I have a new column today on OnlySky. It’s about the feasibility of a Mars settlement… and the trustworthiness of the people currently best known for advocating it.
Mars is the closest place to Earth where human beings could even theoretically live. But, right now, the best-known supporters of establishing a human presence on the red planet are a gang of billionaires who are notorious for their unreliable, failure-prone technology, their long string of broken promises, and their Ayn Randian, libertarian-supremacist views. They’re absolutely not the kind of people anyone should trust to be in control of the oxygen supply.
So if they’re not the ones who should take us to Mars, who is? Or this is even a goal we should pursue at all?
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column requires membership to read, but you can sign up for free. (Paid members of OnlySky get some extra perks, like a subscriber-only newsletter and the ability to post comments.)
It’s not just Musk. The same goes for all the self-declared rationalists and tech-bro billionaires who think they’re head and shoulders above the common herd. Far too many of them prove to be con artists, like Sam Bankman-Fried, or swollen with lethal hubris, like Stockton Rush, or wannabe mad scientists who believe that rules are for little people, like Marc Andreessen.
None of them are trustworthy. None of them have wisdom to match their wealth or their lofty rhetoric. If we’re going to go to Mars—and, for the record, I do hope we eventually go to Mars—it shouldn’t be the private vanity project of a billionaire. It should be a shared commitment on behalf of all humanity, with only our best representatives selected for the mission.
I think Musk does deserve credit for something: rattling the market.
He rattled the market for electric vehicles. Do you believe we’d have the market penetration of EVs we have already if it weren’t for Tesla? Whatever your view of the quality of their vehicles, you surely can’t deny that the reason there’s such a wide range of EVs available is because Teslas exist. Similarly, SpaceX is rekindling some public interest in space technology that NASA had mostly lost.
I don’t think the future is Tesla or SpaceX, any than John Logie Baird’s TV technology was the future when it started. But Musk has nudged us to the future. Thanks Elon… now move on.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Musk’s ambition is to be Cohaagen, the bad guy from Total Recall. Without, I’m assuming, the eventual comeuppance dished out by Ahnold, or any inconvenient alien technology cropping up that will allow the proletariat to seize the means of respiration.
Well, that’s up to whoever is paying, no?
I don’t really see any ‘should’ there, other than your personal preference.
Several years ago, I predicted the following, and currently have little reason to revise it:
The first wave to establish a significant off-Earth presence will be governments: for science, military, and cultural supremacy purposes.
The second wave will be the tech billionaires: for commercial supremacy purposes at first, and later to establish libertarian “paradises” which are really dystopian techno-feudalist kingdoms.
The third wave will be major religious movements seeking to “leave the corruption of the old world behind”, similar to the Pilgrims, Puritans, and some of the other groups colonizing the Eastern US during the 1600s and 1700s.
The fourth wave will be a wide variety of radical separatist groups whose particular notions of freedom don’t mesh well with whatever most societies on Earth look like in the early-mid 22nd century (or whenever). It’s hard to predict what will matter by that point. The reason why this group is last is because I suspect that they’d have the most difficulty getting the resources needed to establish a significant off-world presence.
There would also be significant overlaps between the waves. It’s also possible that at some point, after all of the kinks, dangers, and logistics have been thoroughly worked out, and humanity is very well-established in the solar system and possibly making a literal reach for the stars, that there will be a movement for a total evacuation of Earth (and significant resistance to such happening) in order to turn it into a nature preserve. If so, no predictions to how that would go, as that would be centuries away.
One issue that rarely comes up is “what about the next generations?” Early colonists will be dedicated to their “perfect society”, but some of their descendants won’t be. Some of these societies will eventually become closed off, preventing anyone from entering, leaving, or communicating with the outside. Some of the third (religious) wave might be closed off from the outset. It’s a matter of “do people have the right to semi-permanently limit their descendants’ rights and freedoms”? Most of us would say no, yet under a colonization scenario we’d probably allow it anyway.
I think Musk does deserve credit for something: rattling the market.
Did he really change anything? Or did he just find himself lucky enough to be in the right place and time to pretend to be the instigator of something that was already starting to happen anyway?
This justification sounds a lot like what Internet trolls say when they say something blatantly wrong, stupid and insulting, then get called out on it and decisively debunked, then fall back on “I’m just trying to get a conversation started!”
Yes.
That’s just bluster.
Be aware that your idiosyncratic personal opinion about some claim is not a rational disputation of that claim. That, you have not attempted.
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Here, for you:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eblPwXFb7TE
As for SpaceX, if you think that’s the same old, same old (even after recent events), you are not well-informed.
Starlink seems to be somewhat useful, no?
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Anyway, he might not do the technical stuff, but somehow he’s been quite the catalyst.
Got rich doing it, actually.
PS I remember this well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
(That made quite the difference; South Australia is now a renewable energy leader)
I don’t think that people realize how difficult it is to live elsewhere in the Solar System. The closest that we get is in a military submarine, for example, like some 150 people serving aboard a US Ohio-class missile submarine for 2 or 3 months at a time. But submarine crews bring along all their food, and their vehicles make oxygen with electrolysis and chemically scrub carbon dioxide from the air.
Ipetrich: I’m sure #QElon is just as ignorant about that as most of the rest of us, if not more so. He doesn’t have any sort of a plan, or any new innovation up his sleeve that will make colonizing Mars any more feasible than is currently is, and he doesn’t care either. All he’s doing is latching onto ideas he’s found are popular or well-known in SF circles, and pretending he’s the bold brave cutting-edge techbro entrepreneur who’s gonna make it happen for real. This is why he’s talking specifically about Mars, and not Venus or Ganymede: because there’s been lots of SF written about Mars, and lots more people already are familiar with the idea of colonizing it; which means lots more people likely to be instantly responsive to his promises to make it happen for real.
This is also why #QElon is blithering a lot about things like AI and “neural implants” and vacuum-tunnel railroads: he’s seen lots of SF about those things, so he thinks they’re fantasies he can pander to.
Looking at previous human colonization, it is much easier than colonizing the rest of the Solar System in some ways. Our planet’s atmosphere is breathable everywhere on its surface with the peaks of the highest mountains being a partial exception. Edible flora and fauna live almost everywhere outside of glaciers and deserts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_human_migrations
Homo erectus got to 40 N over most of Eurasia and 50 N in westernmost Europe. Neanderthals and Denisovans got to 50 N over Eurasia.
Our present species originated in sub-Saharan Africa around 100,000 years ago, judging from “behavioral modernity”, crossed the Bab el Mandeb into Eurasia about 70,000 years ago, spreading to the southern parts and to Australia and New Guinea, and not going further north than some 30 N. But some 50,000 years ago, some of us started moving northward, reaching 65 N by 40,000 years ago, close to the Arctic Ocean. All with Paleolithic technology, no less.
These people did have their limits, however. Some of their colonization was by boat, but over distances of at most only about 50 kilometers. Farther water travel awaited Neolithic and later technologies.
The farthest waterborne colonization before about 500 years ago was by Austronesian-language speakers. They arrived in Taiwan about 5,000 years ago from the nearby mainland, and then in the Philippines around 4,000 years ago, spreading to Indonesia and coastal New Guinea and nearby islands over the next thousand years. But some 2,000 – 1,000 years ago, they went further eastward, going to the islands of the Pacific as far as Hawaii and Rapanui and New Zealand. Around then, some colonists from the Barito River in Borneo went westward, finding a good place to settle in Madagascar.
Space Cadets – Charlie’s Diary
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/08/space-cadets.html
“In particular, the fetishization of autonomy, self-reliance, and progress through mechanical engineering — echoing the desire to escape the suffocating social conditions back east by simply running away — utterly undermine the program itself and are incompatible with life in a space colony (which is likely to be at a minimum somewhat more constrained than life in one of the more bureaucratically obsessive-compulsive European social democracies, and at worst will tend towards the state of North Korea in Space).”
It is not just submarines that have a good analogy with space colonization, it is also surface ships. Air is no problem for them, unlike for submarines, though they have the problems of bad weather and sea ice.
We have centuries of experience with living aboard ships for long-distance voyages, sometimes for several weeks.
It may not be surprising that science-fictional military space fleets have a much closer analogy with navies than with air forces.