Yeah, a lot of people have been waiting to take him down a peg, and here he goes doing it himself. The shorts are buying bottles for everyone tonight! This is a tragedy. He needs to apologize, put...
Yeah, a lot of people have been waiting to take him down a peg, and here he goes doing it himself. The shorts are buying bottles for everyone tonight!
This is a tragedy. He needs to apologize, put down the phone, and get to work. I guarantee the Tesla board is saying stuff along those lines. His personality is way too intertwined with both SpaceX and Tesla for this kind of behavior to fly.
edit: Say what you will about the man, but Musk's work is legitimately way too important for this midlife crisis crap.
Trump is a blithering idiot. I would love nothing more than for twitter to ban him. Musk should have enough cop on to lay low for a while. If you're using Trump as the bar for setting standards...
Trump is a blithering idiot. I would love nothing more than for twitter to ban him.
Musk should have enough cop on to lay low for a while.
If you're using Trump as the bar for setting standards you're doing it wrong! :-D
You forgot to add "gigantic asshole". It's been interesting to watch him finally reveal his true self to the world. This one was terrible, but there have been many other instances of assholessness...
You forgot to add "gigantic asshole".
It's been interesting to watch him finally reveal his true self to the world. This one was terrible, but there have been many other instances of assholessness lately, and getting worse.
I'm not entirely sure he doesn't have some sort of mental disorder getting worse and worse.
To be fair to him with the pressure and personality cult around him it's almost inevitable for him to slowly crack a bit. I'd like to make it clear I don't think that it's okay and that getting...
To be fair to him with the pressure and personality cult around him it's almost inevitable for him to slowly crack a bit. I'd like to make it clear I don't think that it's okay and that getting help would be good for him.
Maybe he just lost his cool and responded like an asshole because somebody was accusing him of being a shill when he was really trying to help? Ask yourself what you did to help those kids stuck...
Maybe he just lost his cool and responded like an asshole because somebody was accusing him of being a shill when he was really trying to help?
Ask yourself what you did to help those kids stuck in a cave. If you had access to a good mechanical engineering team, and you had decided to build a submarine in your garage and fly it over there, wouldn't you be pissed if somebody then told you it was a stupid idea?
I bet what you're thinking right now is - "Ah, but I'M not arrogant enough to think that I could just build a submarine to solve this problem. That's Elon Musk's whole problem! He thinks he's master of the universe." Is that really what makes you better than him though? The fact that you just wouldn't even try this? Just like all of the brilliant engineers and rocket scientists who knew it was impossible to start a private space company in this day and age?
Sometimes you have to be overconfident and just try stuff. I'm glad Elon Musk arrogantly takes on these challenges without listening to naysayers, and I'm not surprised that the positive feedback loop of SpaceX and Tesla's success led him to think "Hey, maybe I'm the only one smart and audacious enough to just build a frickin submarine". And so he flew off the handle and made some childish comment. Big freaking deal. This is the epitome of a Twitter mob forming over totally inconsequential trash talk, and I'm frankly sick of the meme that every rich and powerful person is secretly an unbearable bastard just waiting to show their true colors.
It's not that he tried to help. It's not even that he lost his cool. He accused his detractor of being a paedophile. That's a serious stain. There are idiots right now on reddit defending musk...
It's not that he tried to help. It's not even that he lost his cool. He accused his detractor of being a paedophile. That's a serious stain. There are idiots right now on reddit defending musk saying that there must be some truth to it otherwise he wouldn't have said it. He could have just told the guy piss off. He didn't. He is now reaping the whirlwind, as he should.
Next time there is a fire in my town I'm going to buy a bunch of super soakers and hand them out to the crowd. Then when the fire fighters tell me to fuck off, I'll publicly shame them. And if...
Next time there is a fire in my town I'm going to buy a bunch of super soakers and hand them out to the crowd. Then when the fire fighters tell me to fuck off, I'll publicly shame them.
And if anyone dares criticize me, at least I tried to help. What did they do? (Besides stay out of the way and let the professionals do their god-damn job. That doesn't count.)
I think you're being really glib about the complexity of the situation. This wasn't a routine rescue operation, and they were publicly worrying that there might not be a way to get them out. When...
I think you're being really glib about the complexity of the situation. This wasn't a routine rescue operation, and they were publicly worrying that there might not be a way to get them out.
When he announced that he was bringing a submarine to the site, was the whole world laughing and saying what a dumb idea? No, people thought it was a pretty cool act. So at least to the average layman, it seemed plausible. Your example falls down if you replace super-soakers with, say, fire extinguishers. Maybe it would still be a bad idea to have a bunch of people trying to use fire extinguishers around a burning house, but it's not immediately and obviously stupid. How would you feel if the fireman told you to go shove your stupid fire extinguishers up your ass?
Now imagine there were children stuck inside the burning house.
Yes, I simplified it to show the absurdity of defending him when he's just getting in the way. When he was talking about his sub on Twitter he was presenting it as if he was working with the...
Yes, I simplified it to show the absurdity of defending him when he's just getting in the way.
When he was talking about his sub on Twitter he was presenting it as if he was working with the rescue team to develop a plan. Nope, turns out he was full of shit.
And frankly if I was making a mess of a disaster scene I would deserve being told to fuck off.
It's a good thing that doing stuff is exactly the same thing as helping otherwise I might be concerned that this plan might be counterproductive. Update: My newest idea is to install those...
It's a good thing that doing stuff is exactly the same thing as helping otherwise I might be concerned that this plan might be counterproductive.
Update: My newest idea is to install those flailing arm guys from used car lots outside the fire to help survivors see their way to the exit. I think 20 of them around the building is a good start.
It absolutely is a big deal. Musk committed an act of libel and slander against this person, which has the potential to damage his reputation and his career. Even now, if you Google the name...
so he flew off the handle... big freaking deal
It absolutely is a big deal. Musk committed an act of libel and slander against this person, which has the potential to damage his reputation and his career. Even now, if you Google the name "Vernon Unsworth" it brings up articles about Elon Musk calling him a pedophile. If the CEO of several companies took to social media and called me a pedophile, I'd absolutely want to sue him for libel.
Here's a noble idea, how about we hold people responsible for their actions?
I'm pretty sure whatever my response would be, it wouldn't have anything to do with pedophilia. It would have been much better to say something like "I'm sorry you feel that way, but maybe this...
I'm pretty sure whatever my response would be, it wouldn't have anything to do with pedophilia.
It would have been much better to say something like "I'm sorry you feel that way, but maybe this technology can help others in the future.".
Or something like that. But his chosen retorte was absolutely ridiculous!
No doubt it was ridiculous! Totally uncalled for, asshole thing to do. All I'm saying is it annoys me that this is being whipped up into a narrative about how this is who he really is underneath,...
No doubt it was ridiculous! Totally uncalled for, asshole thing to do. All I'm saying is it annoys me that this is being whipped up into a narrative about how this is who he really is underneath, or he's manic depressive, or the entirety of SpaceX needs to hold a moratorium on this, or whatever the hell drama people are dreaming up.
One of the other posters is saying that the reason this is a problem is that people are going to take the accusation that he's a pedo seriously. But the irony is that those reactions fall under the same purview of what I'm complaining about: people getting way too serious about stupid flamewars on Twitter. Why are random pronouncements on Twitter of any concern when we know that basically everything on Twitter is trivial, context-less noise?
Sorry, do you know me? No, so chill with the whole guessing what I'm thinking and am or not doing bit or if I think I'm better or worse than anyone. Wanna defend Musk, go ahead, but do it...
Sorry, do you know me? No, so chill with the whole guessing what I'm thinking and am or not doing bit or if I think I'm better or worse than anyone.
Wanna defend Musk, go ahead, but do it properly, not by trying to attack me, but by explaining what was it that he did that was so great.
And, just for the record, I wouldn't be pissed if someone told me my idea was stupid. I would either prove it wasn't or would realise it was indeed stupid. And not start throwing accusations around like an idiot.
You is a rhetorical device. I'm asking the reader to show a little empathy (how would you act in this situation?) and then I'm trying to make a point by anticipating a counterpoint (I bet you are...
You is a rhetorical device. I'm asking the reader to show a little empathy (how would you act in this situation?) and then I'm trying to make a point by anticipating a counterpoint (I bet you are tempted to say this, however...). My point isn't about literally you, yes YOU user @flip.
Yes, we know you think you would act like a good and honorable person if somebody criticized your idea. Everybody thinks that. Elon Musk thinks that. It doesn't always happen that way when tempers flair and emotions get the better of you. Just proclaiming "I would never do that" is worthless.
Don't forget, by the way, that it's not just your idea that's being criticized, it's your executed idea. It's like if you built an app for a local business for free and they just said "This won't integrate with the accounting back-end that we have. Fuck you for trying!" More than a little annoying, I'd say.
Ah, you were reading my mind, I get it. You're trying to argue using things I never wrote, thinking you know who or what I am and do, this is ridiculous and just sad. Please go away. I have better...
Ah, you were reading my mind, I get it. You're trying to argue using things I never wrote, thinking you know who or what I am and do, this is ridiculous and just sad. Please go away. I have better things to do with my time.
I agree that Musk's submarine wasn't going to help. Based on what I'd read and seen about the cave - especially with everyone saying that the narrowest section was only 38 centimetres across! - it...
I agree that Musk's submarine wasn't going to help. Based on what I'd read and seen about the cave - especially with everyone saying that the narrowest section was only 38 centimetres across! - it was obvious that his submarine was too big.
However, that doesn't mean that Musk was necessarily doing this only for publicity. He might have sincerely wanted to help, but didn't check his engineers' design thoroughly in the rush to be helpful. His comments about how the boys got trapped in the cave just confirm his ignorance about the situation. So, it's very likely that Musk just didn't know his submarine was useless.
This diver telling him to "stick his submarine where it hurts" was unnecessary. Musk tried to help, even if he got it wrong.
But... Musk's response took things to a whole extra level of wrongness. Accusing someone of being a paedophile because he happens to live in Thailand is just flat-out wrong and rude. There's absolutely no justification for that. And doubling down on it by saying "Bet ya a signed dollar it’s true." is stupidity of the highest order. He might be an engineering genius, but he's a moron when it comes to interpersonal communication.
As a Musk fan (but hopefully not part of the cult), he's making it really hard for me to support him right now. He's doing the right thing with his business ventures, but this is really making me...
As a Musk fan (but hopefully not part of the cult), he's making it really hard for me to support him right now. He's doing the right thing with his business ventures, but this is really making me begin to question whether it's the moral way of progressing to the future to support him when he's calling people pedos for no reason and supporting the people he says he's fighting against (both the Republicans and politicians in general in order to get his way).
Accusing someone of being a pedo is rather rude considering that that diver helped save lives. Call him ignorant, an idiot, better yet, don’t insult him at all, just prove him wrong.
Accusing someone of being a pedo is rather rude considering that that diver helped save lives. Call him ignorant, an idiot, better yet, don’t insult him at all, just prove him wrong.
The diver pretty much told him to stick his sub up his behind, and Musk took the bait. I'm really disappointed. So are lots of other people who held him in really high regard. It's really...
The diver pretty much told him to stick his sub up his behind, and Musk took the bait. I'm really disappointed. So are lots of other people who held him in really high regard. It's really depressing reading the SpaceX subs on Reddit right now, even some of his biggest supporters are at a loss.
Yeah, actually it looks like that’s the case at least on SpaceXLounge. Almost no one was defending him in the comments, but some folks were saying it was unrelated to the sub. A lot of people were...
Yeah, actually it looks like that’s the case at least on SpaceXLounge. Almost no one was defending him in the comments, but some folks were saying it was unrelated to the sub. A lot of people were truly heartbroken.
However, there is a thread on r/ElonMusk that is not getting deleted. It is also full of disillusionment.
It's so strange to me that some people can't separate the creator from their creations. Like why can't you simultaneously hold the opinions that SpaceX is good for mankind and that Musk is an...
It's so strange to me that some people can't separate the creator from their creations. Like why can't you simultaneously hold the opinions that SpaceX is good for mankind and that Musk is an egocentric prick?
How is the cult of Elon defending this one? Sure he is doing great things for space and electric cars but man has himself a boatload of problems that people look right past because Elon.
How is the cult of Elon defending this one? Sure he is doing great things for space and electric cars but man has himself a boatload of problems that people look right past because Elon.
People don't want to admit someone/something they support is/can be less than perfect. I remember when the iPhone 4's signal problems hit the spotlight and I saw people defending the "you're...
People don't want to admit someone/something they support is/can be less than perfect. I remember when the iPhone 4's signal problems hit the spotlight and I saw people defending the "you're holding it wrong" response. People will jump through impressive mental hoops to reassure themselves they're on the right side.
I don't think they are. I liked Elon but I'm not gonna defend him for this. I guess I'll still follow things he does like spacex but I will think a lot worse about him
I don't think they are. I liked Elon but I'm not gonna defend him for this. I guess I'll still follow things he does like spacex but I will think a lot worse about him
Musk says he got hacked in 5... 4... No but seriously this was unexpected. Musk never seemed like a person who would say something like this, but I guess this just shows how easliy you can create...
Musk says he got hacked in 5... 4...
No but seriously this was unexpected. Musk never seemed like a person who would say something like this, but I guess this just shows how easliy you can create a false image of yourself on the internet
I like what Musk is doing, but I'm not a fan of the way he's doing it. I love SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company and all of his other ventures, but I think we're now beginning to see that he's not...
I like what Musk is doing, but I'm not a fan of the way he's doing it. I love SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company and all of his other ventures, but I think we're now beginning to see that he's not all perfect. He's making it really hard for me to be a fan of him right now, but his progress to the future is undeniably amazing. Elon, please stay cool and not turn out to be the man we're beginning to see from you.
What about projects he works on? Would you be happy to see them go down in flames as well just to make you happy in regards to not liking him? To me that's the real tragedy here, if it happens.
What about projects he works on? Would you be happy to see them go down in flames as well just to make you happy in regards to not liking him? To me that's the real tragedy here, if it happens.
His idea that "colonizing Mars will save humanity" is either delusion or pandering to nerds who like too much science fiction and too little science. For starters, fixing Earth's climate is a lot...
His idea that "colonizing Mars will save humanity" is either delusion or pandering to nerds who like too much science fiction and too little science. For starters, fixing Earth's climate is a lot easier than colonizing Mars to any reasonable extent.
And Tesla is not the only electric car now. Besides, to be actually environmentally friendly, he should focus on clean energy generation, such as solar power. Because if you plug a car on the power grid to recharge it, but that power came from a coal plant, you only changed the location where the atmosphere harming fumes were emitted.
So I don't think we'd be losing much without musk's ego projects.
People have no idea what a challenge it is to try and colonize Mars. Frankly, I don't think Musk even knows, given how he talks about it - as if 'getting there' is the challenge. Getting there is...
People have no idea what a challenge it is to try and colonize Mars. Frankly, I don't think Musk even knows, given how he talks about it - as if 'getting there' is the challenge. Getting there is about as hard as falling out of bed compared to what has to happen after that.
We are pretty damn lucky to have such a habitable planet sitting next door. Mars and Venus are both 'Earth that could have been.' Venus was too hot, so the runaway greenhouse has turned it into a fireball of pure carbon dioxide, but it's almost identical to Earth in size and gravity, and there are interesting possibilities for colonizing the upper atmosphere (which is quite balmy and has limitless solar power potential). Sky cities, basically. Cooling it down to habitable levels for surface living is probably not in the cards, though. There's just no feasible way to get rid of all that built up heat. You'd have to block a large portion of the sunlight reaching Venus for a geologically significant stretch of time and let it cool off on its own, and that atmosphere is pure smog, the ultimate cleanup job. Planetary solar shields are needed - something we could also use to exert control over Earth's own climate. That's just a bit outside of our tech tree for the moment, though we will do it eventually.
Mars is the low-hanging fruit. All it needs are smokestacks, and we know how to make those. Trouble is, those smokestacks are going to need to run a very long time to generate enough of an atmosphere to trigger the thawing process. Estimates vary on this but it's definitely a multi-century scale project setting up smokestacks all day, every day, that run indefinitely. Once the tipping point is reached, the planet will warm enough to begin outgassing on its own and it'll speed up considerably.
Even then, though, it'll remain far thinner than Earth's atmosphere even best-case thanks to the lower gravity, and it's not going to be remotely breathable, though the equatorial regions should be able to reach cold Earth-like conditions. Some days right now it gets up to almost 60'F (t-shirt weather) during Martian summer. That equatorial region is the sweet spot - that's where we build. There's a ton of water-ice under the surface there too, according to radar.
Once the newer atmosphere is created, it won't dissipate like the original atmosphere - most of that loss was not due to the weak solar winds Mars is experiencing now, but heavy solar activity (including direct flare strikes) from when the solar system was a much younger, more violent place. Our sun's calmed way down from those early days, Mars will retain whatever atmosphere we can give it indefinitely now. There is the minor matter of one of Mars' moons losing orbit, I remember reading it's slated to collide with Mars in a couple million years. If we expect to live there we'd need to do something about that.
All of that has to happen to 'live' on Mars. Until then, it's pressurized underground dwellings, suits with radiation shielding, and will require both sophisticated nuclear power plants and habitat management with indoor farming and recycling atmosphere and water. Good news though - no earthquakes on a planet with a stalled frozen core.
There's some significant doubt about humans living in Mars gravity, which is 40% of Earth normal. That's going to have serious long term medical consequences, as we didn't evolve to live in that gravity and no human has ever lived in anything other than Earth gravity for long periods of time. Our biology may be flatly incompatible with gravity that low - many bodily processes depend on the presence of gravity to function. Exercise doesn't help with the processes for bone marrow, for example, which are gravity-sensitive. Maybe sleeping in spinning gravity-beds would be enough, maybe not. This isn't 'The Expanse', you don't 'adapt' to this, you die or engineer around it.
Presuming all of this can be overcome, and a colony can be constructed (using materials we manufacture from Mars itself, since it's too expensive to send more than the basics), and this colony can manage the terraforming and atmospheric generation, and we have sufficient medical tech to manage living in those altered conditions... after a few hundred years, it might be possible to start seeding the planet with life and building up an ecosystem (algae in the oceans that have thawed, bacteria, perhaps some hardy genetically-engineered plants). Run that eco-building process for a few more hundred years, and you might end up with a living, breathing planet, though at best it's going to be like Earth's colder regions - think Tundra, not Temperate.
It's centuries of exceptionally difficult, perhaps even impossible work, all to end up with roughly the equivalent of living in northern Siberia as a best-case scenario. It buys us immunity to certain classes of existential risks like asteroid impacts or global pandemics, but precious little else. It's something we should get around to doing, sure - but right now? We haven't got the basics down yet.
Frankly, I'd rather aim for a moon colony. It's far easier, cheaper, and requires us to develop exactly the same tech we need to live on Mars or pretty much anywhere else where we need to build self-contained environments. Once we prove it all out on the moon, we can worry about permanent presences in other places. That's the point when you start looking seriously at giving Mars a makeover, or setting up deep science bases on jovian moons... after you've proven you can handle living on the moon, a place with no atmosphere and nearly zero resources.
If we get good enough at genetic engineering, we might be able to skip this whole process. Certain classes of extremophiles can already live in hostile, Mars-like conditions. We could build a designer bacterial ecosystem, load it on a rocket, fire it into Mars, and let life do the work for us, possibly at a vastly accelerated pace, depending on just how good we get at designing life. That method doesn't even require us to go there until after it's already terraformed.
Frankly, space colonization is a non-starter until you have...
Terawatt nuclear reactors that can run indefinitely
Indoor farming tech that is an order of magnitude beyond what we do now
Space-based manufacturing (factories in Earth orbit)
AI and Robotics that are capable of autonomous manufacturing well beyond what we build today
Significantly improved medicine (equivalent to a post-Cancer world)
If you haven't got any of these things (we do not) then it's not time to colonize other worlds. It's time to build these technologies instead. That's what we should be focused on. We need more space stations, more science being done in space, and a moon base to prove it all out. Once we kick ass at that, we can worry about Mars.
It's interesting you don't mention the book The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin, which effectively serves to counter all of your arguments about why we shouldn't bother with Mars today. It also...
It's interesting you don't mention the book The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin, which effectively serves to counter all of your arguments about why we shouldn't bother with Mars today. It also brings to light how highly political the two factions are: the "let's do it today" Mars Direct faction vs. the "we need a lot more preparation" faction.
The Wikipedia page provides a brief summary of the major counterarguments which I'll quote liberally below.
When you say "All of that has to happen to 'live' on Mars" - it's misleading, because in any scenario highly trained astronauts will have to live there first, maybe for centuries, before general populations can live there. Yes the astronauts will need special suits and live in very specialized habitat structures, but that comes with the job description.
For Robert Zubrin, the attractiveness of Mars Direct does not rest on a single cost-effective mission. He envisions a series of regular Martian missions with the ultimate goal of colonization, which he details in the seventh through ninth chapters. As initial explorers leave hab-structures on the planet, subsequent missions become easier to undertake.
Zubrin recognizes that colonization will take centuries. The major point of the book is that at some point we have to stop the hand-wringing and take some risks; and he argues that we already have the technology to go to Mars today including building the first astronauts' habitats (involving low-cost chemical labs that are shipped over). Yes, there will still be centuries of work ahead of us if the end goal is mass colonization, but the point is we need to start before we can finish.
Regarding your argument on low-gravity, the book talks about this:
while zero-gravity presents challenges, “near total recovery of musculature and immune system occurs after reentry and reconditioning to a one-gravity environment.” Furthermore, since his plan has the spacecraft spinning at the end of a long tether to create artificial gravity, worries about zero gravity do not apply to this mission in any case.
Regarding your assertion that "It buys us immunity to certain classes of existential risks like asteroid impacts or global pandemics, but precious little else," Zubrin argues there are incentives to going to Mars now:
Mars may be a profitable place for two reasons. First, it may contain concentrated supplies of metals of equal or greater value to silver which have not been subjected to millennia of human scavenging and may be sold on Earth for profit. Secondly, the concentration of deuterium – a possible fuel for commercial nuclear fusion – is five times greater on Mars. Humans emigrating to Mars thus have an assured industry and the planet will be a magnet for settlers as wage costs will be high.
Regarding your thoughts on the moon, Zubrin argues we should skip all that:
Zubrin decisively denounces and rejects suggestions that the Moon should be used as waypoint to Mars or as a training area. It is ultimately much easier to journey to Mars from low Earth orbit than from the moon and using the latter as a staging point is a pointless diversion of resources. While the Moon may superficially appear a good place to perfect Mars exploration and habitation techniques, the two bodies are radically different. The moon has no atmosphere, no analogous geology and a much greater temperature range and rotational period. Antarctica or desert areas of Earth provide much better training grounds at lesser cost.
I disagree with Zubrin on quite a few of those points, and so do a lot of people. I find his fusion arguments to be a distraction - we have an abundance of fuel for powering fusion reactions here...
I disagree with Zubrin on quite a few of those points, and so do a lot of people.
I find his fusion arguments to be a distraction - we have an abundance of fuel for powering fusion reactions here on Earth, so we don't need to go to Mars to get it. If you want deuterium, there's enough in the top ten inches of lake superior to last humanity millennia. In fact, as far as I'm aware, there's no factual, proven evidence that Mars has any worthwhile export potential or would ever produce any kind of mineral economic wealth that is sufficient to overcome the expense of acquiring it and shipping it. Granted, we've never done proper geological surveys there and won't until we have a colony in place, but as it turns out, what we find isn't as important as the difficulty in moving it off-planet.
The cost to launch is too great, just like on Earth, and it tends to erase profit margins. The simple fact is, without space elevators, all production that occurs at the bottom of a planetary gravity well will always remain there because there will never be a way to make it profitable to ship it to space. Whatever is on the ships is dwarfed by the costs of those ships and their fuel.
Asteroid mining is likely to be a better economic investment than any planet-based activity. Orbital manufacturing in zero-g has a long list of potential advantages, and shipping something down to the ground is nearly free, unlike launching something back up. The moon's abundance of Helium 3 is equally attractive from an energy perspective, there are more arguments for mining the moon for fuel than there are for Mars.
In fact, we have the technology right now to build lunar and martian space elevators. Their weaker gravity wells make it viable - kevlar would do for the moon, and zylon for Mars. If you really want to push for lunar and martian industries, those space elevators are not an optional part of the equation. Without them, there will be no profit motive. Where do we test the first one? The moon, again, of course. It'd be pretty great if we could just bring a finished one along to Mars and deploy it there for easy access to the surface. That'd mitigate a great many of the issues with a Mars mission and make getting back off-planet easy.
Zubrin is right that there's no point in launching a Mars mission from the moon, but that's also a distraction, since that's not the point of building a lunar colony. It's not a staging point, it's a proving ground. If something goes badly wrong on Mars, aid, supplies, and rescue are orders of magnitude more difficult and slow there than on the moon. That's the sole reason it makes sense to develop and perfect these technologies on the lunar surface and in orbit around Earth.
His argument that Mars is different from the moon also misses the point - the moon is much more difficult than the Martian surface, so what works there will work just about anywhere. It's all well and good to test what we can on Earth, but no amount of Earth-based testing will ever truly prove out technologies intended to enable humans to live in environments as hostile as the lunar surface. Calling any place that has an atmosphere a 'better training ground' than the moon seems rather disingenuous. So, we can half-ass it with tents in Antarctica and call that Mars-worthy while crossing our fingers, or we can build a habitat on the moon and call that space-worthy, then scale it back for Mars. I favor the latter, since luck favors the prepared.
As for the degeneration of the bones and immune system, the space voyage is also irrelevant to the point. The space voyage isn't even long enough for serious health problems to set in. Living on the Martian surface is the point - and a tethered spaceship is no help there. We need to talk about the people living on the ground on Mars for decades at a time in 40% of Earth's gravity, determining what medical issues arise, and discovering ways to mitigate those problems. I've seen it suggested that regular exercise and gravity beds would probably be sufficient to handle the problems - so that colonists always sleep in standard gravity on the Martian surface. This needs a lot more study before we send hundreds of people up there to possibly die from gravity-related health problems.
There's a reasonable middle ground here - we can, right now, send a couple dozen people to Mars with everything they need to live there for years. We just won't get them back alive. Plenty of people would volunteer for it despite being a suicide mission. We'd get a treasure trove of science out of it, which would prepare us better than anything for serious colonization. If we want to fast-track Mars, that's the way to do it.
You do make salient arguments, especially after clarifying why you think a moon colony is a good idea. It's hard to completely follow your line of reasoning though, because some of your arguments...
You do make salient arguments, especially after clarifying why you think a moon colony is a good idea. It's hard to completely follow your line of reasoning though, because some of your arguments are self-contradictory and muddle the point you are trying to get across.
My takeaway from your comments is: if no loss of life is tolerable during these missions, then we should play it safe and test as much as possible closer to home, including on the moon. Otherwise, if we have some tolerance for loss of life, then we can take faster approaches like Zubrin's Mars Direct.
I think your commentary on space elevators detracts from your point though, since space elevators do not exist today, while rockets powerful enough to get to Mars do. Also you originally criticized Elon Musk for spending so much time worrying about how to get to Mars, which is the easy part in your mind, but then you say we need to spend time developing space elevator technology to shuttle material to and from Mars. It sounds contradictory.
In my opinion Elon Musk's approach makes sense: getting to Mars is always Step #1 of a Mars mission, right? So it makes sense to focus on Step #1. Just because he's not focusing on Step #2 (colonizing) yet doesn't mean he's deserving of criticism for getting started on Step #1. There's nothing stopping other people from working on those other steps. And it's not like Musk sending rockets to Mars suddenly triggers an irreversible deadline for Steps 2 and beyond; he or others could step back and say, "Okay, now we can reliably get there. Now let's slow down and figure out how to live there."
If you take shortcuts, you're going to get burned. Just look at what a clusterfuck our collective track record is on space travel - it's the hardest thing we know how to do. I think people...
If you take shortcuts, you're going to get burned. Just look at what a clusterfuck our collective track record is on space travel - it's the hardest thing we know how to do. I think people fundamentally underestimate the challenge and dangers involved. Guarding oneself fully against those dangers requires several classes of technologies I mentioned above that we have not developed yet, though all of them are currently in development and will likely pan out within our lifetimes.
You send a million people to Mars before those technologies are fully cooked, and you're just marking a million graves on that planet. Terraforming Mars isn't a job for a few hundred. We're talking about literal cities on Mars here - tens of thousands at first, eventually millions. How many people will sign up for that if it's all built on unproven technology? Or do we just put a disclaimer on the waiver about their health deteriorating fatally within ten years and hope they don't notice? :P
I'm fine sending a suicide mission to Mars to do the early science, they could accomplish in a few months what would take robots decades. That's by far and away the best cost-benefit analysis of any Mars-related activity. Most governments wouldn't do it due to the loss of life factor, but that won't stop (or even register for) China, Russia, or most private corporations. I think that's likely to be the next 'space race' round. We'll probably live to see it happen. I'm quite sure Elon would ride a rocket to Mars tomorrow without a care in the world for getting back again. Most people, however, aren't going to take the trip until there's some basic infrastructure in place and it's easy for them to get back again. Even then, I expect most people will only visit once.
Taking a step back from the 'rah rah Mars' fever, remember that the best possible case scenario here is that we turn Mars into Siberia's colder brother - at a cost of centuries of effort from millions of people and trillions of dollars of expense. How many people live in Siberia? Is that the kind of place you'd want to live? I'll wager for most people the answer is no, unless Earth's climate reaches a point where things get really bad.
My point on space elevators is this: No space elevator, no space profits. Think of it like an immutable law of physics, and whenever someone tells you they can make money in space without it, laugh at them as if they'd just suggested a free-energy machine, because that's the cold hard economic truth.
Imagine your shipping cost for everything is a couple hundred million per truckload, regardless of what's in the truck. Now try to imagine what you could possibly fill that truck with that would make it worth spending a couple hundred million to get it from planet A to planet B. Once you have a space elevator, you're allowed to talk about profits again, since that truck's cost per trip goes down to the tens of thousands instead of hundreds of millions. It's the same principle as Elon's reusable rockets, just far better since there's no fuel cost involved in an elevator.
So, when someone like Zubrin or Musk or even god himself tells you Mars is profitable, ask to see their space elevator plans, or call bullshit on the 'profitable' part.
This is an incomplete picture of power generation Power generation sources vary greatly by region. For about 25-30 states, coal is <= 50% of total generation capacity (see the interactive chart)....
Because if you plug a car on the power grid to recharge it, but that power came from a coal plant, you only changed the location where the atmosphere harming fumes were emitted.
This is an incomplete picture of power generation
Power generation sources vary greatly by region. For about 25-30 states, coal is <= 50% of total generation capacity (see the interactive chart).
Centralized power plants are insanely more efficient than your gas or diesel powered car. It's some pretty simple logic: if you have a multi-million (possibly billion) dollar power generation plant, it's a lot easier to justify spending large sums improving efficiency, particularly if you compare doing so to the cost of improving the efficiency of millions of old car engines out there.
The thermodynamic cycles used in power generation themselves are much more efficient than your average 4 stroke engine. In an industrial power plant you can use techniques like combined cycles, cogeneration, reheating etc., to get your thermal efficiency well over 60% (that is, <40% of energy must go to waste heat due to the laws of thermodynamics). In contrast, your average gasoline engine is just ~20-50%, with most achieving just 18-20% on average (over the whole car ride). Further, a good rule of thumb is that the temperature difference between the hot and cold parts of the power cycle (i.e., inlet vs burnt gas temperatures) is a good predictor of the maximum efficiency you can achieve (aka the Carnot efficiency) -- but to achieve higher temperatures requires more advanced materials (i.e., expensive) and greater design consideration (think, micro cooling flows injected into the actual turbine blades inside airplane engines), both of these factors heavy favor large-scale generation.
edit: this isn't to say that we shouldn't move away from coal. "Clean Coal" is pure and utter bullshit, it's outrageously expensive, difficult to implement, and it still isn't as clean as natural gas.
We should utilize natural gas, which all things considered can be some of the cleanest hydrocarbon fuel around (depending on the source, proper treatment / extraction methods, and power generation techniques), while moving full speed ahead with actually useful technologies such as latent heat storage for solar thermal plants, e.g. in the Solar Three plant currently operating in Spain, which can operate for 15 hours (!) without sunlight.
Musk isn't the only person to suggest this. A few scientists and science fiction writers have suggested the same thing. It's not so much that colonising Mars will save humanity, as colonising Mars...
His idea that "colonizing Mars will save humanity" is either delusion or pandering to nerds who like too much science fiction and too little science.
Musk isn't the only person to suggest this. A few scientists and science fiction writers have suggested the same thing. It's not so much that colonising Mars will save humanity, as colonising Mars will provide a fall-back in case something goes wrong on Earth (which might be climate, or nuclear war, or anything). Having a back-up is always a good thing in case something goes wrong with your original.
As far as I'm aware Musk is working on clean energy / solar power / battery tech / power grid solutions. Just because he is advancing EV technology doesn't mean he neglecting other aspects of the...
As far as I'm aware Musk is working on clean energy / solar power / battery tech / power grid solutions. Just because he is advancing EV technology doesn't mean he neglecting other aspects of the problem. It's not like Musk is working to improve coal-powered technology.
I expect you've probably already seen it, but I thought this was a good article from about a month ago: https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-its-like-when-elon-musks-twitter-mob-comes-after-you
I don't want to say "I told you so" to all the people defending Musk as something other than a spoiled billionaire megalomaniac, but...
Yeah, a lot of people have been waiting to take him down a peg, and here he goes doing it himself. The shorts are buying bottles for everyone tonight!
This is a tragedy. He needs to apologize, put down the phone, and get to work. I guarantee the Tesla board is saying stuff along those lines. His personality is way too intertwined with both SpaceX and Tesla for this kind of behavior to fly.
edit: Say what you will about the man, but Musk's work is legitimately way too important for this midlife crisis crap.
Yeah. Musk needs to get away from Twitter now. This is obviously really bad.
Trump is a blithering idiot. I would love nothing more than for twitter to ban him.
Musk should have enough cop on to lay low for a while.
If you're using Trump as the bar for setting standards you're doing it wrong! :-D
You forgot to add "gigantic asshole".
It's been interesting to watch him finally reveal his true self to the world. This one was terrible, but there have been many other instances of assholessness lately, and getting worse.
I'm not entirely sure he doesn't have some sort of mental disorder getting worse and worse.
To be fair to him with the pressure and personality cult around him it's almost inevitable for him to slowly crack a bit. I'd like to make it clear I don't think that it's okay and that getting help would be good for him.
Maybe he just lost his cool and responded like an asshole because somebody was accusing him of being a shill when he was really trying to help?
Ask yourself what you did to help those kids stuck in a cave. If you had access to a good mechanical engineering team, and you had decided to build a submarine in your garage and fly it over there, wouldn't you be pissed if somebody then told you it was a stupid idea?
I bet what you're thinking right now is - "Ah, but I'M not arrogant enough to think that I could just build a submarine to solve this problem. That's Elon Musk's whole problem! He thinks he's master of the universe." Is that really what makes you better than him though? The fact that you just wouldn't even try this? Just like all of the brilliant engineers and rocket scientists who knew it was impossible to start a private space company in this day and age?
Sometimes you have to be overconfident and just try stuff. I'm glad Elon Musk arrogantly takes on these challenges without listening to naysayers, and I'm not surprised that the positive feedback loop of SpaceX and Tesla's success led him to think "Hey, maybe I'm the only one smart and audacious enough to just build a frickin submarine". And so he flew off the handle and made some childish comment. Big freaking deal. This is the epitome of a Twitter mob forming over totally inconsequential trash talk, and I'm frankly sick of the meme that every rich and powerful person is secretly an unbearable bastard just waiting to show their true colors.
It's not that he tried to help. It's not even that he lost his cool. He accused his detractor of being a paedophile. That's a serious stain. There are idiots right now on reddit defending musk saying that there must be some truth to it otherwise he wouldn't have said it. He could have just told the guy piss off. He didn't. He is now reaping the whirlwind, as he should.
Next time there is a fire in my town I'm going to buy a bunch of super soakers and hand them out to the crowd. Then when the fire fighters tell me to fuck off, I'll publicly shame them.
And if anyone dares criticize me, at least I tried to help. What did they do? (Besides stay out of the way and let the professionals do their god-damn job. That doesn't count.)
I think you're being really glib about the complexity of the situation. This wasn't a routine rescue operation, and they were publicly worrying that there might not be a way to get them out.
When he announced that he was bringing a submarine to the site, was the whole world laughing and saying what a dumb idea? No, people thought it was a pretty cool act. So at least to the average layman, it seemed plausible. Your example falls down if you replace super-soakers with, say, fire extinguishers. Maybe it would still be a bad idea to have a bunch of people trying to use fire extinguishers around a burning house, but it's not immediately and obviously stupid. How would you feel if the fireman told you to go shove your stupid fire extinguishers up your ass?
Now imagine there were children stuck inside the burning house.
Yes, I simplified it to show the absurdity of defending him when he's just getting in the way.
When he was talking about his sub on Twitter he was presenting it as if he was working with the rescue team to develop a plan. Nope, turns out he was full of shit.
And frankly if I was making a mess of a disaster scene I would deserve being told to fuck off.
Don't forget to live blog the whole event for publicity, that would make it seem like your helping more!
It's a good thing that doing stuff is exactly the same thing as helping otherwise I might be concerned that this plan might be counterproductive.
Update: My newest idea is to install those flailing arm guys from used car lots outside the fire to help survivors see their way to the exit. I think 20 of them around the building is a good start.
It absolutely is a big deal. Musk committed an act of libel and slander against this person, which has the potential to damage his reputation and his career. Even now, if you Google the name "Vernon Unsworth" it brings up articles about Elon Musk calling him a pedophile. If the CEO of several companies took to social media and called me a pedophile, I'd absolutely want to sue him for libel.
Here's a noble idea, how about we hold people responsible for their actions?
I'm pretty sure whatever my response would be, it wouldn't have anything to do with pedophilia.
It would have been much better to say something like "I'm sorry you feel that way, but maybe this technology can help others in the future.".
Or something like that. But his chosen retorte was absolutely ridiculous!
No doubt it was ridiculous! Totally uncalled for, asshole thing to do. All I'm saying is it annoys me that this is being whipped up into a narrative about how this is who he really is underneath, or he's manic depressive, or the entirety of SpaceX needs to hold a moratorium on this, or whatever the hell drama people are dreaming up.
One of the other posters is saying that the reason this is a problem is that people are going to take the accusation that he's a pedo seriously. But the irony is that those reactions fall under the same purview of what I'm complaining about: people getting way too serious about stupid flamewars on Twitter. Why are random pronouncements on Twitter of any concern when we know that basically everything on Twitter is trivial, context-less noise?
It's recreational outrage, plain and simple.
Sorry, do you know me? No, so chill with the whole guessing what I'm thinking and am or not doing bit or if I think I'm better or worse than anyone.
Wanna defend Musk, go ahead, but do it properly, not by trying to attack me, but by explaining what was it that he did that was so great.
And, just for the record, I wouldn't be pissed if someone told me my idea was stupid. I would either prove it wasn't or would realise it was indeed stupid. And not start throwing accusations around like an idiot.
You is a rhetorical device. I'm asking the reader to show a little empathy (how would you act in this situation?) and then I'm trying to make a point by anticipating a counterpoint (I bet you are tempted to say this, however...). My point isn't about literally you, yes YOU user @flip.
Yes, we know you think you would act like a good and honorable person if somebody criticized your idea. Everybody thinks that. Elon Musk thinks that. It doesn't always happen that way when tempers flair and emotions get the better of you. Just proclaiming "I would never do that" is worthless.
Don't forget, by the way, that it's not just your idea that's being criticized, it's your executed idea. It's like if you built an app for a local business for free and they just said "This won't integrate with the accounting back-end that we have. Fuck you for trying!" More than a little annoying, I'd say.
Ah, you were reading my mind, I get it. You're trying to argue using things I never wrote, thinking you know who or what I am and do, this is ridiculous and just sad. Please go away. I have better things to do with my time.
This is the what happens when a rockabilly gets a billion dollars. We should heed this warning.
I agree that Musk's submarine wasn't going to help. Based on what I'd read and seen about the cave - especially with everyone saying that the narrowest section was only 38 centimetres across! - it was obvious that his submarine was too big.
However, that doesn't mean that Musk was necessarily doing this only for publicity. He might have sincerely wanted to help, but didn't check his engineers' design thoroughly in the rush to be helpful. His comments about how the boys got trapped in the cave just confirm his ignorance about the situation. So, it's very likely that Musk just didn't know his submarine was useless.
This diver telling him to "stick his submarine where it hurts" was unnecessary. Musk tried to help, even if he got it wrong.
But... Musk's response took things to a whole extra level of wrongness. Accusing someone of being a paedophile because he happens to live in Thailand is just flat-out wrong and rude. There's absolutely no justification for that. And doubling down on it by saying "Bet ya a signed dollar it’s true." is stupidity of the highest order. He might be an engineering genius, but he's a moron when it comes to interpersonal communication.
As a Musk fan (but hopefully not part of the cult), he's making it really hard for me to support him right now. He's doing the right thing with his business ventures, but this is really making me begin to question whether it's the moral way of progressing to the future to support him when he's calling people pedos for no reason and supporting the people he says he's fighting against (both the Republicans and politicians in general in order to get his way).
Accusing someone of being a pedo is rather rude considering that that diver helped save lives. Call him ignorant, an idiot, better yet, don’t insult him at all, just prove him wrong.
The diver pretty much told him to stick his sub up his behind, and Musk took the bait. I'm really disappointed. So are lots of other people who held him in really high regard. It's really depressing reading the SpaceX subs on Reddit right now, even some of his biggest supporters are at a loss.
I'm guessing mods are removing posts concerning this on the Teslamotors and SpaceX subs?
Yeah, actually it looks like that’s the case at least on SpaceXLounge. Almost no one was defending him in the comments, but some folks were saying it was unrelated to the sub. A lot of people were truly heartbroken.
However, there is a thread on r/ElonMusk that is not getting deleted. It is also full of disillusionment.
It's so strange to me that some people can't separate the creator from their creations. Like why can't you simultaneously hold the opinions that SpaceX is good for mankind and that Musk is an egocentric prick?
I'm about 70:30 that he crashed from a manic state relatively recently—it'd line up with his guess at being bipolar but untreated.
How is the cult of Elon defending this one? Sure he is doing great things for space and electric cars but man has himself a boatload of problems that people look right past because Elon.
People don't want to admit someone/something they support is/can be less than perfect. I remember when the iPhone 4's signal problems hit the spotlight and I saw people defending the "you're holding it wrong" response. People will jump through impressive mental hoops to reassure themselves they're on the right side.
I don't think they are. I liked Elon but I'm not gonna defend him for this. I guess I'll still follow things he does like spacex but I will think a lot worse about him
Musk says he got hacked in 5... 4...
No but seriously this was unexpected. Musk never seemed like a person who would say something like this, but I guess this just shows how easliy you can create a false image of yourself on the internet
Elon Musk Insists He’d Be Much More Innovative Pedophile Than Thailand Rescue Worker
(satire)
I like what Musk is doing, but I'm not a fan of the way he's doing it. I love SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company and all of his other ventures, but I think we're now beginning to see that he's not all perfect. He's making it really hard for me to be a fan of him right now, but his progress to the future is undeniably amazing. Elon, please stay cool and not turn out to be the man we're beginning to see from you.
What about projects he works on? Would you be happy to see them go down in flames as well just to make you happy in regards to not liking him? To me that's the real tragedy here, if it happens.
His idea that "colonizing Mars will save humanity" is either delusion or pandering to nerds who like too much science fiction and too little science. For starters, fixing Earth's climate is a lot easier than colonizing Mars to any reasonable extent.
And Tesla is not the only electric car now. Besides, to be actually environmentally friendly, he should focus on clean energy generation, such as solar power. Because if you plug a car on the power grid to recharge it, but that power came from a coal plant, you only changed the location where the atmosphere harming fumes were emitted.
So I don't think we'd be losing much without musk's ego projects.
People have no idea what a challenge it is to try and colonize Mars. Frankly, I don't think Musk even knows, given how he talks about it - as if 'getting there' is the challenge. Getting there is about as hard as falling out of bed compared to what has to happen after that.
We are pretty damn lucky to have such a habitable planet sitting next door. Mars and Venus are both 'Earth that could have been.' Venus was too hot, so the runaway greenhouse has turned it into a fireball of pure carbon dioxide, but it's almost identical to Earth in size and gravity, and there are interesting possibilities for colonizing the upper atmosphere (which is quite balmy and has limitless solar power potential). Sky cities, basically. Cooling it down to habitable levels for surface living is probably not in the cards, though. There's just no feasible way to get rid of all that built up heat. You'd have to block a large portion of the sunlight reaching Venus for a geologically significant stretch of time and let it cool off on its own, and that atmosphere is pure smog, the ultimate cleanup job. Planetary solar shields are needed - something we could also use to exert control over Earth's own climate. That's just a bit outside of our tech tree for the moment, though we will do it eventually.
Mars is the low-hanging fruit. All it needs are smokestacks, and we know how to make those. Trouble is, those smokestacks are going to need to run a very long time to generate enough of an atmosphere to trigger the thawing process. Estimates vary on this but it's definitely a multi-century scale project setting up smokestacks all day, every day, that run indefinitely. Once the tipping point is reached, the planet will warm enough to begin outgassing on its own and it'll speed up considerably.
Even then, though, it'll remain far thinner than Earth's atmosphere even best-case thanks to the lower gravity, and it's not going to be remotely breathable, though the equatorial regions should be able to reach cold Earth-like conditions. Some days right now it gets up to almost 60'F (t-shirt weather) during Martian summer. That equatorial region is the sweet spot - that's where we build. There's a ton of water-ice under the surface there too, according to radar.
Once the newer atmosphere is created, it won't dissipate like the original atmosphere - most of that loss was not due to the weak solar winds Mars is experiencing now, but heavy solar activity (including direct flare strikes) from when the solar system was a much younger, more violent place. Our sun's calmed way down from those early days, Mars will retain whatever atmosphere we can give it indefinitely now. There is the minor matter of one of Mars' moons losing orbit, I remember reading it's slated to collide with Mars in a couple million years. If we expect to live there we'd need to do something about that.
All of that has to happen to 'live' on Mars. Until then, it's pressurized underground dwellings, suits with radiation shielding, and will require both sophisticated nuclear power plants and habitat management with indoor farming and recycling atmosphere and water. Good news though - no earthquakes on a planet with a stalled frozen core.
There's some significant doubt about humans living in Mars gravity, which is 40% of Earth normal. That's going to have serious long term medical consequences, as we didn't evolve to live in that gravity and no human has ever lived in anything other than Earth gravity for long periods of time. Our biology may be flatly incompatible with gravity that low - many bodily processes depend on the presence of gravity to function. Exercise doesn't help with the processes for bone marrow, for example, which are gravity-sensitive. Maybe sleeping in spinning gravity-beds would be enough, maybe not. This isn't 'The Expanse', you don't 'adapt' to this, you die or engineer around it.
Presuming all of this can be overcome, and a colony can be constructed (using materials we manufacture from Mars itself, since it's too expensive to send more than the basics), and this colony can manage the terraforming and atmospheric generation, and we have sufficient medical tech to manage living in those altered conditions... after a few hundred years, it might be possible to start seeding the planet with life and building up an ecosystem (algae in the oceans that have thawed, bacteria, perhaps some hardy genetically-engineered plants). Run that eco-building process for a few more hundred years, and you might end up with a living, breathing planet, though at best it's going to be like Earth's colder regions - think Tundra, not Temperate.
It's centuries of exceptionally difficult, perhaps even impossible work, all to end up with roughly the equivalent of living in northern Siberia as a best-case scenario. It buys us immunity to certain classes of existential risks like asteroid impacts or global pandemics, but precious little else. It's something we should get around to doing, sure - but right now? We haven't got the basics down yet.
Frankly, I'd rather aim for a moon colony. It's far easier, cheaper, and requires us to develop exactly the same tech we need to live on Mars or pretty much anywhere else where we need to build self-contained environments. Once we prove it all out on the moon, we can worry about permanent presences in other places. That's the point when you start looking seriously at giving Mars a makeover, or setting up deep science bases on jovian moons... after you've proven you can handle living on the moon, a place with no atmosphere and nearly zero resources.
If we get good enough at genetic engineering, we might be able to skip this whole process. Certain classes of extremophiles can already live in hostile, Mars-like conditions. We could build a designer bacterial ecosystem, load it on a rocket, fire it into Mars, and let life do the work for us, possibly at a vastly accelerated pace, depending on just how good we get at designing life. That method doesn't even require us to go there until after it's already terraformed.
Frankly, space colonization is a non-starter until you have...
If you haven't got any of these things (we do not) then it's not time to colonize other worlds. It's time to build these technologies instead. That's what we should be focused on. We need more space stations, more science being done in space, and a moon base to prove it all out. Once we kick ass at that, we can worry about Mars.
It's interesting you don't mention the book The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin, which effectively serves to counter all of your arguments about why we shouldn't bother with Mars today. It also brings to light how highly political the two factions are: the "let's do it today" Mars Direct faction vs. the "we need a lot more preparation" faction.
The Wikipedia page provides a brief summary of the major counterarguments which I'll quote liberally below.
When you say "All of that has to happen to 'live' on Mars" - it's misleading, because in any scenario highly trained astronauts will have to live there first, maybe for centuries, before general populations can live there. Yes the astronauts will need special suits and live in very specialized habitat structures, but that comes with the job description.
Zubrin recognizes that colonization will take centuries. The major point of the book is that at some point we have to stop the hand-wringing and take some risks; and he argues that we already have the technology to go to Mars today including building the first astronauts' habitats (involving low-cost chemical labs that are shipped over). Yes, there will still be centuries of work ahead of us if the end goal is mass colonization, but the point is we need to start before we can finish.
Regarding your argument on low-gravity, the book talks about this:
Regarding your assertion that "It buys us immunity to certain classes of existential risks like asteroid impacts or global pandemics, but precious little else," Zubrin argues there are incentives to going to Mars now:
Regarding your thoughts on the moon, Zubrin argues we should skip all that:
I disagree with Zubrin on quite a few of those points, and so do a lot of people.
I find his fusion arguments to be a distraction - we have an abundance of fuel for powering fusion reactions here on Earth, so we don't need to go to Mars to get it. If you want deuterium, there's enough in the top ten inches of lake superior to last humanity millennia. In fact, as far as I'm aware, there's no factual, proven evidence that Mars has any worthwhile export potential or would ever produce any kind of mineral economic wealth that is sufficient to overcome the expense of acquiring it and shipping it. Granted, we've never done proper geological surveys there and won't until we have a colony in place, but as it turns out, what we find isn't as important as the difficulty in moving it off-planet.
The cost to launch is too great, just like on Earth, and it tends to erase profit margins. The simple fact is, without space elevators, all production that occurs at the bottom of a planetary gravity well will always remain there because there will never be a way to make it profitable to ship it to space. Whatever is on the ships is dwarfed by the costs of those ships and their fuel.
Asteroid mining is likely to be a better economic investment than any planet-based activity. Orbital manufacturing in zero-g has a long list of potential advantages, and shipping something down to the ground is nearly free, unlike launching something back up. The moon's abundance of Helium 3 is equally attractive from an energy perspective, there are more arguments for mining the moon for fuel than there are for Mars.
In fact, we have the technology right now to build lunar and martian space elevators. Their weaker gravity wells make it viable - kevlar would do for the moon, and zylon for Mars. If you really want to push for lunar and martian industries, those space elevators are not an optional part of the equation. Without them, there will be no profit motive. Where do we test the first one? The moon, again, of course. It'd be pretty great if we could just bring a finished one along to Mars and deploy it there for easy access to the surface. That'd mitigate a great many of the issues with a Mars mission and make getting back off-planet easy.
Zubrin is right that there's no point in launching a Mars mission from the moon, but that's also a distraction, since that's not the point of building a lunar colony. It's not a staging point, it's a proving ground. If something goes badly wrong on Mars, aid, supplies, and rescue are orders of magnitude more difficult and slow there than on the moon. That's the sole reason it makes sense to develop and perfect these technologies on the lunar surface and in orbit around Earth.
His argument that Mars is different from the moon also misses the point - the moon is much more difficult than the Martian surface, so what works there will work just about anywhere. It's all well and good to test what we can on Earth, but no amount of Earth-based testing will ever truly prove out technologies intended to enable humans to live in environments as hostile as the lunar surface. Calling any place that has an atmosphere a 'better training ground' than the moon seems rather disingenuous. So, we can half-ass it with tents in Antarctica and call that Mars-worthy while crossing our fingers, or we can build a habitat on the moon and call that space-worthy, then scale it back for Mars. I favor the latter, since luck favors the prepared.
As for the degeneration of the bones and immune system, the space voyage is also irrelevant to the point. The space voyage isn't even long enough for serious health problems to set in. Living on the Martian surface is the point - and a tethered spaceship is no help there. We need to talk about the people living on the ground on Mars for decades at a time in 40% of Earth's gravity, determining what medical issues arise, and discovering ways to mitigate those problems. I've seen it suggested that regular exercise and gravity beds would probably be sufficient to handle the problems - so that colonists always sleep in standard gravity on the Martian surface. This needs a lot more study before we send hundreds of people up there to possibly die from gravity-related health problems.
There's a reasonable middle ground here - we can, right now, send a couple dozen people to Mars with everything they need to live there for years. We just won't get them back alive. Plenty of people would volunteer for it despite being a suicide mission. We'd get a treasure trove of science out of it, which would prepare us better than anything for serious colonization. If we want to fast-track Mars, that's the way to do it.
You do make salient arguments, especially after clarifying why you think a moon colony is a good idea. It's hard to completely follow your line of reasoning though, because some of your arguments are self-contradictory and muddle the point you are trying to get across.
My takeaway from your comments is: if no loss of life is tolerable during these missions, then we should play it safe and test as much as possible closer to home, including on the moon. Otherwise, if we have some tolerance for loss of life, then we can take faster approaches like Zubrin's Mars Direct.
I think your commentary on space elevators detracts from your point though, since space elevators do not exist today, while rockets powerful enough to get to Mars do. Also you originally criticized Elon Musk for spending so much time worrying about how to get to Mars, which is the easy part in your mind, but then you say we need to spend time developing space elevator technology to shuttle material to and from Mars. It sounds contradictory.
In my opinion Elon Musk's approach makes sense: getting to Mars is always Step #1 of a Mars mission, right? So it makes sense to focus on Step #1. Just because he's not focusing on Step #2 (colonizing) yet doesn't mean he's deserving of criticism for getting started on Step #1. There's nothing stopping other people from working on those other steps. And it's not like Musk sending rockets to Mars suddenly triggers an irreversible deadline for Steps 2 and beyond; he or others could step back and say, "Okay, now we can reliably get there. Now let's slow down and figure out how to live there."
If you take shortcuts, you're going to get burned. Just look at what a clusterfuck our collective track record is on space travel - it's the hardest thing we know how to do. I think people fundamentally underestimate the challenge and dangers involved. Guarding oneself fully against those dangers requires several classes of technologies I mentioned above that we have not developed yet, though all of them are currently in development and will likely pan out within our lifetimes.
You send a million people to Mars before those technologies are fully cooked, and you're just marking a million graves on that planet. Terraforming Mars isn't a job for a few hundred. We're talking about literal cities on Mars here - tens of thousands at first, eventually millions. How many people will sign up for that if it's all built on unproven technology? Or do we just put a disclaimer on the waiver about their health deteriorating fatally within ten years and hope they don't notice? :P
I'm fine sending a suicide mission to Mars to do the early science, they could accomplish in a few months what would take robots decades. That's by far and away the best cost-benefit analysis of any Mars-related activity. Most governments wouldn't do it due to the loss of life factor, but that won't stop (or even register for) China, Russia, or most private corporations. I think that's likely to be the next 'space race' round. We'll probably live to see it happen. I'm quite sure Elon would ride a rocket to Mars tomorrow without a care in the world for getting back again. Most people, however, aren't going to take the trip until there's some basic infrastructure in place and it's easy for them to get back again. Even then, I expect most people will only visit once.
Taking a step back from the 'rah rah Mars' fever, remember that the best possible case scenario here is that we turn Mars into Siberia's colder brother - at a cost of centuries of effort from millions of people and trillions of dollars of expense. How many people live in Siberia? Is that the kind of place you'd want to live? I'll wager for most people the answer is no, unless Earth's climate reaches a point where things get really bad.
My point on space elevators is this: No space elevator, no space profits. Think of it like an immutable law of physics, and whenever someone tells you they can make money in space without it, laugh at them as if they'd just suggested a free-energy machine, because that's the cold hard economic truth.
Imagine your shipping cost for everything is a couple hundred million per truckload, regardless of what's in the truck. Now try to imagine what you could possibly fill that truck with that would make it worth spending a couple hundred million to get it from planet A to planet B. Once you have a space elevator, you're allowed to talk about profits again, since that truck's cost per trip goes down to the tens of thousands instead of hundreds of millions. It's the same principle as Elon's reusable rockets, just far better since there's no fuel cost involved in an elevator.
So, when someone like Zubrin or Musk or even god himself tells you Mars is profitable, ask to see their space elevator plans, or call bullshit on the 'profitable' part.
This is an incomplete picture of power generation
Power generation sources vary greatly by region. For about 25-30 states, coal is <= 50% of total generation capacity (see the interactive chart).
Centralized power plants are insanely more efficient than your gas or diesel powered car. It's some pretty simple logic: if you have a multi-million (possibly billion) dollar power generation plant, it's a lot easier to justify spending large sums improving efficiency, particularly if you compare doing so to the cost of improving the efficiency of millions of old car engines out there.
The thermodynamic cycles used in power generation themselves are much more efficient than your average 4 stroke engine. In an industrial power plant you can use techniques like combined cycles, cogeneration, reheating etc., to get your thermal efficiency well over 60% (that is, <40% of energy must go to waste heat due to the laws of thermodynamics). In contrast, your average gasoline engine is just ~20-50%, with most achieving just 18-20% on average (over the whole car ride). Further, a good rule of thumb is that the temperature difference between the hot and cold parts of the power cycle (i.e., inlet vs burnt gas temperatures) is a good predictor of the maximum efficiency you can achieve (aka the Carnot efficiency) -- but to achieve higher temperatures requires more advanced materials (i.e., expensive) and greater design consideration (think, micro cooling flows injected into the actual turbine blades inside airplane engines), both of these factors heavy favor large-scale generation.
edit: this isn't to say that we shouldn't move away from coal. "Clean Coal" is pure and utter bullshit, it's outrageously expensive, difficult to implement, and it still isn't as clean as natural gas.
We should utilize natural gas, which all things considered can be some of the cleanest hydrocarbon fuel around (depending on the source, proper treatment / extraction methods, and power generation techniques), while moving full speed ahead with actually useful technologies such as latent heat storage for solar thermal plants, e.g. in the Solar Three plant currently operating in Spain, which can operate for 15 hours (!) without sunlight.
Musk isn't the only person to suggest this. A few scientists and science fiction writers have suggested the same thing. It's not so much that colonising Mars will save humanity, as colonising Mars will provide a fall-back in case something goes wrong on Earth (which might be climate, or nuclear war, or anything). Having a back-up is always a good thing in case something goes wrong with your original.
As far as I'm aware Musk is working on clean energy / solar power / battery tech / power grid solutions. Just because he is advancing EV technology doesn't mean he neglecting other aspects of the problem. It's not like Musk is working to improve coal-powered technology.
A lot of the success and value of both Tesla and SpaceX is currently way too reliant on Musk. I wish that wasn't the case, but in my opinion it is.
If I was short TSLA I would be so giddy for tomorrow.
I expect you've probably already seen it, but I thought this was a good article from about a month ago: https://www.thedailybeast.com/what-its-like-when-elon-musks-twitter-mob-comes-after-you