How does he keep getting away with saying this shit without suffering any consequences to his credibility? It can not be built within the next decade. Even if the funding for it already existed,...
Exemplary
In a post on his social media platform X, Musk wrote that a lunar city could be built within the next decade.
How does he keep getting away with saying this shit without suffering any consequences to his credibility?
It can not be built within the next decade. Even if the funding for it already existed, which it doesn't, we don't have a working way to land on the moon yet. HLS isn't even built, let alone tested, let alone actually landed on the moon. We haven't set foot on the moon for over half a century. We have no data on the viability of long term habitation on the moon, no one has ever built a habitat on the moon let alone a city.
It's beyond the realm of unfeasible, it just straight up not possible to build a self sufficient city on the moon in 10 years. It's science fiction. We may as well be talking about building the starship enterprise.
Somehow, people respond positively to this shit from a known, proven liar, who almost always lies at press announcements. It's like people have the memory of goldfishes with this guy, it just really leaves me dumbstruck every time some new story like this comes out.
For what it's worth, Musk is not a unique idealist in that regard. This is likely something inherent about humanity. For reference, Project Horizon was a project proposal by the US ABMA for a...
For what it's worth, Musk is not a unique idealist in that regard. This is likely something inherent about humanity.
For reference, Project Horizon was a project proposal by the US ABMA for a military base on the moon in 1959.
The timeline was as follows:
1964: 40 Saturn (rocket) launches.
January 1965: Cargo delivery to the Moon would begin.
April 1965: The first crewed landing by two soldiers. The build-up and construction phase would continue without interruption until the outpost was ready.
November 1966: Outpost staffed by a task force of 12 soldiers. This program would have required a total of 61 Saturn A-1 and 88 Saturn A-2 launches up to November 1966. During this period the rockets would transport some 220 tonnes of useful cargo to the Moon.
December 1966 through 1967: First operational year of the lunar outpost, with a total of 64 launches scheduled. These would result in an additional 120 tons of useful cargo.
This was a decade prior to the first moon landing, and at least Musk gave it a generous decade! /s
As @plutonic pointed out, while this is completely laughable and quite literally impossible within the next decade, I don't really mind the optimism about space exploration. It's quite a scarcity these days.
I think it was honestly more doable in 1964 than it is today. We already had an absolute massive space industry and production lines, with a proven, working launch system, and the funding to...
I think it was honestly more doable in 1964 than it is today. We already had an absolute massive space industry and production lines, with a proven, working launch system, and the funding to match. We also had an existential fear of the USSR beating us to align the entire nation to the single purpose of dominating space, and the risk tolerance to match that reality.
Doing it now is like starting in 1955 with 1/100th of the budget and less of a domestic manufacturing base.
The only advantages we have today over then is better technology and the experience of having some it before, except most of the people who actually did it before are dead.
I don't think these wild statements lately from the Muskrat have anything real to do with space exploration and colonization. He's just making a fresh round of outrageous claims to push the recent...
I don't think these wild statements lately from the Muskrat have anything real to do with space exploration and colonization.
He's just making a fresh round of outrageous claims to push the recent news about how he lied through his teeth about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein out of the news cycle.
Because people who like the idea of science trot out things like “well we got to the moon so fast the first time” not understanding that it’s not JUST a funding problem. That the technical...
Because people who like the idea of science trot out things like “well we got to the moon so fast the first time” not understanding that it’s not JUST a funding problem.
That the technical challenges are leagues farther and economic benefits basically non existent.
Because he paints a very convenient/desirable sci-fi image of the future, I think. And he has a ton of money, which we somehow still equate with universal competence for some reason. Personally,...
Because he paints a very convenient/desirable sci-fi image of the future, I think. And he has a ton of money, which we somehow still equate with universal competence for some reason.
Personally, I'm just relieved that we're likely now to see Artemis/Lunar funding maintained instead of abandoned in some icarus-like insane rush to put people on Mars to die within the decade.
"Delivering the impossible, late." or something to that affect is his thing. I'm a big fan of SpaceX since the early days and follow them (and all space related things) closely. I'm not sure Elon...
"Delivering the impossible, late." or something to that affect is his thing. I'm a big fan of SpaceX since the early days and follow them (and all space related things) closely. I'm not sure Elon has any credibility left regarding stuff like this, some people are still Koolaid drinkers but you'd have to be pretty naive to have not recognized his timelines for the future are laughable at best and always have been. The only defense I can possibly put up of Musk these days is that at least the man is a dreamer and he dreams big. I really like that in someone, who else is dreaming big like this? I want BIG dreamers about space exploration and space technology, especially those who are willing to fund it.
There are many people dreaming about ending poverty but they get called idiots, communists etc., instead of BIG dreamers. He's a BIG dreamer only because he's rich and wants to get richer and...
There are many people dreaming about ending poverty but they get called idiots, communists etc., instead of BIG dreamers. He's a BIG dreamer only because he's rich and wants to get richer and investors want to get richer. This is BIG mistake of humanity to let a person collect such huge amount of wealth and influence.
It's really staggering when you realize that Elon musk, personally, has enough wealth to permanently end homelessness in the US. His net worth is so high that he could give a million dollars to...
Exemplary
It's really staggering when you realize that Elon musk, personally, has enough wealth to permanently end homelessness in the US. His net worth is so high that he could give a million dollars to every homeless person in the country and still be a millionaire many times over.
More practically, he could fund construction of public housing, addiction treatment and mental health centers, training centers and so on. He could use his considerable influence to get candidates elected that lead to the passing of actual affordable social healthcare programs.
He has the wealth to significantly improve human life in the United States. He could make those improvements starting in a few weeks, not decades or centuries. Those improvements, in turn would have knock on effects that would compound over years and cement his legacy as a significant figure in the success of the country and people's well being.
Its patently obvious when you take a step back, that his goal isn't "ensuring humanity's future in the stars" or whatever other bullshit he's peddling lately. If he cared about humanity's future, he could start right now. He doesn't care about helping humanity because he can't personally profit from that though.
China can build an earth city in a decade, and has done so multiple times in the very recent past. (How well is another story...) And China appears to be serious about their current moon landing...
China can build an earth city in a decade, and has done so multiple times in the very recent past. (How well is another story...)
And China appears to be serious about their current moon landing program; their date is 2030.
A decade might be cutting it a bit fine, but China has a solid record of Making Things Happen these days.
Yeah, I thought of mentioning China as an exception. I suppose it depends on the specific definition and requirements for any proposed lunar city. I imagine it will be closer to an Antarctic...
Yeah, I thought of mentioning China as an exception.
I suppose it depends on the specific definition and requirements for any proposed lunar city.
I imagine it will be closer to an Antarctic research base like McMurdo.
Pfft. Says you. I took the hyerloop to LA today. Anything is possible with some good old fashioned American ingenuity and enough Ketamine to kill a parade of elephants. Anything.
Pfft. Says you. I took the hyerloop to LA today. Anything is possible with some good old fashioned American ingenuity and enough Ketamine to kill a parade of elephants. Anything.
While it’s true it’s incredibly doubtful this gets achieved within 10 years, many of the things you lined out are going to be explored with the Artemis program, and I’m guessing nasa and spacex...
While it’s true it’s incredibly doubtful this gets achieved within 10 years, many of the things you lined out are going to be explored with the Artemis program, and I’m guessing nasa and spacex collaborate on some things to reduce costs
I found this quote at the end to be particularly interesting. Humans haven't needed to exist on another surface other than Earth's for many thousands of years, but now he's essentially saying the...
I found this quote at the end to be particularly interesting.
“The overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster,” he wrote.
Humans haven't needed to exist on another surface other than Earth's for many thousands of years, but now he's essentially saying the future is so uncertain (in large part due to the people he and other billionaires have funded to prominent positions throughout the world) that to secure human civilization as fast as possible, he needed to switch gears and go to the Moon instead.
My favorite suggestion was to collect all the good billionaires and get them on a boat, safe from everything ... then kill all the other billionaires ... and then, you know ... sink the boat.
My favorite suggestion was to collect all the good billionaires and get them on a boat, safe from everything ... then kill all the other billionaires ... and then, you know ... sink the boat.
It would make a good artificial reef. Many sunken ships have actually helped in this regard. It would be a nice way for the billionaires to give back to the planet, by becoming fish food in a new...
It would make a good artificial reef. Many sunken ships have actually helped in this regard. It would be a nice way for the billionaires to give back to the planet, by becoming fish food in a new artificial reef.
Donating everything he owns to organisations that work to curb global warming and end wars and hunger, and ceasing all business activities for the remainder of his life, would be even faster AND a...
“The overriding priority is securing the future of civilization and the Moon is faster,” he wrote.
Donating everything he owns to organisations that work to curb global warming and end wars and hunger, and ceasing all business activities for the remainder of his life, would be even faster AND a lot more efficient.
And that would probably earn him way more money in the long term, ironically. Unfortunately, that requires understanding that society is not a zero-sum game, which the wealthy seem incapable of...
And that would probably earn him way more money in the long term, ironically. Unfortunately, that requires understanding that society is not a zero-sum game, which the wealthy seem incapable of comprehending.
Exactly. There are two things here that they seem to fail to understand: others don't necessarily have to lose for me to be able to win, just because I'm making others lose, that doesn't mean I...
not a zero-sum game
Exactly. There are two things here that they seem to fail to understand:
others don't necessarily have to lose for me to be able to win,
just because I'm making others lose, that doesn't mean I won't lose too!
These people are making society worse for everyone, including themselves and their offspring. It doesn't stop baffling me that they don't realise, or care, what kind of existence their kids will have to endure. Stuck on an inherently hostile planet with extremely limited resources and only a handful of humans (which is of course not a realistic prospect anyway), or stuck on one that used to be habitable for billions until your father decided to waste it away. Gee, thanks dad.
I've long since given up on the messenger. Forget the messenger. The message is still valid. Off-site backup is always a good idea, and especially now, the way things are going lately ... always...
I've long since given up on the messenger. Forget the messenger. The message is still valid.
Off-site backup is always a good idea, and especially now, the way things are going lately ... always assuming you believe our species deserves to survive.
That said, I don't think the Moon is viable ... or at least, it'll take even longer than Mars, because as barren as Mars is, the Moon is much worse. If it's gonna work as a civilization backup, it has to be actually self-sufficient, and the Moon sucks for self-sufficiency. Practice run, maybe, I suppose; but not really for species preservation.
Personally, I have always held the quiet expectation that a Martian colony will never expand beyond a few thousand people, roughly comparable to what we have on Antarctica now ... because, by the time we are technologically advanced enough to establish and support a colony of that size on Mars (or the Moon, for that matter) ... that's about the time that we will have the skills and wherewithal to start building O'Neill cylinders, and we'll realize that trying to adapt to a giant lifeless rock with the wrong gravity and no magnetosphere is not worth the trouble when we can build places we actually like, from scratch.
... again, assuming we can keep it together for another century or so.
There are very, very few potential disasters that could entirely wipe out life on earth but allow life on Mars or the Moon to survive. Even a mega asteroid the size of the one that hit Chicxulub...
There are very, very few potential disasters that could entirely wipe out life on earth but allow life on Mars or the Moon to survive.
Even a mega asteroid the size of the one that hit Chicxulub would be more survivable in a underground bunker than surviving on Mars. A global pandemic stealthy enough to kill all humans would almost certainly also spread to Mars. The powers that be wouldn't somehow conciniently forget about the Mars colony in a global nuclear war, nor would super intelligent AI.
You really have to contort yourself to think of a scenario where earth dies, but Mars colonies somehow continue to go on and thrive.
I think if space travel becomes cheap, we'll likely naturally get to a place where other worlds are colonized, likely to be mined for their resources, but prioritizing that colonization because of some "life boat" scenario really doesnt make sense to me, and spending a ton of resources towards that is very hard to justify when there are still so many problems here on earth to solve.
The only thing I can think of where the moon is valuable is some sort of atmospheric event that we didn't have forewarning of. Even then, the moon wouldn't be self sufficient so they'd be doomed...
There are very, very few potential disasters that could entirely wipe out life on earth but allow life on Mars or the Moon to survive.
The only thing I can think of where the moon is valuable is some sort of atmospheric event that we didn't have forewarning of. Even then, the moon wouldn't be self sufficient so they'd be doomed anyways.
Maybe if something happened instantly all across the whole world in less than the day to poison the entire atmosphere, and that thing wasn't biological so there was no chance of it spreading to...
Maybe if something happened instantly all across the whole world in less than the day to poison the entire atmosphere, and that thing wasn't biological so there was no chance of it spreading to the moon, or intentionally done so that the moon wouldn't factor into the plans of whoever did it.
I can't think of how something like that could happen though. Any more warning than that or anything less than total impact all across the world, and it would be easier to live in a hermetically sealed chamber on earth underground, or in the ocean, or just in a sealed biodome. At the very least, you still have the advantage of earth gravity and a magnetosphere then.
Realistically, humanity will almost certainly survive whatever disaster (probably something of our own making). The real risk is things getting so bad that the population gets knocked down to a...
Realistically, humanity will almost certainly survive whatever disaster (probably something of our own making). The real risk is things getting so bad that the population gets knocked down to a small percentage of what it currently is, grinding all industry to a halt and forcing what remains of society to revert to an agrarian lifestyle. It’d take probably more than a century to bounce back from that, maybe longer, if that’s even possible with how much fossil fuel stores have been depleted. The longer recovery drags on the more likely it is that vast amounts of scientific and technological progress is permanently lost.
To me, this idea is terrifying and if there’s anything to hedge against, it’d be that. An off-world self-sustaining settlement of a few thousand scientists, physicians, engineers, etc with the capability to get back to Earth after the dust had settled would probably be the best you could do in this scenario.
What's the likelihood that something like that happens, but it somehow doesn't also impact the self sustaining moon city though? It wouldn't be a secret, everyone would know about it, and in order...
What's the likelihood that something like that happens, but it somehow doesn't also impact the self sustaining moon city though? It wouldn't be a secret, everyone would know about it, and in order to get to self sufficiency, space travel would have to be way more accessible than it is now.
At a minimum, people would try to get there in hordes. More realistically, it would just become another front in the massive war that destroyed earth society.
Either way, it would be way easier to just create a hermetically sealed super bunker underground somewhere on earth. Just as secure, but way cheaper, way more feasible, and you have the advantage of 1g gravity, an atmosphere, a magnetosphere, an active mantle that can be used for heating and abundant energy, and plenty of water. You could also build a super bunker secretly so that it doesn't become a massive target.
Likelihoods are anybody’s guess, but it’s noted I think some manmade disaster that kicks off a chain of crises is the most probable if anything happens. I don’t think the moon specially is very...
Likelihoods are anybody’s guess, but it’s noted I think some manmade disaster that kicks off a chain of crises is the most probable if anything happens.
I don’t think the moon specially is very well suited for the purpose. Mars would be better, and is more likely to actually achieve self-sustainability due to how long it takes relief missions to arrive.
The proposed bunker would be easier to set up but keeping it secret is going to be just about impossible given how many people would be involved in the project.
I personally don't see the value in humanity enough to support it. I value that we're genetically programmed for survival in more immediate and direct ways and wouldn't advocate for forced...
I personally don't see the value in humanity enough to support it. I value that we're genetically programmed for survival in more immediate and direct ways and wouldn't advocate for forced extinction or such, but having an off-site backup is not meeting any immediate human needs. Humans do not need to exist forever. Humans that destroy their own civilization even less so. I'm not talking about specific humans, I'm talking about the species. The fact that some humans find the idea desirable to spread the virus far and wide to ensure the species exists only further proves to me that humans are not some higher intelligent being that should be seen as something morally superior and worth saving, but no different than any life form or virus on Earth.
I don't necessarily hate humanity in the way that the above paragraph may be interpreted, as I said I'm not advocating for a mass extinction event or anything, I just don't support plans that involve repopulating planets or spreading genetic material around the solar system to ensure the ongoing existence of the species. I support plans that are about improving the lives of the humans that already exist, not trying to create and subjugate more conscious beings into the trap.
I really don't want to insult anyone but "off site backup" is something that sounds cool but at this point should be left for discussions around science fiction. It's as silly as securing your...
I really don't want to insult anyone but "off site backup" is something that sounds cool but at this point should be left for discussions around science fiction. It's as silly as securing your data against an asteroid strike before securing them against a drive crash or accidental deletion. It's focusing on a problem so unlikely whose solution is literally a thousand years away while ignoring the much more serious and immediate problems some of those same fuckers (Musk and ilk) are directly responsible for creating.
I can already hear the counter arguments that "yeah it's a thousand years away if we start NOW so we need to get started ".
No. Anyone serious about saving humanity starts by securing the Earth. Solve our self-destructive actions, secure a proper future for humans on earth, build an asteroid shield, THEN after those centuries-long projects are completed start thinking about an off site backup.
Right now our data is on a Pentium 2 with the original HDD and we're talking about building a bunker underneath mount fuji to create a backup location.
It's silly diverting the slightest of resources towards that and IMHO it displays a dishonesty around the "backup" claim.
These are the people who can't even ensure Earth to remain inhabitable. A project massively more feasible than making some initially hostile planet inhabitable. Once they've migrated there, how...
Off-site backup is always a good idea
These are the people who can't even ensure Earth to remain inhabitable. A project massively more feasible than making some initially hostile planet inhabitable. Once they've migrated there, how are they planning to rid themselves of their power hunger and inflated egos so that they won't destroy societal and living conditions there too? A brain transplant? If that were an option, it would be better to do it right away so the Earth could be saved from ruin.
There is no scenario where it would be a good idea to invest a single cent in an off-site backup at the expense of fixing the fatal flaws that got humanity into this mess in the first place. Those flaws will follow us everywhere we go.
Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt.
"They change their sky, not their soul, those who rush across the sea." (Horace, The Odes of Horace)
Trying to remain civil here, but I am really getting sick of this straw-man argument. It is not an either-or choice. Humanity has the ability to work on more than one project at a time. I maintain...
invest a single cent in an off-site backup at the expense of
Trying to remain civil here, but I am really getting sick of this straw-man argument. It is not an either-or choice. Humanity has the ability to work on more than one project at a time.
I maintain that people who keep making this fake argument are still focusing on the messenger, rather than the message.
The math is simple ... thru no fault of our own (giant asteroid, super-volcano, Zombie Apocalypse, yada), humanity could be either knocked back into the Stone Age, or wiped out entirely on this planet. This has always been true, for millions of years, going back to Lucy. However, it is only right now, the past couple of decades, where humanity has finally reached a point where we are technologically advanced enough that the "off-site backup" idea is actually a (marginally) feasible idea.
It is exactly the same logic that led to NASA (and, I think, the whole world) starting to track asteroids and figure out how to redirect any that turn out to be on a collision course with us ... because we can.
Would you argue that this is also wasted money? Should we never have gone to the Moon at all? Maybe we should quit investing in art; I mean, how is that helping?
But the off-site backup is currently nowhere near the "feasible idea" stage. And placing the tiniest of tiny foundational stone of this millenia-long project would take immense resources. So while...
But the off-site backup is currently nowhere near the "feasible idea" stage. And placing the tiniest of tiny foundational stone of this millenia-long project would take immense resources.
So while in theory it might not be an either or, it practically is. Trillions are hard to come by.
Asteroid defense is a million times more reasonable an expense since it aims to preserve the perfectly suitable planet we already have.
This isn't really about any individual person - it's about realising that some projects are driven by delusional egomania to such an extent that investment in them is in itself indication of a...
I maintain that people who keep making this fake argument are still focusing on the messenger, rather than the message.
This isn't really about any individual person - it's about realising that some projects are driven by delusional egomania to such an extent that investment in them is in itself indication of a personality who can't be trusted with the fate of humanity.
It is not an either-or choice. Humanity has the ability to work on more than one project at a time.
Terraforming the Sahara desert is something that could be attempted with funding of this scale, but not at the same time as terraforming Mars, or the Moon. I hope we can all agree which one is more pressing and more feasible.
Choosing to work on a project that is not feasible and not sustainable is just an extension of the mindset that got us into the current global challenges in the first place. The solution is for humanity to learn how to work together for the greater good - not 'move fast and break things' and when shit hits the fan, try to escape the consequences of our own actions to another planet. Allowing ourselves to give in to such lack of accountability accelerates environmentally destructive practices here on Earth.
Even though this seems like I'm criticising an individual person, I actually believe that this is a challenge for humanity as a whole: the way our societies are constructed, our politics and our values, are enabling people like Musk, and that's the ultimate issue we have to solve if we are to "secure the future of civilization".
What makes it so much harder to be self-sufficient on the Moon than on Mars?
That said, I don't think the Moon is viable ... or at least, it'll take even longer than Mars, because as barren as Mars is, the Moon is much worse. If it's gonna work as a civilization backup, it has to be actually self-sufficient, and the Moon sucks for self-sufficiency.
What makes it so much harder to be self-sufficient on the Moon than on Mars?
Lower gravity than Mars, no atmosphere at all as opposed to a thin atmosphere, no chance of a magnetosphere as opposed to even vague hypothetical recharging of the core of Mars, no water at all as...
Lower gravity than Mars, no atmosphere at all as opposed to a thin atmosphere, no chance of a magnetosphere as opposed to even vague hypothetical recharging of the core of Mars, no water at all as opposed to subterranean ice caps.
There is ice on the Moon, but it's questionable how abundant and accessible it is. If you've got water, you can make lunarcrete, and thence radiation-resistant structures. Maybe send Optimus...
There is ice on the Moon, but it's questionable how abundant and accessible it is. If you've got water, you can make lunarcrete, and thence radiation-resistant structures.
Another big one is the moon’s month long day-night cycle and much more extreme temperatures, which basically necessitate a nuclear reactor for energy since battery tech isn’t yet capable of...
Another big one is the moon’s month long day-night cycle and much more extreme temperatures, which basically necessitate a nuclear reactor for energy since battery tech isn’t yet capable of keeping a station’s lights on that long in such conditions.
By contrast Mars’ day-night cycle is only an hour longer than Earth’s and its thin atmosphere makes for a comparatively mild average temperature with much less extreme peaks and valleys.
The moon’s lack of an atmosphere makes it hellish relative to Mars in other ways too, like increased radiation exposure and ultra-sharp, statically-charged lunar regolith.
Furthermore, the Martian atmosphere can be used to synthesize hydrocarbons, which enables a wide variety of essentials to be manufactured in situ which never will be on the moon.
Same with lunar regolith, it's about 45 - 50% oxygen by weight, and doesn't contain the nasty perchlorates found in Martian soil. It's incredibly fine and abrasive, though, so it's got mechanical...
Same with lunar regolith, it's about 45 - 50% oxygen by weight, and doesn't contain the nasty perchlorates found in Martian soil. It's incredibly fine and abrasive, though, so it's got mechanical failures and silicosis as drawbacks.
Still not an easy place to live, like a planet with a biosphere (if we can keep it).
It was, sadly, never about Mars, that was the marketing since 'the moon' isn't sexy or novel. Now that Artemis II is about to do a roundtrip around the moon within the next month (not using a...
It was, sadly, never about Mars, that was the marketing since 'the moon' isn't sexy or novel.
Now that Artemis II is about to do a roundtrip around the moon within the next month (not using a SpaceX rocket, btw), and there are already plans for colonization of the moon (not currently including SpaceX directly either), he is hoping to use this as a "Hey! Look at me! We are doing the moon thing too!" as production for L2-L5 habitats and new moon-based resource gathering and infrastructure projects are starting to procure real funding from the nations of the world, and a lot of new space startups have already set their sites and have secured contracts and funding to get to and use the moon.
I imagine there will be a number of articles now when the fly-around happens that says something along the lines of:
Artemis II on their flyby of our nearest celestial neighbor, one where a certain elongated muskrat just recently announced their new intentions for colonization in a post on X (previous Twitter), has been a resounding success and sets the world in a new moment for humankind.
or something along those lines, its a way to ensure SpaceX (and himself) are in the press cycle when it happens, even though they shouldn't be this time around.
Are you saying the whole Mars fantasy was just to get funding for rocket technology so he could get some contracts for infrastructure projects closer to Earth?
Are you saying the whole Mars fantasy was just to get funding for rocket technology so he could get some contracts for infrastructure projects closer to Earth?
It's been a month - who would have guessed that the extremely problematic and least tested crewed rocket would still be delayed and not completed the fly-around....
It's been a month - who would have guessed that the extremely problematic and least tested crewed rocket would still be delayed and not completed the fly-around....
Kind of related, but I'm part way through A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith and it makes a really interesting case that the tech enthusiasts are overlooking a bunch of very real...
Kind of related, but I'm part way through A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith and it makes a really interesting case that the tech enthusiasts are overlooking a bunch of very real problems that still exist for any kind of long term space mission, let alone colonization.
Yeeeeeup. They always have been. People have been shouting it from the rooftops and I’m so glad they did a book that you can easily point to and say “read this” for the ones who care to be...
Yeeeeeup. They always have been. People have been shouting it from the rooftops and I’m so glad they did a book that you can easily point to and say “read this” for the ones who care to be educated about it
The Lady Astronaut series progresses to a lunar base and a Mars mission (alternate history SF, it's set pre-Polio vaccine which becomes relevant) and doesn't deal with all the technical issues but...
The Lady Astronaut series progresses to a lunar base and a Mars mission (alternate history SF, it's set pre-Polio vaccine which becomes relevant) and doesn't deal with all the technical issues but addresses quite a few, especially while doing it with human computers.
I can't speak to their total accuracy but I think they're quite good.
Ian McDonald's Luna series is interesting too - an economic and political model for long-term Lunar colonization that's rather compelling. All the habitations are underground, it's very...
Ian McDonald's Luna series is interesting too - an economic and political model for long-term Lunar colonization that's rather compelling. All the habitations are underground, it's very corporate-feudal, and the major export is Helium-3 for Earth-based fusion reactors.
Spoilers
Much of the plot revolves around the kind of Shakespearean dramas you'd expect from feudal relations among family-dynastic corporations.
I love how they deal with race/gender/religion on top of needing human computers to do the math, societal ebbs and flows and the climate disaster of a major asteroid hit. Mary Robinette Kowal is...
I love how they deal with race/gender/religion on top of needing human computers to do the math, societal ebbs and flows and the climate disaster of a major asteroid hit.
Mary Robinette Kowal is one of my favs and she's an audiobook narrator as well so she reads her own books too
I loved A City on Mars. While it ultimately says that off world colonization is impossible it does give a very clear list of problems that need to be overcome. And understanding the actual...
I loved A City on Mars. While it ultimately says that off world colonization is impossible it does give a very clear list of problems that need to be overcome. And understanding the actual problems is the first step to overcoming them.
Remember how we have yet to have a sucessful long-term, self-sufficient closed ecosystem here on earth? Biodome was not just a bad movie. It was inspired by real events. A colony on the moon with...
Remember how we have yet to have a sucessful long-term, self-sufficient closed ecosystem here on earth?
Biodome was not just a bad movie. It was inspired by real events. A colony on the moon with the stated purpose as described can't get an emergency oxygen injection.
....also apparently Steve Bannon got involved with Biosphere 2 awhile ago and that explains so many things.
A friend of mine worked at Biosphere 2 (site staff, not inside the domes) during Missions 1 and 2 and he says Steve Bannon is the worst person he's ever met and he was instrumental in the downfall...
A friend of mine worked at Biosphere 2 (site staff, not inside the domes) during Missions 1 and 2 and he says Steve Bannon is the worst person he's ever met and he was instrumental in the downfall of the project - although he admits it probably would have failed by itself without Bannon anyway.
However, my friend remains enthusiastic (and knowledgable) about the Biosphere project conceptually, despite all the many flavours of fuckiness which went along with it, and he still believes it is do-able with enough money and effort on board. And, obviously, not Steve Bannon.
That's really cool, and FWIW I totally think it'll be possible to get there. But a truely successful attempt probably will require decades of ecosystem stabilization, like having living soil....
That's really cool, and FWIW I totally think it'll be possible to get there. But a truely successful attempt probably will require decades of ecosystem stabilization, like having living soil.
There are definitely some tricks that can be pulled, but best I can tell it's a lot like a soup...the flavors have to mix and blossom.
Oh man, it's been so long since I read the story of biosphere 2. I forgot how amazingly drama filled and weird it was. Also forgot that Steve Bannon was involved. It's criminal that this hasn't...
Oh man, it's been so long since I read the story of biosphere 2. I forgot how amazingly drama filled and weird it was. Also forgot that Steve Bannon was involved.
It's criminal that this hasn't been turned into a real dramatic adaptarion. The whole story is so juicy and scandalous and strange. If you wrote it from scratch I would have thought it was a little hackneyed and unbelievable.
Moon is pretty far away too and not very habitable. Let's try an orbital city first! Actually space is pretty expensive and hard to reach, how about a city in Antarctica? It's still pretty cold...
Moon is pretty far away too and not very habitable. Let's try an orbital city first! Actually space is pretty expensive and hard to reach, how about a city in Antarctica? It's still pretty cold there though, I guess we should try northern Greenland instead. Nobody seems happy about that though. How about colonizing Detroit, is that even survivable?
Considering how cheap it is to re-green deserts and limit carbon emissions, I'm really pissed about the opportunity costs of throwing money at data centers, let alone in space or on other planets....
Considering how cheap it is to re-green deserts and limit carbon emissions, I'm really pissed about the opportunity costs of throwing money at data centers, let alone in space or on other planets.
There are potential resource opportunities in space, but I don't see Musk as a serious person for getting there at this point.
To go the other way on my ranting about the stupidity of Elon Musk's space data centre pitch: hey, he's finally admitting that his plan to ignore the Moon and go right to Mars was monumentally...
To go the other way on my ranting about the stupidity of Elon Musk's space data centre pitch: hey, he's finally admitting that his plan to ignore the Moon and go right to Mars was monumentally stupid after all. Nice.
Lunar dust is utterly fascinating. There is a nice article in IEEE Spectrum “Dust is probably one of our greatest inhibitors to a nominal operation on the moon,” Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan,...
Lunar dust is utterly fascinating. There is a nice article in IEEE Spectrum
“Dust is probably one of our greatest inhibitors to a nominal operation on the moon,” Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, said during a postflight debriefing. “I think we can overcome other physiological or physical or mechanical problems, except dust.”
Frankly, if anyone thinks they can solve the lunar dust problem, I will be extremely impressed. I have worked on this and, while my solution worked, it was also wholly impractical, so I'm not holding my breath for a callback from NASA. But hey, go ahead and ship infinite bunny suits to the moon. I'm sure the cost of transport to the moon will enjoy similar reductions in cost to LEO transport and then, well, it would be foolish not to. What could go wrong?
Fascinating. There was an update in 2025: https://www.space.com/astronomy/moon/moon-dust-is-less-toxic-than-urban-air-pollution-scientists-discover I would love to hear your comments on this study...
Fascinating. There was an update in 2025:
Moon dust may not be as harmful to humans as had been thought, with a new experiment showing that the typical air pollution on a busy street is more toxic than inhaling lunar dust.
"The results contribute to the safety case for returning humans to the moon," said Brian Oliver, who is a Distinguished Professor of Life Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney, in a statement.
I would love to hear your comments on this study or if they've left out the radiation part or something
Unless we can actually use moon dust to build portals (the video game) so we can teleport people and materials to the surface of the moon instantly, then yeah 10 years sounds doable.
There is something very Aperture Science about this, no? Well, whether or not ground up moon rocks are pure poison, as Cave Johnson claimed, moon dust is catastrophic for equipment. It rains dust...
Exemplary
There is something very Aperture Science about this, no? Well, whether or not ground up moon rocks are pure poison, as Cave Johnson claimed, moon dust is catastrophic for equipment. It rains dust continually on the moon due to the photovoltaic charging of dust during the lunar daytime. The solar wind then blows this back to the nighttime side, where it rains a constant shower of weakly charged, insulating, jaggged, microscopic, silica particles. Each particle carries a large electrostatic dipole, the remnant of the photovoltaic charging which launched it into the lunar sky.
As it settles, it coats everything. Right now, that just other dust, but equipment or machinery would be a different deal. Thermal radiators for cooling radioactive thermal generators or fully fledged nuclear reactors see their emissivities decrease as the dust piles on. Solar panels see their efficiency drop as they get covered in dust. Any bearings or sliding surfaces would quickly see their mechanisms fouled by the the abundance of microscopic abrasives entrained between mating countersurfaces.
Removal is expensive, difficult, and potentially futile, given the continual nature of the cascade, non-existent atmosphere, miniscule gravity, and highly attractive nature of the particles of dust themselves. Did I mention the tribocharging? Yeah, the dust is electrostatically charged to beging with, but there is a way to make them even more charged and sticky: touching and moving them. If you try to brush off the dust, it will tribocharge to a higher electrostatic voltage than it did before you touched it.
Oh, I almost forgot: it permeates and destroys clothing and fabric. The orthofabric used for the space suits is really remarkable stuff, but lunar dust will happily waft through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest (apologies to Neal Stephenson). However, it absolutely destroys Tyvek bunny suits. So disposable bunny suits would work, but unless we figure out how to establish a petrochemical industry on the moon, we would need to send a steady stream of care packages to avoid trucking it back inside after any kind of extra-vehicular activity.
As to the health claims, I am inclined to take the precautionary principle and assume that lunar dust is more harmful than benign. I don't want to be breathing it, and I don't think anyone else should either.
So, if we can solve all those problems: let's do it. But it is far, far easier said than done.
So in brief, not only is it coarse and rough and irritating and gets everywhere, its also radiated and tribocharged. Considering we already get plenty of lung disease from good old regular mining...
So in brief, not only is it coarse and rough and irritating and gets everywhere, its also radiated and tribocharged. Considering we already get plenty of lung disease from good old regular mining when we have plenty of water to wash and decent gravity and gear.... Man. Is this kind of radiated, sharp edges, static cling stuff all over Mars as well? We live on a dream paradise planet, I wish we would take better care of it.
Well, the billionaires bought all the real estate down here, there has to be somewhere to go. New places to own and exploit, though maybe not if you pay attention to trivial things like...
Well, the billionaires bought all the real estate down here, there has to be somewhere to go. New places to own and exploit, though maybe not if you pay attention to trivial things like international law.
This might be a bit too cavalier for tildes, but reading this title, and given Elon's political activity, did anyone else immediately think of the movie Iron Sky?
This might be a bit too cavalier for tildes, but reading this title, and given Elon's political activity, did anyone else immediately think of the movie Iron Sky?
Surely, this is just marketing / magic misdirection so people stop looking at the disaster of the cybertruck. I don't fault the scam artist for trying new scams, I blame anybody who might still...
Surely, this is just marketing / magic misdirection so people stop looking at the disaster of the cybertruck. I don't fault the scam artist for trying new scams, I blame anybody who might still fall for it
That doesn't make any sense. Why would it be a cover for the cybertruck? For one, the set of investors for Tesla and SpaceX would be completely different; Tesla investors would not care about what...
That doesn't make any sense. Why would it be a cover for the cybertruck? For one, the set of investors for Tesla and SpaceX would be completely different; Tesla investors would not care about what SpaceX is doing, as a public company.
Second, the cybertruck is old news by now. Even if you wanted to go for the "Elon is trying to cover something up", surely it would be to cover up the acquisition of xAI by SpaceX, since that appeared to have no particular reason other than merging an unprofitable company into a profitable company AND was recent.
Third, Elon has done this many times with nothing else happening in the background to cover up. Occam's razor is that he's a bit crazy, has delusions of grandeur, and likes to commit to impossible moonshot ideas every once in a while because he has no impulse control.
Both Mars and Moon are shitty places to live. No ozone layer to protect you from space rocks. You’re out walking your dog and boom! space rocks to the head. RIP
Both Mars and Moon are shitty places to live. No ozone layer to protect you from space rocks. You’re out walking your dog and boom! space rocks to the head. RIP
How does he keep getting away with saying this shit without suffering any consequences to his credibility?
It can not be built within the next decade. Even if the funding for it already existed, which it doesn't, we don't have a working way to land on the moon yet. HLS isn't even built, let alone tested, let alone actually landed on the moon. We haven't set foot on the moon for over half a century. We have no data on the viability of long term habitation on the moon, no one has ever built a habitat on the moon let alone a city.
It's beyond the realm of unfeasible, it just straight up not possible to build a self sufficient city on the moon in 10 years. It's science fiction. We may as well be talking about building the starship enterprise.
Somehow, people respond positively to this shit from a known, proven liar, who almost always lies at press announcements. It's like people have the memory of goldfishes with this guy, it just really leaves me dumbstruck every time some new story like this comes out.
For what it's worth, Musk is not a unique idealist in that regard. This is likely something inherent about humanity.
For reference, Project Horizon was a project proposal by the US ABMA for a military base on the moon in 1959.
The timeline was as follows:
This was a decade prior to the first moon landing, and at least Musk gave it a generous decade! /s
As @plutonic pointed out, while this is completely laughable and quite literally impossible within the next decade, I don't really mind the optimism about space exploration. It's quite a scarcity these days.
I think it was honestly more doable in 1964 than it is today. We already had an absolute massive space industry and production lines, with a proven, working launch system, and the funding to match. We also had an existential fear of the USSR beating us to align the entire nation to the single purpose of dominating space, and the risk tolerance to match that reality.
Doing it now is like starting in 1955 with 1/100th of the budget and less of a domestic manufacturing base.
The only advantages we have today over then is better technology and the experience of having some it before, except most of the people who actually did it before are dead.
And even then, the early efforts of the first space stations in the early 70s reveal the kinds of growing pains we were still dealing with.
I don't think these wild statements lately from the Muskrat have anything real to do with space exploration and colonization.
He's just making a fresh round of outrageous claims to push the recent news about how he lied through his teeth about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein out of the news cycle.
Because people who like the idea of science trot out things like “well we got to the moon so fast the first time” not understanding that it’s not JUST a funding problem.
That the technical challenges are leagues farther and economic benefits basically non existent.
Because he paints a very convenient/desirable sci-fi image of the future, I think. And he has a ton of money, which we somehow still equate with universal competence for some reason.
Personally, I'm just relieved that we're likely now to see Artemis/Lunar funding maintained instead of abandoned in some icarus-like insane rush to put people on Mars to die within the decade.
"Delivering the impossible, late." or something to that affect is his thing. I'm a big fan of SpaceX since the early days and follow them (and all space related things) closely. I'm not sure Elon has any credibility left regarding stuff like this, some people are still Koolaid drinkers but you'd have to be pretty naive to have not recognized his timelines for the future are laughable at best and always have been. The only defense I can possibly put up of Musk these days is that at least the man is a dreamer and he dreams big. I really like that in someone, who else is dreaming big like this? I want BIG dreamers about space exploration and space technology, especially those who are willing to fund it.
There are many people dreaming about ending poverty but they get called idiots, communists etc., instead of BIG dreamers. He's a BIG dreamer only because he's rich and wants to get richer and investors want to get richer. This is BIG mistake of humanity to let a person collect such huge amount of wealth and influence.
It's really staggering when you realize that Elon musk, personally, has enough wealth to permanently end homelessness in the US. His net worth is so high that he could give a million dollars to every homeless person in the country and still be a millionaire many times over.
More practically, he could fund construction of public housing, addiction treatment and mental health centers, training centers and so on. He could use his considerable influence to get candidates elected that lead to the passing of actual affordable social healthcare programs.
He has the wealth to significantly improve human life in the United States. He could make those improvements starting in a few weeks, not decades or centuries. Those improvements, in turn would have knock on effects that would compound over years and cement his legacy as a significant figure in the success of the country and people's well being.
Its patently obvious when you take a step back, that his goal isn't "ensuring humanity's future in the stars" or whatever other bullshit he's peddling lately. If he cared about humanity's future, he could start right now. He doesn't care about helping humanity because he can't personally profit from that though.
So many. The question is how many of them have the wealth where it matters?
Can't build a new earth city within a decade, let alone a lunar one.
China can build an earth city in a decade, and has done so multiple times in the very recent past. (How well is another story...)
And China appears to be serious about their current moon landing program; their date is 2030.
A decade might be cutting it a bit fine, but China has a solid record of Making Things Happen these days.
Yeah, I thought of mentioning China as an exception.
I suppose it depends on the specific definition and requirements for any proposed lunar city.
I imagine it will be closer to an Antarctic research base like McMurdo.
Pfft. Says you. I took the hyerloop to LA today. Anything is possible with some good old fashioned American ingenuity and enough Ketamine to kill a parade of elephants. Anything.
While it’s true it’s incredibly doubtful this gets achieved within 10 years, many of the things you lined out are going to be explored with the Artemis program, and I’m guessing nasa and spacex collaborate on some things to reduce costs
I found this quote at the end to be particularly interesting.
Humans haven't needed to exist on another surface other than Earth's for many thousands of years, but now he's essentially saying the future is so uncertain (in large part due to the people he and other billionaires have funded to prominent positions throughout the world) that to secure human civilization as fast as possible, he needed to switch gears and go to the Moon instead.
I propose we send Musk and the rest of his billionaire friends to live on the moon, and then stop sending them food and supplies.
My favorite suggestion was to collect all the good billionaires and get them on a boat, safe from everything ... then kill all the other billionaires ... and then, you know ... sink the boat.
Why would we sink an empty boat? That seems like it would be damaging to the environment for no real gain.
It would make a good artificial reef. Many sunken ships have actually helped in this regard. It would be a nice way for the billionaires to give back to the planet, by becoming fish food in a new artificial reef.
Donating everything he owns to organisations that work to curb global warming and end wars and hunger, and ceasing all business activities for the remainder of his life, would be even faster AND a lot more efficient.
And that would probably earn him way more money in the long term, ironically. Unfortunately, that requires understanding that society is not a zero-sum game, which the wealthy seem incapable of comprehending.
Exactly. There are two things here that they seem to fail to understand:
These people are making society worse for everyone, including themselves and their offspring. It doesn't stop baffling me that they don't realise, or care, what kind of existence their kids will have to endure. Stuck on an inherently hostile planet with extremely limited resources and only a handful of humans (which is of course not a realistic prospect anyway), or stuck on one that used to be habitable for billions until your father decided to waste it away. Gee, thanks dad.
I've long since given up on the messenger. Forget the messenger. The message is still valid.
Off-site backup is always a good idea, and especially now, the way things are going lately ... always assuming you believe our species deserves to survive.
That said, I don't think the Moon is viable ... or at least, it'll take even longer than Mars, because as barren as Mars is, the Moon is much worse. If it's gonna work as a civilization backup, it has to be actually self-sufficient, and the Moon sucks for self-sufficiency. Practice run, maybe, I suppose; but not really for species preservation.
Personally, I have always held the quiet expectation that a Martian colony will never expand beyond a few thousand people, roughly comparable to what we have on Antarctica now ... because, by the time we are technologically advanced enough to establish and support a colony of that size on Mars (or the Moon, for that matter) ... that's about the time that we will have the skills and wherewithal to start building O'Neill cylinders, and we'll realize that trying to adapt to a giant lifeless rock with the wrong gravity and no magnetosphere is not worth the trouble when we can build places we actually like, from scratch.
... again, assuming we can keep it together for another century or so.
There are very, very few potential disasters that could entirely wipe out life on earth but allow life on Mars or the Moon to survive.
Even a mega asteroid the size of the one that hit Chicxulub would be more survivable in a underground bunker than surviving on Mars. A global pandemic stealthy enough to kill all humans would almost certainly also spread to Mars. The powers that be wouldn't somehow conciniently forget about the Mars colony in a global nuclear war, nor would super intelligent AI.
You really have to contort yourself to think of a scenario where earth dies, but Mars colonies somehow continue to go on and thrive.
I think if space travel becomes cheap, we'll likely naturally get to a place where other worlds are colonized, likely to be mined for their resources, but prioritizing that colonization because of some "life boat" scenario really doesnt make sense to me, and spending a ton of resources towards that is very hard to justify when there are still so many problems here on earth to solve.
The only thing I can think of where the moon is valuable is some sort of atmospheric event that we didn't have forewarning of. Even then, the moon wouldn't be self sufficient so they'd be doomed anyways.
Maybe if something happened instantly all across the whole world in less than the day to poison the entire atmosphere, and that thing wasn't biological so there was no chance of it spreading to the moon, or intentionally done so that the moon wouldn't factor into the plans of whoever did it.
I can't think of how something like that could happen though. Any more warning than that or anything less than total impact all across the world, and it would be easier to live in a hermetically sealed chamber on earth underground, or in the ocean, or just in a sealed biodome. At the very least, you still have the advantage of earth gravity and a magnetosphere then.
Realistically, humanity will almost certainly survive whatever disaster (probably something of our own making). The real risk is things getting so bad that the population gets knocked down to a small percentage of what it currently is, grinding all industry to a halt and forcing what remains of society to revert to an agrarian lifestyle. It’d take probably more than a century to bounce back from that, maybe longer, if that’s even possible with how much fossil fuel stores have been depleted. The longer recovery drags on the more likely it is that vast amounts of scientific and technological progress is permanently lost.
To me, this idea is terrifying and if there’s anything to hedge against, it’d be that. An off-world self-sustaining settlement of a few thousand scientists, physicians, engineers, etc with the capability to get back to Earth after the dust had settled would probably be the best you could do in this scenario.
What's the likelihood that something like that happens, but it somehow doesn't also impact the self sustaining moon city though? It wouldn't be a secret, everyone would know about it, and in order to get to self sufficiency, space travel would have to be way more accessible than it is now.
At a minimum, people would try to get there in hordes. More realistically, it would just become another front in the massive war that destroyed earth society.
Either way, it would be way easier to just create a hermetically sealed super bunker underground somewhere on earth. Just as secure, but way cheaper, way more feasible, and you have the advantage of 1g gravity, an atmosphere, a magnetosphere, an active mantle that can be used for heating and abundant energy, and plenty of water. You could also build a super bunker secretly so that it doesn't become a massive target.
Likelihoods are anybody’s guess, but it’s noted I think some manmade disaster that kicks off a chain of crises is the most probable if anything happens.
I don’t think the moon specially is very well suited for the purpose. Mars would be better, and is more likely to actually achieve self-sustainability due to how long it takes relief missions to arrive.
The proposed bunker would be easier to set up but keeping it secret is going to be just about impossible given how many people would be involved in the project.
I personally don't see the value in humanity enough to support it. I value that we're genetically programmed for survival in more immediate and direct ways and wouldn't advocate for forced extinction or such, but having an off-site backup is not meeting any immediate human needs. Humans do not need to exist forever. Humans that destroy their own civilization even less so. I'm not talking about specific humans, I'm talking about the species. The fact that some humans find the idea desirable to spread the virus far and wide to ensure the species exists only further proves to me that humans are not some higher intelligent being that should be seen as something morally superior and worth saving, but no different than any life form or virus on Earth.
I don't necessarily hate humanity in the way that the above paragraph may be interpreted, as I said I'm not advocating for a mass extinction event or anything, I just don't support plans that involve repopulating planets or spreading genetic material around the solar system to ensure the ongoing existence of the species. I support plans that are about improving the lives of the humans that already exist, not trying to create and subjugate more conscious beings into the trap.
I really don't want to insult anyone but "off site backup" is something that sounds cool but at this point should be left for discussions around science fiction. It's as silly as securing your data against an asteroid strike before securing them against a drive crash or accidental deletion. It's focusing on a problem so unlikely whose solution is literally a thousand years away while ignoring the much more serious and immediate problems some of those same fuckers (Musk and ilk) are directly responsible for creating.
I can already hear the counter arguments that "yeah it's a thousand years away if we start NOW so we need to get started ".
No. Anyone serious about saving humanity starts by securing the Earth. Solve our self-destructive actions, secure a proper future for humans on earth, build an asteroid shield, THEN after those centuries-long projects are completed start thinking about an off site backup.
Right now our data is on a Pentium 2 with the original HDD and we're talking about building a bunker underneath mount fuji to create a backup location.
It's silly diverting the slightest of resources towards that and IMHO it displays a dishonesty around the "backup" claim.
These are the people who can't even ensure Earth to remain inhabitable. A project massively more feasible than making some initially hostile planet inhabitable. Once they've migrated there, how are they planning to rid themselves of their power hunger and inflated egos so that they won't destroy societal and living conditions there too? A brain transplant? If that were an option, it would be better to do it right away so the Earth could be saved from ruin.
There is no scenario where it would be a good idea to invest a single cent in an off-site backup at the expense of fixing the fatal flaws that got humanity into this mess in the first place. Those flaws will follow us everywhere we go.
"They change their sky, not their soul, those who rush across the sea." (Horace, The Odes of Horace)
Trying to remain civil here, but I am really getting sick of this straw-man argument. It is not an either-or choice. Humanity has the ability to work on more than one project at a time.
I maintain that people who keep making this fake argument are still focusing on the messenger, rather than the message.
The math is simple ... thru no fault of our own (giant asteroid, super-volcano, Zombie Apocalypse, yada), humanity could be either knocked back into the Stone Age, or wiped out entirely on this planet. This has always been true, for millions of years, going back to Lucy. However, it is only right now, the past couple of decades, where humanity has finally reached a point where we are technologically advanced enough that the "off-site backup" idea is actually a (marginally) feasible idea.
It is exactly the same logic that led to NASA (and, I think, the whole world) starting to track asteroids and figure out how to redirect any that turn out to be on a collision course with us ... because we can.
Would you argue that this is also wasted money? Should we never have gone to the Moon at all? Maybe we should quit investing in art; I mean, how is that helping?
I'm done.
But the off-site backup is currently nowhere near the "feasible idea" stage. And placing the tiniest of tiny foundational stone of this millenia-long project would take immense resources.
So while in theory it might not be an either or, it practically is. Trillions are hard to come by.
Asteroid defense is a million times more reasonable an expense since it aims to preserve the perfectly suitable planet we already have.
This isn't really about any individual person - it's about realising that some projects are driven by delusional egomania to such an extent that investment in them is in itself indication of a personality who can't be trusted with the fate of humanity.
Terraforming the Sahara desert is something that could be attempted with funding of this scale, but not at the same time as terraforming Mars, or the Moon. I hope we can all agree which one is more pressing and more feasible.
Choosing to work on a project that is not feasible and not sustainable is just an extension of the mindset that got us into the current global challenges in the first place. The solution is for humanity to learn how to work together for the greater good - not 'move fast and break things' and when shit hits the fan, try to escape the consequences of our own actions to another planet. Allowing ourselves to give in to such lack of accountability accelerates environmentally destructive practices here on Earth.
Even though this seems like I'm criticising an individual person, I actually believe that this is a challenge for humanity as a whole: the way our societies are constructed, our politics and our values, are enabling people like Musk, and that's the ultimate issue we have to solve if we are to "secure the future of civilization".
What makes it so much harder to be self-sufficient on the Moon than on Mars?
Lower gravity than Mars, no atmosphere at all as opposed to a thin atmosphere, no chance of a magnetosphere as opposed to even vague hypothetical recharging of the core of Mars, no water at all as opposed to subterranean ice caps.
There is ice on the Moon, but it's questionable how abundant and accessible it is. If you've got water, you can make lunarcrete, and thence radiation-resistant structures.
Maybe send Optimus robots to do the work. /s
Another big one is the moon’s month long day-night cycle and much more extreme temperatures, which basically necessitate a nuclear reactor for energy since battery tech isn’t yet capable of keeping a station’s lights on that long in such conditions.
By contrast Mars’ day-night cycle is only an hour longer than Earth’s and its thin atmosphere makes for a comparatively mild average temperature with much less extreme peaks and valleys.
The moon’s lack of an atmosphere makes it hellish relative to Mars in other ways too, like increased radiation exposure and ultra-sharp, statically-charged lunar regolith.
Furthermore, the Martian atmosphere can be used to synthesize hydrocarbons, which enables a wide variety of essentials to be manufactured in situ which never will be on the moon.
Oxygen. At least on Mars you can capture some if you have the power.
Same with lunar regolith, it's about 45 - 50% oxygen by weight, and doesn't contain the nasty perchlorates found in Martian soil. It's incredibly fine and abrasive, though, so it's got mechanical failures and silicosis as drawbacks.
Still not an easy place to live, like a planet with a biosphere (if we can keep it).
It was, sadly, never about Mars, that was the marketing since 'the moon' isn't sexy or novel.
Now that Artemis II is about to do a roundtrip around the moon within the next month (not using a SpaceX rocket, btw), and there are already plans for colonization of the moon (not currently including SpaceX directly either), he is hoping to use this as a "Hey! Look at me! We are doing the moon thing too!" as production for L2-L5 habitats and new moon-based resource gathering and infrastructure projects are starting to procure real funding from the nations of the world, and a lot of new space startups have already set their sites and have secured contracts and funding to get to and use the moon.
I imagine there will be a number of articles now when the fly-around happens that says something along the lines of:
or something along those lines, its a way to ensure SpaceX (and himself) are in the press cycle when it happens, even though they shouldn't be this time around.
Are you saying the whole Mars fantasy was just to get funding for rocket technology so he could get some contracts for infrastructure projects closer to Earth?
It's been a month - who would have guessed that the extremely problematic and least tested crewed rocket would still be delayed and not completed the fly-around....
Kind of related, but I'm part way through A City on Mars by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith and it makes a really interesting case that the tech enthusiasts are overlooking a bunch of very real problems that still exist for any kind of long term space mission, let alone colonization.
That book was excellent! Highly recommended for anyone interested in the idea of building things in space/on other planets.
Yeeeeeup. They always have been. People have been shouting it from the rooftops and I’m so glad they did a book that you can easily point to and say “read this” for the ones who care to be educated about it
The Lady Astronaut series progresses to a lunar base and a Mars mission (alternate history SF, it's set pre-Polio vaccine which becomes relevant) and doesn't deal with all the technical issues but addresses quite a few, especially while doing it with human computers.
I can't speak to their total accuracy but I think they're quite good.
Ian McDonald's Luna series is interesting too - an economic and political model for long-term Lunar colonization that's rather compelling. All the habitations are underground, it's very corporate-feudal, and the major export is Helium-3 for Earth-based fusion reactors.
Spoilers
Much of the plot revolves around the kind of Shakespearean dramas you'd expect from feudal relations among family-dynastic corporations.
I'm intrigued! Thanks
Those look good and weren't on my radar, thanks for the suggestion!
I love how they deal with race/gender/religion on top of needing human computers to do the math, societal ebbs and flows and the climate disaster of a major asteroid hit.
Mary Robinette Kowal is one of my favs and she's an audiobook narrator as well so she reads her own books too
I loved A City on Mars. While it ultimately says that off world colonization is impossible it does give a very clear list of problems that need to be overcome. And understanding the actual problems is the first step to overcoming them.
Remember how we have yet to have a sucessful long-term, self-sufficient closed ecosystem here on earth?
Biodome was not just a bad movie. It was inspired by real events. A colony on the moon with the stated purpose as described can't get an emergency oxygen injection.
....also apparently Steve Bannon got involved with Biosphere 2 awhile ago and that explains so many things.
A friend of mine worked at Biosphere 2 (site staff, not inside the domes) during Missions 1 and 2 and he says Steve Bannon is the worst person he's ever met and he was instrumental in the downfall of the project - although he admits it probably would have failed by itself without Bannon anyway.
However, my friend remains enthusiastic (and knowledgable) about the Biosphere project conceptually, despite all the many flavours of fuckiness which went along with it, and he still believes it is do-able with enough money and effort on board. And, obviously, not Steve Bannon.
That's really cool, and FWIW I totally think it'll be possible to get there. But a truely successful attempt probably will require decades of ecosystem stabilization, like having living soil.
There are definitely some tricks that can be pulled, but best I can tell it's a lot like a soup...the flavors have to mix and blossom.
Oh man, it's been so long since I read the story of biosphere 2. I forgot how amazingly drama filled and weird it was. Also forgot that Steve Bannon was involved.
It's criminal that this hasn't been turned into a real dramatic adaptarion. The whole story is so juicy and scandalous and strange. If you wrote it from scratch I would have thought it was a little hackneyed and unbelievable.
Moon is pretty far away too and not very habitable. Let's try an orbital city first! Actually space is pretty expensive and hard to reach, how about a city in Antarctica? It's still pretty cold there though, I guess we should try northern Greenland instead. Nobody seems happy about that though. How about colonizing Detroit, is that even survivable?
Considering how cheap it is to re-green deserts and limit carbon emissions, I'm really pissed about the opportunity costs of throwing money at data centers, let alone in space or on other planets.
There are potential resource opportunities in space, but I don't see Musk as a serious person for getting there at this point.
exactly, no matter how we slice it, it doesn't get more habitable than a place we can easily reach with ready supply of oxygen
To go the other way on my ranting about the stupidity of Elon Musk's space data centre pitch: hey, he's finally admitting that his plan to ignore the Moon and go right to Mars was monumentally stupid after all. Nice.
Archive Link: https://archive.is/LquIn
Lunar dust is utterly fascinating. There is a nice article in IEEE Spectrum
“Dust is probably one of our greatest inhibitors to a nominal operation on the moon,” Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, said during a postflight debriefing. “I think we can overcome other physiological or physical or mechanical problems, except dust.”
Frankly, if anyone thinks they can solve the lunar dust problem, I will be extremely impressed. I have worked on this and, while my solution worked, it was also wholly impractical, so I'm not holding my breath for a callback from NASA. But hey, go ahead and ship infinite bunny suits to the moon. I'm sure the cost of transport to the moon will enjoy similar reductions in cost to LEO transport and then, well, it would be foolish not to. What could go wrong?
Fascinating. There was an update in 2025:
https://www.space.com/astronomy/moon/moon-dust-is-less-toxic-than-urban-air-pollution-scientists-discover
I would love to hear your comments on this study or if they've left out the radiation part or something
Unless we can actually use moon dust to build portals (the video game) so we can teleport people and materials to the surface of the moon instantly, then yeah 10 years sounds doable.
There is something very Aperture Science about this, no? Well, whether or not ground up moon rocks are pure poison, as Cave Johnson claimed, moon dust is catastrophic for equipment. It rains dust continually on the moon due to the photovoltaic charging of dust during the lunar daytime. The solar wind then blows this back to the nighttime side, where it rains a constant shower of weakly charged, insulating, jaggged, microscopic, silica particles. Each particle carries a large electrostatic dipole, the remnant of the photovoltaic charging which launched it into the lunar sky.
As it settles, it coats everything. Right now, that just other dust, but equipment or machinery would be a different deal. Thermal radiators for cooling radioactive thermal generators or fully fledged nuclear reactors see their emissivities decrease as the dust piles on. Solar panels see their efficiency drop as they get covered in dust. Any bearings or sliding surfaces would quickly see their mechanisms fouled by the the abundance of microscopic abrasives entrained between mating countersurfaces.
Removal is expensive, difficult, and potentially futile, given the continual nature of the cascade, non-existent atmosphere, miniscule gravity, and highly attractive nature of the particles of dust themselves. Did I mention the tribocharging? Yeah, the dust is electrostatically charged to beging with, but there is a way to make them even more charged and sticky: touching and moving them. If you try to brush off the dust, it will tribocharge to a higher electrostatic voltage than it did before you touched it.
Oh, I almost forgot: it permeates and destroys clothing and fabric. The orthofabric used for the space suits is really remarkable stuff, but lunar dust will happily waft through it like a breeze through a freshly napalmed forest (apologies to Neal Stephenson). However, it absolutely destroys Tyvek bunny suits. So disposable bunny suits would work, but unless we figure out how to establish a petrochemical industry on the moon, we would need to send a steady stream of care packages to avoid trucking it back inside after any kind of extra-vehicular activity.
As to the health claims, I am inclined to take the precautionary principle and assume that lunar dust is more harmful than benign. I don't want to be breathing it, and I don't think anyone else should either.
So, if we can solve all those problems: let's do it. But it is far, far easier said than done.
So in brief, not only is it coarse and rough and irritating and gets everywhere, its also radiated and tribocharged. Considering we already get plenty of lung disease from good old regular mining when we have plenty of water to wash and decent gravity and gear.... Man. Is this kind of radiated, sharp edges, static cling stuff all over Mars as well? We live on a dream paradise planet, I wish we would take better care of it.
The moon is an interesting place to experiment with self sufficient colonies. As there's pretty much nothing there lol
Well, the billionaires bought all the real estate down here, there has to be somewhere to go. New places to own and exploit, though maybe not if you pay attention to trivial things like international law.
This might be a bit too cavalier for tildes, but reading this title, and given Elon's political activity, did anyone else immediately think of the movie Iron Sky?
Surely, this is just marketing / magic misdirection so people stop looking at the disaster of the cybertruck. I don't fault the scam artist for trying new scams, I blame anybody who might still fall for it
That doesn't make any sense. Why would it be a cover for the cybertruck? For one, the set of investors for Tesla and SpaceX would be completely different; Tesla investors would not care about what SpaceX is doing, as a public company.
Second, the cybertruck is old news by now. Even if you wanted to go for the "Elon is trying to cover something up", surely it would be to cover up the acquisition of xAI by SpaceX, since that appeared to have no particular reason other than merging an unprofitable company into a profitable company AND was recent.
Third, Elon has done this many times with nothing else happening in the background to cover up. Occam's razor is that he's a bit crazy, has delusions of grandeur, and likes to commit to impossible moonshot ideas every once in a while because he has no impulse control.
I kinda blame people that talk about it, just ignore these type of noises.
Both Mars and Moon are shitty places to live. No ozone layer to protect you from space rocks. You’re out walking your dog and boom! space rocks to the head. RIP