Neil deGrasse Tyson went on Bill Maher’s terrible show (that’s not good, I wish everyone would just starve that guy of air) and dismissed him quickly when he brought up Elon Musk’s plan to go to Mars. It makes no sense.
I have strong views on that. My read of the history of space exploration is such that we do big, expensive things only when it’s geopolitically expedient, such as we feel threatened by an enemy. And so for him to just say, let’s go to Mars because it’s the next thing to do. What is that venture capitalist meeting look like? ‘So, ELon, what do you want to do?’ ‘I want to go to Mars?’ ‘How much will it cost?’ ‘$1 trillion.’ ‘Is it safe?’ ‘No. People will probably die.’ ‘What’s the return on the investment?’ ‘Nothing.’ That’s a five minute meeting. And it doesn’t happen.
Tyson has offended Elon Musk! We need more of that. Musk fired back on Shitter.
Wow, they really don’t get it. Mars is critical to the long-term survival of consciousness. Also, I’m not going to ask any venture capitalists for money. I realize that it makes no sense as an investment. That’s why I’m gathering resources.
By “gathering resources,” of course, he means “plundering our investment in space research”. Sure, he doesn’t need venture capital money now, because he’s got his hooks into the federal government.
I am most aghast at that claim that Wow, they really don’t get it. Mars is critical to the long-term survival of consciousness.
The arrogance of the man! He sees himself as vital to humanity when he’s actually a selfish, weird parasite with an ego that leads him to think all he has to do is build a bigger rocket and people will love him as a savior.
That was enough to entice another very stupid man, Piers Morgan, to bring Tyson on to his show. If there’s anything Morgan likes, it’s being able to pit high profile people against one another in a spectacle. His second favorite thing is to ladle out smarm for rich people, so he says I’ve got massive respect for you [Tyson], I also have a lot of respect for Musk. I also like the fact that he dares to dream very big.
Morgan sucks up painfully, talking about vacationing in the south of France with Musk and how he wants to protect humanity from total ecological collapse and the heat death of the sun. So Tyson launches an even longer discourse on how the whole Mars dream is impractical and wrong.
Tyson is laughing throughout, which baffles Morgan, who thinks he’s chuckling about the eventual destruction of humanity. No. He’s laughing at how ridiculous and how ignorant Morgan and Musk are. They don’t discuss Musk’s follow-up accusation.
The real problem is that Neil decided to grovel to the woke far left when he got hit with a #MeToo. You can avoid being canceled if you beg for forgiveness and push their nonsense ideology. The truth hurts.
It’s an all-purpose excuse: any criticism is met with an accusation of wokeness. He is not a clever or rational man. Also, you should realize that being in favor of equal rights for women is not antithetical to being in favor of science and exploration.
They had this discussion and focused only on the possibility of getting a spaceship to Mars, which we know is possible — it’s been done. Getting a crewed spaceship there is much, much harder, but like Tyson says, is entirely within the realm of possibility if you throw enough money at it. What they don’t discuss is the whole absurd idea of colonizing Mars, which I think is not possible in this era, and if it were, the effort would be better dedicated to supporting our existence on this precious jewel of a planet, Earth.
Maybe Morgan should read A City on Mars and learn something. That’s not as profitable as sucking up to billionaires, though.
Hmmm:
“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
Would this apply to a Martian colony?
Worrying about the heat death of the sun? He has no idea whatsoever of the timescale has he!
It’s nice to see Neil deGrass Tyson’s rating is going up. It’s been a bit variable here in the past.
The heat death of the sun? WTF? Does he realise when that will happen and what the entire history of the human species is? And well no, a trillion won’t be enough. And there is no way he is going to accumulate a trillion either. And if consciousness doesn’t survive – who the fuck will care?
I think we should definitely take advantage of the rich abundance of life that has evolved on Mars, and rely on it for our long-term survival. Wait….
The massive arrogance and ignorance of the elongated muskrat is becoming commonplace in this society of crackpots. Money and religion seem to be two of the main supportive elements of the lunatics. The result is throwing massive amounts of money and fanaticism at projects to tilt at windmills (sometimes literally). It sounds like the muskrat foolishly wants to build cities he can control on mars, like the potemkin villages he is trying to build here. WTF
When Mr. Mollusk has no rational response he uses the right’s fallback excuse, The Woke Liberals. He also only focuses on getting to Mars, not the arduous undertakings needed for humans to thrive there. And of course, once a colony is established, so far from earth, what would stop them from claiming independence?
I’ve heard Tyson, as well as Brian Cox and others, talk repeatedly about the fact that humanity is on the verge of truly moving off planet. I think the folks in the space science community get it. They also get the enormity of the costs, and the risks to humans.
A NASA review of various estimates on the cost of a human mission to Mars…not a colonization, just a trip there and back like Apollo…puts it at $500B. That’s more than all of Musk’s resources. Also, that’s probably a conservative estimate that doesn’t factor in glitches like Apollo 1.
Furthermore, Musk is talking colonization to create an escape boat for a dying Earth. That’s a much bigger goal in comparison to a trip to Mars and back. To do that requires building enormous infrastructure on Mars and/or geo-engineering Mars. We’re not even sure what that means, if it’s possible, or what it costs. As I’ve heard Tyson say in several contexts, if we can geo-engineer Mars, then let’s apply that technology to geo-engineer Earth.
1) Musk would probably argue that the United States has no jurisdiction over his Mars city. Yet another reason not to follow Elon to Mars.
Musk is talking colonization to create
an escape boata scapegoat for a dying Earth. FTFYIf Elon wants to die on Mars, he’s welcome to. Buy a big enough rocket and leave the rest of the money to the public good.
One of the points I like to make is that if we can’t make a sealed environment work on Earth that will last at least a year without intervention, we have no business going to Mars. We need to prove we can camp in our own back yard before we go into a place far less livable than Death Valley. Of course, if we studied ecology enough to accomplish such a feat, we’d be much better equipped to fix Earth, rendering Mars moot.
Moving to a dead planet because we’re killing out living one is such a weird idea.
One of the biggest mistakes the Harris campaign made (after ignoring the genocide in Palestine and cozying up to Never Trump Republicans) was no longer calling weird people and their weird beliefs weird, and wanting to move from a dying planet to a dead planet is weird.
Really… apart from being an ignorant pillock, what does El Musko DO all day? Isn’t he supposed to be that hard-working, world-moving Galt-style zillionaire? When does he actually work I wonder (twittering all day does not count, natch).
Comparison to the moon:
The moon is much closer (< 400000 km) than Mars (> 75000000 km) and has a shallower gravity well. We have sent men to the moon. A total of 12 men, decades ago. The longest any person has spent on the moon is 75 hours. We do not have a stable, long-term inhabited colony there.
If Musk’s goal of “saving consciousness” is to happen, Mars would need to have not just a stable colony, but a breeding colony. That means at least a few thousand people.
Or perhaps we could just send an advance AI computer there and call it “conscious.” That would save a bunch of money.
That’s highly questionable. Musk does not have an engineering education. His college major was physics.
He does spend a lot of time tweeting. And claiming to support free speech in between banning people from X. And criticizing other people who work more than one job. And taking cracks at illegal immigrants. And flying from one place to another.
Elon Musk’s jets made 355 trips in 2024
I will never understand why people like Musk are so obsessed with “the survival of consciousness”. They would go as far to inflict massive amounts of suffering on millions of people if it meant a few of them could have a tiny chance to live a bit longer. Newsflash—if humans go extinct, and given all our best understandings of physics this is inevitable—literally no one will care. I fail to see the pressing concern of that
“The survival of consciousness?” What a pretentious asshat. Oh well, at least he’s admitting — as blatantly as possible without saying it outright — that he doesn’t give a shit about actual people, and only cares about some vague abstract ideal (that he probably doesn’t understand).
Grandiose dreams are nothing new.
According to Forbes: “$436.8B Real Time Net Worth as of 12/28/24”
(43.68% of a trillion)
He clearly leveraged his acquisition of the media company to sit at the right hand of power and inveigle himself into the halls of government,
PZ:
robro:
Recursive Rabbit:
Yes, yes, more like this, and louder.
Musk, you ludicrous anti-scientific Nazi dingus, if you were even vaguely serious about actually colonizing Mars, you would be working on building self-sustaining habitats in Antarctica and the Sahara and Gobi deserts as working models and proofs-of-concept. The fact that you’re not proves that you are a huckster with no idea what you’re even talking about.
@18 Owlmirror — He’s not the least bit interested in colonizing Mars. He only wants attention back here on Earth. Which is why he and fellow narcissist/bedfellow Trump are doomed to falling out sooner or later.
Scott Manley video:
FFS. Musk is such an idiot. It would be easier to build a city on the Moon or Antarctica than on Mars. Dude is doing way too many drugs because he has no idea about the practicalities. He just called Mars the next “New World”. The old New World already had plenty of people living in it before the white man got here. What a joke.
Ray, as my video shows, he’s been doing that for a quarter of a century now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Mars_colonization_program#History
This is nothing new, and he maybe doesn’t know about practicalities, though he clearly knows how to get very rich, beginning around 1999. Not bad for an alleged druggie, eh?
(https://finance.yahoo.com/news/rich-elon-musk-during-every-130036338.html)
If humanity is going to invest the ridiculous amounts of money to build self-sustaining cities underground on Mars, maybe we should start here. Invest some money in asteroid defense and learn how to redirect them, then build self-sustaining cities there. Mars has enough of a gravity well to make it a really crap choice.
Of course, I think we should focus our efforts on building sustainable and peaceful civilizations right here on Earth and figuring out how to defend them against threats. This, by the way, is really really really easy. The single biggest threat reduction humanity could do is to stop spending trillions on nuclear weapons designed to make Earth uninhabitable. There! I just made humanity’s likely life-span on Earth vastly longer.
Idiot authoritarian jackasses like Musk seem to have trouble recognizing that the biggest danger to humanity is idiot authoritarian jackasses like Musk. Sending them on a one-way trip to Mars would help with that problem but that’s hideously expensive. Maybe we could get them to build carbon fiber habitats down where the Titanic is. Is that more or less hostile than Mars? Well, a cinderblock and a short length of chain and you can get there pretty quick.
Raging Bee@#6:
“The survival of consciousness?” What a pretentious asshat.
Yes, he doesn’t even know what consciousness is. (Neither do I!) But if that was out concern, we are most likely going to be blasting various forms of machine consciousnesses all over near-Earth space – and abandoning them to die, like we seem to do with our children. If AGIs are smarter and faster than humans, would that make them more worth saving? Their potential immortality is a big plus. They are also potentially free of human sins and flaws. If we really want to favor consciousness we should be building robot probes and not wasting our time on humans.
Perhaps someday machine intelligences will scoff at the idea that MI bootstrapped itself out of (eew! Ugh!) masses of meat and bacteria and originated in a biosphere.
Biosphere 2 was a sealed environment that was supposed to demonstrate an extraterrestrial colony was feasible. It failed. it was 4.3 acres in size. No way Muskrat can make a viable colony on Mars. Remember High Frontier? Orbiting space colonies? Never got close to working. Theodore Taylor’s Santa Claus machine? 1978. A plan to create automated factories on the Moon? Never got past the concept stage. Eric Drexler’s Nanotech machines that could build anything. Not even close 30 years later. John Von Neuman’s automated self replicating factories? 75 years on, not even close. Muskrat is like Dilbert’s Wally. “I’m more of a big idea man.” Question. If Muskrat sends some suckers to Mars we know will die, is that a federal crime, negligent homicide?
First, I enjoyed “A City On Mars”, written by the married couple behind ‘Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal’.
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I have posted this in the infinite thread before, here is a summary
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A low-cost approach for providing enough water and other volatiles including a thicker atmosphere on Mars would take a couple of thousand years.
It includes nudging icy objects on elliptical orbits to make a gravity assist by Neptune when they reach perihelion. It would take mass like ca 4 100km kuiper belt objects (but it would be more practical with a million smaller objects). At the end you would have a (non-oxygen) atmosphere with a density like at the upper Himalayas, a ten-metre layer of silcate and iron rubble all over Mars, and a lot of water.
While you wait for the kuiper belt objects you build a superconducting orbital cable around Mars from metals from Phobos and run power through it providing a magnetic field that stops charged particles.
Now you can walk around on Mars with just an oxygen mask, without being fried by radiation (provided the atmosphere has a organic haze that absorbs UV as strongly as ozone would).
Two thousand years is nothing in geological terms, yet I doubt Musk et al would accept such a wait.
If you add even more kuiper belt mass you can even create shallow seas in the depressions. But now you may need to separate the volatiles from the solid rubble before dropping it on the world.
Machine intelligence may enjoy Mars the way it is, but as Earth has metals and other useful stuff concentrated in ore bodies (only available on planets with tectonic processes) there are reasons to look after Earth. Even if you are a robot.
We’ve tried each spinning space mote
and reckoned its true worth;
Take us back again to the homes of men
On the cool, green hills of Earth.
—Robert A. Heinlein
JM– what do you mean “alleged druggie”??? Musk went on a video podcast and performatively smoked weed around the same time he introduced compulsory drug testing (including for marijuana) for his employees.
shermanj and Hex–
Musk’s psychology is very basic. [1] He wants to put a colony on Mars so that he will be famous forever, even if that colony fails and everyone dies. [2] Protecting the future of consciousness is just a variation on effective altruism, i.e. a way for billionaires to justify whatever they want.
chrislawson, be aware there is another commenter here whose ‘nym is “JM”.
I know, probably unlikely to be confusing, but still.
—
As for the term, perhaps my own idiosyncrasy and age (I knew actual druggies); by the term, I intend to indicate a heavy chronic user, not just someone merely performative indulging.
Kinda like ‘alcoholic’ might be used for someone who has for the last quarter-century been functional, bibulous as they may be.
[I personally reckon he’s into plastic surgery and ozempic, but that’s mostly pattern-matching and also irrelevant; I add this because people somehow sometimes imagine I try to defend him]
Definitely NOT a big fan of NdG Tyson here. In my view he’s a wanna be and inferior copy of Carl Sagan who who vastly was better as a scientist and writer / presenter. He parasitised Sagan’s old Cosmos show overwriting it with his personal version which isn’t as good and done instead of coming up with his own more original work. Emulate Tyson but don’t just copy please Tyson! Hé’s also said some werid things about vegetarians in a Colbert interview here and then there’s the sexual assault claims against him :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson#Sexual_misconduct_allegations
Then there was Tyson’s weird, mean-spirited and unscientific crusade against Pluto which has eventually resulted in an absurdly flawed current definition of planet which excludes exoplanets, means that planets on a collision course cease to be planets and mean that Earth would stop being a planet if it orbited far enough away from our star among other issues.
So Musk actually thinks that the heat death of the sun will affect Earth, but won’t affect Mars. Isn’t he the same guy who said that repeatedly nuking Mars would make the climate more like Earth’s? Yes, he is! https://youtu.be/OvTJeTbqKKY
@ ^ HidariMak : In fairness, when our sun ballooons into a Red Giant star in about 5 billion years time it will very likely consume our Earth but NOT Mars. There have been SF idea suggestions that nuking the martian polar caps might melt them creating a more habitable atmosphere although there is the obvs issue of the extra radioactivity among oher things making that problematic.
@28. Steve Morrison : Interesting Heinlein quote. I’ve read a lot of his books as a kid and don’t recall that one. Which of his books or short stories was that from please?
@25. cheerfulcharlie : “Remember High Frontier? Orbiting space colonies? Never got close to working.”
Never actually attempted – yet :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder
Remember reading about them and thinking they were an awesoem idea and still do. Basically supersized space stations like the fictional Babylon 5 which whislt currently SF may one day become reality. Justlike martian colonies, space elevators and interstellar travel insome form. Big, grand, imaginative dreams but apparently unlike some here I’ve no objection to those.
Remember that people thought flying heavier than air craft was imposible once as well as space travel, Moon landings, the sort of things SpaceX has already achieved and more.
&
Source : https://mdharrismd.com/2014/05/27/quotations-aviation-and-space/
Just because one, toxic evil billionaire nazi dreams big doesn’t mean that all such dreams are bad. Just because we haven’t yet done something doesn’t mean it cannot be done and isn’t worth trying to do. An old adage about babies and bathwater being ejected springs to mind here. Along with Clarke’s Laws :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws
Humanity can create and build and fly some absolutely fantastic things when we put on minds and efforts to it. When we prioritise them over other things like killing & persecuting each other en masse.
@34 HidariMak — The ultimate fate of the sun is to become a white dwarf — giving off residual heat effectively forever (trillions of years, given a universe that’s open and flat). Before that, it will balloon into a red giant that’s expected to swallow the orbits of the inner three planets. Earth will become a cinder. Won’t matter by then, of course, since the planet will have long since gone into runaway greenhouse mode with its oceans boiled away as the sun marches up the main sequence line toward the RG branch. This “heat death of the sun” crap sounds like some kind of pot-induced hallucination to me.
StevoR: I’ve always been fascinated by O’Neill colonies too; but I’m starting to suspect that an O’Neill colony might be more feasible than building settlements on the Moon or Mars — both because O’Neill colonies can be built closer to Earth and would thus be easier to get to than Mars; and because the Sunward hub of such a cylinder could serve as a better shield against solar radiation (with mirrors reflecting only visible light through large windows on the sides of the cylinder) than anything we could build over a ground settlement on any planet.
Also, a cylinder’s rotation could be adjusted to give people the gravity that’s most healthy for them, rather than being stuck with Mars’s or the Moon’s much weaker gravity.
[um, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Hills_of_Earth ]
Another idea comes from Kim Stanley Robinson’s “Mars” trilogy (plus a couple of adjacent novels taking place on Earth, Venus and elsewhere): hollow out an asteroid, refine its raw materials into whatever usable/salable stuff one can, then set the asteroid spinning so people can live on its inner surface like they would in an O’Neill cylinder — in just about any sort of artificial environment they might want to tailor for themselves. You’d lose the sunlight reflected in through big windows, but you’d also thereby be able to travel about the Solar System without depending on that sunlight.
A NASA review of various estimates on the cost of a human mission to Mars…not a colonization, just a trip there and back like Apollo…puts it at $500B.
“Like Apollo?” Does that mean three or more people crammed together in a capsule even tighter than an airline’s coach seating? For…how many MONTHS?!