy is available in the form of either solar or nuclear. Getting the colony to be self-sustaining is hard, but it boils down to getting enough people and infrastructure there that they are able to build everything they need on site.
>Nobody has tried to make them self-sustaining. It's not as if people have tried and failed.
I'm certain folks have tried on Antarctica (we've had constant human presence there for decades).
However, we still failed even under a much more controlled and hospitable environment - Biosphere 2.
Biosphere 2[1] failed because of our lack of understanding of our own ecosystems on earth. A minute imbalance led to the entire ecosystem failing.
The issue with Mars isn't getting there (or back) - government's have been doing this for more than a decade.
The issue with Mars is getting people there, alive... and keeping them alive for the duration of the mission, and then returning them home alive.
We're only now starting to explore the effects of microgravity on the human body - and having not figured out how to mitigate some serious issues (such as your eyes losing shape, causing you to go blind[2]), we're not going to be able to seriously consider long duration space travel, let alone inhabit another planet.
Why are you certain folks have tried to make a self-sustaining Antarctic colony? I don't see why anyone would bother. You can get supplies from the outside. Activity on the continent transitioned directly from exploration to scientific outposts.
Biosphere 2 was in many ways more challenging than Mars. It was intended to be totally self-contained with all water and oxygen recycled. On Mars, water can be found outside, and oxygen can be made from the atmosphere industrially.
The transit time to Mars with this system is 3-4 months. Astronauts have already spent far more time in orbit than that. There are negative effects, yes, but blindness isn't one of them (and your link doesn't even list blindness as a potential consequence, just impaired vision).
It's possible that the reduced gravity on Mars would continue to cause harm, but I rather doubt that it would be so bad as to make the whole venture impossible. Maybe Martians have bad eyesight and shortened lives, but nobody's doing this for their health anyway.
> Why are you certain folks have tried to make a self-sustaining Antarctic colony? I don't see why anyone would bother. You can get supplies from the outside. Activity on the continent transitioned directly from exploration to scientific outposts.
Nobody said they _had_ to, but I'm sure someone has tried over the years out of a scientific interest. (Although I have no source for this, so it's unsubstantiated unless someone digs something up).
> The transit time to Mars with this system is 3-4 months
Travel time depends on trajectory, however safe estimates usually are around 6 months each way.[1]
> It's possible that the reduced gravity on Mars would continue to cause harm, but I rather doubt that it would be so bad as to make the whole venture impossible
Well, the effects we're observing now (for the first time!) are largely from Scott Kelly[2]'s year in microgravity. Going to mars and back takes around 1 year's time (6 months approximately each way), plus we assume they'll stay on the surface longer than a few hours... so these may prove to be serious complications. The scary thing is, few talk about these issues when dreaming about traveling to Mars (Musk included, apparently).
"Travel time depends on trajectory, however safe estimates usually are around 6 months each way."
The figure I stated comes from the presentation we're discussing, I didn't just pull it out of my nether regions. You can go faster if you're willing to use more fuel.
You're "sure" that someone has tried to set up a self-sustaining colony in Antarctica even though you have absolutely zero evidence for any such thing, yet you completely reject a figure I got straight from the source material we're supposedly discussing here? I can't carry on a conversation like that.
> The figure I stated comes from the presentation we're discussing, I didn't just pull it out of my nether regions
We have yet to see if these figures are sound. Hauling enough fuel up there for an oversized vehicle quickly becomes an issue - the more weight, the more fuel required, which adds to weight.
Regardless, 3-4 months each way is still a long time in microgravity. I don't see the point you're raising.
> You're "sure" that someone has tried to set up a self-sustaining colony in Antarctica even though you have absolutely zero evidence for any such thing, yet you completely reject a figure I got straight from the source material we're supposedly discussing here?
The grand point I raised was we've tried this on earth, and failed. We understand earth fairly well, comparatively... yet we've failed each time we try. We can't just waive hands and say this isn't an issue.
Right now my point is just that a discussion needs some foundation of shared understanding, and when you're insisting that there's some failed colony in Antarctica based on nothing, while simultaneously discounting believable numbers from the CEO of a successful rocket company because hauling more fuel is "an issue," then we don't have that.
I'm not talking about Mars anymore, because it would be fruitless.
> The grand point I raised was we've tried this on earth, and failed.
A grand point that you have failed to back up with anything other than a hunch, and are defending by rejecting numbers, that while are far from infallible, you didn't give any reason for rejecting.
> I'm sure someone has tried over the years out of a scientific interest.
Maybe as a hobby idea. But has anyone seriously tried, with an 8-9 figure budget, a team of engineers, etc.? Shipping in supplies is cheap. There is little financial motive to make a self-sustaining colony.
If terraforming is not possible and the Mars colony requires sealed and pressurized buildings, why does it need to be on Mars? Just build it on earth. And if earth runs out of mineable resources, mine asteroids instead, and build your colonies inside those asteroids.
> why does it need to be on Mars? Just build it on earth
The point is to make humanity resilient to what would otherwise be an exctinction-level event, such as an engineered superplague, weaponized nanorobotics, or a massive asteroid impact.
I don't know if you actually stayed for the Q&A session after the video, but this question came up and he addressed it directly.
His viewpoint is that SpaceX is a transportation company, not a colonization or habitat company. He drew an analogy to the railroad companies that built the first railroads to California. Once they made California easily accessible, others came after them to settle down to and build the state.
Two-way transportation is the biggest obstacle in the way of Mars colonization. That's why SpaceX is focusing on it. But colonization is what gets people excited, and it is the long-term vision, so it has to be the central pitch.
Having a sustainable transport scheme is a necessity in moving to Mars. I don't think anyone is naive enough to think that in practice transport is the hardest problem. But it's psychologically important - without transport there is nowhere to go. Either we become multiplanetary or not - I don't know - but if we become multiplanetary then transport is a necessary step. Building the transport scheme from economically self sustaining processes is only for the better for the robustness of it.
The fact that something is marketed does not diminish the utility of a thing.
> Human colonization, in this context, is a bait-and-switch
A switch with what, exactly? If he's just trying to make money, just space tourism alone would be more than enough, since he could charge the same as he'd charge for a Mars trip . Also, if your goal is to colonize Mars, a pretty critical step one is getting humans to Mars. It's not some nefarious plan.
Nobody's making you participate in this venture. If you don't like it, then you're free to go do whatever it is you do like.
You might think Musk could better direct his efforts and resources elsewhere, but most other billionaires don't do anything all that interesting, they just invest their money in mundane stuff, outsource jobs, build hotels, run for President, etc. So why are you upset with this one and not all those others?