i'm pretty sure he hasn't taken on the challenges he's chosen because they were easy.
Are there really millions of people who would sign up for the world's most expensive method of committing suicide?
The same could have been said about crossing oceans or strapping into a seat to travel thousands of miles at 30k feet in the air over mountains and open water. Safety is naturally an issue. One can never know what the future will be like, but I'd be fairly confident in saying that the world a hundred years from now will not be the world of present. I think it's that you're ignoring history, not that he's ignoring what's easy and what's not.
By the time millions are willing to sign up, it's likely that it won't be the expensive way to commit suicide anymore. I mean who knows, maybe we'll be shipping our criminals to mars.
If we knew for a fact that on the other side of the ocean was a place that had no food, air, energy sources or practical means of return and where touching anything in the environment will severely injure you from the intense cold, I don't think many people would have done that either, and those who did would not have living descendants today.
But anyway, if Musk is talking about the year 2500, yeah, I'll admit I have no idea what anything will be like then. And neither does Musk. Tautologically, nobody can really predict much outside of the foreseeable future. We could have perfected cold fusion by then, or a major cataclysm could have decimated the human race and left us in a new ice age. I don't feel any more qualified to say what that year will be like than somebody in 1511 was to predict what we'd be doing nowadays.
I honestly don't think history can prepare us for the concept of colonizing another planet. In fact I think the only thing history can tell us is "Humans are part of a very long chain of life that has evolved symbiotically with planet earth", beyond that I'm pretty skeptical. Mars has no magnetic field, 38% of the gravity of earth, non-existent air pressure, and is geologically and biologically dead.
Are there really millions of people who would sign up for the world's most expensive method of committing suicide?
The same could have been said about crossing oceans or strapping into a seat to travel thousands of miles at 30k feet in the air over mountains and open water. Safety is naturally an issue. One can never know what the future will be like, but I'd be fairly confident in saying that the world a hundred years from now will not be the world of present. I think it's that you're ignoring history, not that he's ignoring what's easy and what's not.
By the time millions are willing to sign up, it's likely that it won't be the expensive way to commit suicide anymore. I mean who knows, maybe we'll be shipping our criminals to mars.