The DOGE scam is fading, at least in the sense of helping Musk skim off money from the government, so now he’s pivoting to maximizing fear in the uninformed. Forgive me for including this clip from Fox News of that walking smarmy smirk, Jesse Watters, encouraging Musk to expound on his nonsensical imaginary apocalyptic claims of the coming doom of Earth.
He can’t even get the numbers right. He says that the sun is going to expand and swallow up the Earth in a few hundred million years — the end is imminent! It’s more like 5 billion years, but even a hundred million years is an immensity of time for a species that has only existed for maybe 300,000 years, and it’s ridiculous to be trying to terrify stupid people, like Jesse Watters, with the news of an apocalypse sometime. It’s a good way to shake down the rubes, though, just like the opening claim that the Biden administration stole billions of dollars from the gullible geezers watching Fox News.
I’m not being pessimistic to say that Musk will never build a colony on Mars; I doubt he’ll even get a single mission to land there and return. He is not saving humanity. He’s the biggest grifter to ever exist, and Fox News has cultivated an army of goobers who will direct the federal government to shovel their tax money into the gaping maw of this horrible person.
So far, all his large Mars rocket launches have been failures.
There have been 7 and a lot of them ended up blowing up shortly after launch.
The last one had the upper stage completely destroyed in the upper atmosphere.
No one who wants a lifespan of over half an hour is going to be a passenger on that rocket.
True.
The latest estimate of how long the earth will be habitable is 1.3 billion years.
Not worth worrying about when our planning horizon is 2 years, which is one election cycle in the USA.
Or was. Our US planning horizon has been getting shorter and shorter.
It’s now down to about a day, which is one sleep wake cycle for the current deranged wannabe dictator.
Trump changes his mind on key policies on a daily basis and no one including him knows what the current policies are.
What are the trariffs today and what products are exempt?
Who knows?
It depends on who has bribed who lately.
Watters is pretty much admitting that someone working for Musk just might make a non-notable discovery, which we probably won’t be aware of for hundreds of thousands of generations, but to just trust him that it is coming.
@1.raven : “So far, all his large Mars rocket launches have been failures.There have been 7 and a lot of them ended up blowing up shortly after launch.
Not quite. I think you mean the Starship rocket :
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship
Several flights of which have made orbit or shown that that can make orbit and one splashed down near its intended target. Many of them did blow up early on but then many SpaceX flights failed only to then prove extraordinarily successful. Starship is a marvellous rocket with a lot of potential that probly will soon be regularly achieving the goals set out for it just as the Falcon and FalconHeavy rockets and Dragon capsule etc..have done.
SpaceX have not yet attempted any Mars missions in terms of sending rockets there. They did send Musks’s personal Tesla into independent heliocentric orbit nearly reaching though.
I can’t stand that nazi douchebag Musk but what SpaceX have done has been magnificent and extremely successful. Despite more than because of their boss most likely.
Given their record of success so far I think SpaceX (not Musk alone) will manage to suceed in going to Mars if they seriously decide to do that. There is plenty of precedent for them doing what they say set already.
F-Elon Musk has said he wants to go to Mars and wouldn’t mind dying there. I would love it if he had that goal and only that goal of his accomplished soonest.
I’m willing to assume a little (a lot of) debt to help Elon accomplish the first half of that, so long as he’s on the rocket.
Watters had no idea the sun will eventually expand and incinerate the Earth? No surprise there.
And what the hell kinda k-hole results in this (sorry all caps in transcript):
Yeah, this is coming from the guy who is convinced we live in a simulation so…
The image of Musk in the Youtube capture above looks like a portrait of smugness from someone convinced they are always the smartest person in the room.
The sun will last another 5 billion years?
Oh, man. For a minute there I thought you wrote 5 million years. I was worried.
The time it’ll take for the sun to go into the red giant phase (the change that’ll roast the Earth) isn’t the only sketchy, wrong number there. They started off with DOGE numbers. There are several types of DOGE numbers.
High DOGE: Things Elon & co. think they’ve done in their high as a kite dreams.
Low DOGE: What they claim after some harsh reality checks by external sources.
Short-Sighted DOGE: What they really cut.
Reality: What them saving pennies will cost us in dollars eventually as they fuck everything up. Hint: this “savings” is a large negative number.*
Fox of course went with High DOGE and I think one of the highest numbers they ever claimed. Pretty sure that number has been brutally fact checked and humbled for months now.
This tells you that education spending will be cripplingly low for a very long time. At least until someone thinks of a way to profit politically off of the general citizenry finding out how badly this inept clown show is damaging the future of anyone who’s younger than Trump or Biden.
feralboy12 @8
5 million years is way too long a wait at this point. Bring it on!
I hate to throw cold water on Mars, but to take a riff from Bezos, I’d rather settle upon the summit of Mt Everest. At least the gravity is better there. Mars seems much worse.
As for the haploid spewing natalist haby daddy Musk and his fascist utopia on Mars, I offer an antinatalist pessimistic spin via Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun video which does us the solid of taking a more global approach toward Earth than the more localized focus of Tool’s Ænema, though I appreciate Maynard’s dis on LRH and his clones.
I don’t get Elon’s 1950s-esque Mars colony fixation. No breathable air, scant water, no magnetic field to block incoming solar radiation and X-rays, no possibility of assistance coming in under two years if something goes very wrong. Why doesn’t he first try to see if he could create a successful colony on Antarctica? It’s cold, but it’s got air and water. Give it a test run for five years. The one caveat being no outside help will be allowed. If someone falls ill or is in an accident, no life flights to Argentina. If he can make it work there, only then should he try something as grandiose as a Mars colony.
I mean… not before Jesus returns, obviously.
I wonder if I should actually watch this. I’ve been struggling to imagine how Musk connects “we’ll never make it to Mars unless”… we gut U.S. science? What?
great idea elon. start a colony on mars, cuz the earth is going to get engulfed by the sun when it goes red giant. i’m sure mars will be just fine
Musk has only ever shown interest in the transport part of a Mars colony, and that’s very much the easy part. There’s also the psychology of being on Mars, in a small group. Cabin fever is a huge risk, and one spree killing could take the gene pool below the minimum. Then there’s the matter of persuading people to put themselves in a position where Elon Musk controls their air supply. Oh wait, maybe El Salvador isn’t far enough from the USA. Just send convicts, it worked for Australia. But a Mars colony needs a very particular mix of skills. Also, see above re psychological pressure and spree killings.
But the real kicker is that you can’t say humans are an interplanetary species until the Mars colony can survive alone indefinitely, like, for centuries at least. Until then, once the Earth can no longer send spaceships, the colony dies. Habitats are not going to last on that sort of timescale, so you would need to terraform Mars. Clearly it would be a ****ing sight easier to terraform Earth back to below 350 ppm of CO2.
I think Musk might have liked the idea of a Mars colony to begin with, particularly if it meant that all the inhabitants were totally, utterly under his control, but I suspect he now realises it’s impractical and just uses it as a sales presentation.
The microbes of the Mesoproterozoic did not colonize space a billion years ago, and now we have let half the lifespan of the habitable Earth slip by without doing it. Clearly we need to get on that immediately by giving more money to a rich liar. :(
As @2 raven mentioned, 5bil years is the time for the sun to die. The Earth will become uninhabitable earlier.
But the reason Earth becomes uninhabitable is due to a small percentage change in conditions, incoming sunlight/radiation/etc… we’re at a sweet spot for life as we know it.
The conditions on Mars are a large percentage change in conditions. It is not a viable alternative. Fixing climate change is many orders of magnitude easier than terraforming Mars (or making it remotely liveable), and we still don’t really know how to fix Earth’s climate. Even if WW3 were to happen, and we completely nuked the entire Earth’s surface, Earth would be more amenable to life than Mars is now.
Musk is promoting a fantasy, not a solution. If he really had a solution, he should be able to apply it to the problems that are currently facing us.
NPR did a story entitled Volunteers Who Lived in a NASA-Created Mars Replica For Over a Year Have Emerged (July 7,2024)
robert79 @16
I would rather take my chances on a nuked Earth with zombies and vampires (The Strain type vampires at that) than try to inhabit Mars.
Re: StevoR @4:
Will Lockett (Mar 11)
Damn I shouldn’t have clicked on the video. Now I have to clean the puke off the screen.
IIRC in two billion Sol’s expansion will consume the Earth, but well before that Earth’s surface will have been boiled dry and sterilised.
These people are morons. Humanity has built an impressively dangerous trap for itself that such stupidity is rewarded.
Eat your way across that petri dish, little bacteria!
Last I heard, by the time the Sun expands out to Earth’s orbit, it will have lost so much mass that earth will have moved out far enough to be clear of the Sun.
Orbital mechanics question – is it cheaper to fire Felon Musk into the Sun or on a one way trip to Mars. Would the answer be different if no fuel was wasted on braking for the second option.
Last time I checked Mars was in the same solar system as us so a Mars colony is not going to help us once the sun goes Kablooie, even if it existed.
@19. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain : Re: StevoR @4: …Will Lockett (Mar 11).
Pretty sure we covered Will Locketts article here before on another thread. Will Lockett is NOT a rocket scientist but a very pessimistic journo with some engineering experience – but not in aeronautics or rocketry – who has a massive bias against Musk and more importantlky seemingly against SpaceX.
Hate Musk? Sure. Hate SpaceX? Nah. The company ain’t the same as it ‘s boss.
the level of magical thinking this luckily rich dufus engages in is absof’nlutly astounding.
Musk is not a visionary. His ‘vision’ is nothing more than an endless rehash of 80s pulp fiction books.
I can vaguely imagine a colony on Mars in 100 years or so, but nothing grand, maybe a couple hundred full time inhabitants who are rapidly becoming an inbred offshoot of humans, because large scale transport of people and the things that keep them human from Earth to Mars is, at present, very problematic. Even for this, one of two situations must obtain. The first requires developing solutions for the deleterious effects of extended exposure to cosmic radiation and low gravity. Barring that, the second requires the development of transport that reduces transit times from months to hours. And even if those are achieved, it now appears that Martian soil may be incompatible with agriculture amenable to raising crops compatible with human nutritional needs.
@25 “Pretty sure we covered Will Locketts article here before on another thread. “
Yes, see here comment #39 & below :
https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2025/04/17/you-know-hes-not-actually-ever-going-to-mars/#comment-2261920
In essence, I don’t think Will Lockett has much credibility here.
@Militant Agnostic
Mars is cheaper delta V wise. Even cheaper is a sub orbital rocked without a landing system
@ 24 yoav
That’s not the model. No kablooie. Stellar evolution is quite well understood.
StevoR
Personally, I’m quite capable of hating both. Furthermore, both have given me reasons to hate them. What SpaceX is doing to the local environment in Texas, for instance, is a good reason to hate it.
I quite liked the 2015 movie ‘The Martian’.
Re: Walter Solomon @32:
SpaceX’s unsafe workplace, hundreds of unreported severe injuries and a death. The disregard extended beyond Musk to his deputies and managers.
PZ’s excerpt of the same article in an OP:
Per a Blue Origin memo, Bezos’ company was envious of their 80hr/week exploitation of disposable college grads.
Bloomberg
https://archive.is/XkcdhNPR
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/11/nx-s1-5034991/why-spacex-is-facing-off-with-the-national-labor-relations-boardAnd the orbital environment. And potentially the global environment.
* Transcript error at NPR: “And [the day] after the letter”
@29 One thing that didn’t surface in that post regarding the subscription model as it pertains to the acquisition process: It looks to be an end around for Operational Evaluation. More simply Musk wants to sell something without the responsibility for assuring the purchaser that it works.
@CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain
Even more reasons to hate that company. Thank you.
@29
“In essence, I don’t think Will Lockett has much credibility here.”
He’s got way more than you.
larpar, I looked up this person; “What makes something valuable? I have a little jade plant on my desk. Most people would forget to water it and let it shrivel into oblivion, but I would happily crawl through a house fire to save it. It was grown from a clipping of my grandma’s favourite plant, and it’s one of the only things I have to remember her by. You see, the value you place on something, especially when that value makes zero sense, inherently unveils a hidden truth. Why am I talking about my house plants? Well, Musk was so busy destroying the most powerful government on the planet that he accidentally let the Tesla board escape from his basement. He was able to round them up before they could find a new subject for their Stockholm Syndrome, but not before the world found out they were intending on replacing Musk. In the aftermath of this shocking event, major Tesla investors were forced to explain the value they place on Musk, and in the process, have given the whole game away.”
(https://wlockett.medium.com/teslas-dirty-little-secret-47f28f9f93c9)
Surely nothing there other than market analytics and sober adumbration; that it seems like a jaundiced personal take vague on detail is just accidental.
@38. larpar :
Okay, thankyou for that personal assessment and subjective opinion of yours based on ___???
Ofc, I’m not writing prejudiced op-eds that are being (wrongly in my view) taken as fact as here.
Nor do I claim to be a rocket scientist or able to judge and dismiss the expertise of those who are rocket scientists such as those working for SpaceX who have already got a proven record of achieving things that people didn’t think could be achieved until those SpaceX rocket scientists achieved them.
I am curious now about what qualifications & expertise you, larpar, have that are relevant and enable you to decide credibility here.
FWIW I’ve loved astronomy since I was a kid. Loved SF and read & watched widely. Self-taught mostly but still. I’ve been inspired and rather obsessively loved learning about space and space exploration especially since August 1989 & the Voyager II fly-by of Neptune that turned that planet from another pale blue dot to a real place with storms bigger than Earth – temporarily but for years – and a moon with active geysers and cantaloupe terrain and many more than the just two moons (Triton & Nereid) we knew of beforehand. Learned, read, followed, understood, grokked so much. If I do say so myself. (Well, no one else will they eh?)
Perhaps you know more than I do. It’s possible.
I don’t think it’s that likely tho’
Now. Do you know more than the people with the best & most relevant qualifications and expertise here – those with so much better lived experience and expertise and scientific qualifications than some rando, minor,. journo w vague engineering experience with ..boats.. & an axe that’s being constantly ground blunt named Will Lockett has – & who actually work as & are qualified to be rocket scientists for SpaceX?
I doubt it.
FWIW. I put the expertise of actual SpaceX engineers and rocket scientists above that of anyone else here who isn’t, well, that.
Just my subjective view based on listening to those who know what they are talking about vs those who do not FWIW.
FWIW I really Ilike boats too but boats ain’t rockets. Nor are they spacecraft.
Engineering one ain’t engineering t’óther.
Will Lockett should know that but seems not to. Nor does Will Lockett seem to respect those with expertise thast vastly excceeds his own, Lockett seems blinde dby his ahtred froMusk. Like too many here.
I hate Felon Musk too. Douchebag is a fucking nazi.
But that don’t make SpaceX or its people incapable or bad or unable to achieve what they keep on achieving.
Don’t under-estimate them or lose the wonder at what they buiild and fly please.
Brecoz science works and can be awesome – whoever does it & whoever is in charge of those doing it.
You don’t have to approve of the bosses to appreciate good work by those who do that work.
StevoR @40, 41: You seem to think we’re getting the unblemished truth from SpaceX scientists. You know that they are Musk’s employees and subject to his direction and iron control, right?
Speaking of rocket science – I’d love to give Musk a pencil and notepad and ask him to derive the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation without looking anything up. Maybe he could, but I’d bet a moderate sum that he can’t. For that matter, could you?
@ ^ Rob Grigjanis : I don’t claim to be a rocket scientist – so I listen to & respect those who are. A category set that does NOT include Lockett as already noted.
I also don’t think Musk is a rocket scientist – he’s the CEO of a private space company. Among many other mostly far less admirable and much worse things like part of the Trump administration and one of Trump’s biggest financial supporters and head of the nazi propaganda cesspool he’s turned the late X-Twitter into. No fan of Musks here.
Big fan of SpaceX and what that group of engineers and people have done which we’ve observed by their accomplishments so far which have been far in excess of what people first expected them to be able to do. Their history and record – list of records set and broken and rockets and spacecraft flown and done that are just awesome – speaks for itself.
Its not what SpaceX say its what they’ve done and shown they can do.
@32. Walter Solomon :
That is a reasonable concern and something they need to address and fix and behave much better on I agree.
It doesn’t make what they have done with rocketry and spacecraft design etc .. less impressive but it is a problem and they should do or be made to do the right things environmentally.
@34. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain :
Likewise here on the issue of their employee and safety and harassment too.