I look forward to people figuring out how to create a sustainable biosphere out of raw materials when we can't figure out how to keep a pre-existing rich one healthy. Somehow the economic incentives in the outposts will prevent them from screwing things up?
If they are small enough they could keep a lid on the entropy from divergent human behaviors, including the basic tendency to say "I can waste this/destroy this, my action doesn't affect the whole very much". But they also need to be large enough to be functional. If they're all fully automated and people just need to live their lives- wish we could have that on Earth, but economically it will never happen.
> I look forward to people figuring out how to create a sustainable biosphere out of raw materials when we can't figure out how to keep a pre-existing rich one healthy.
This is what I always raise when people start fantasizing breathlessly about mars colonization. Even if we possessed the technology to terraform a planet like mars in a way that could sustain human life long term, the presumable incentives to doing so (escaping a decreasingly habitable earth) don't make sense, because we could then just use that technology to terraform our own environment.
None of it makes sense because it's fantasy used to raise money.
It's been shared by some number of people, perhaps not by these few who are actually in a position to influence the effort. But I think this sort of counts:
> "Why are we doing this?" Musk said at the company's February 2022 Starship progress update. "I think this is an incredibly important thing for the future of life itself ... there's always some chance that something could go wrong on Earth. Dinosaurs are not around anymore!"
[https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-mars-city-codex]
I believe he is talking about black swan event like an asteroid impact. Not the current problems with climate change. It's more about there being another branch of humanity that's thriving than for people to "escape".
I always wonder about this. I tend to assume that people like Bezos and Musk aren't stupid, but rather saying what people want to hear. "Colonize Mars" is more inspiring than "launch a lot of stuff into orbit" to people I guess. And the latter may well be worth the money to humanity.
Mr. Bezos can have any vision he wants, drug-induced or not. My personal vision is that I can flap my arms and fly to the Moon. Unfortunately, neither vision has any basis in reality.
He’ll live barely long enough to maybe see handful of people stay on the moon for a brief period. We’re not even close to having a sustainable habitat even on the moon. Let alone anywhere else.
His vision assumes living is always worthwhile, even if it means living your entire life precariously on a spaceship orbiting a distant moon of another planet.
A trillion people to sell something to. genial, just imagine the delivery.
Seriously, it sounds like -look at the sky, forget about down here-, propaganda to distract about all the real problems we have on the third planet.
> If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins
We'd also have 1,000 Hitlers and 1,000 Breiviks. Just sayin'.
Aside from the fact that you can use his argument in exactly the opposite way, this kind of stuff doesn't scale linearly anyway; certainly when it comes to music there's already far more talent out there than any human being can reasonably listen to. We also need to wonder if we really want a musical world dominated by "Mozarts".
We also had "1,000 Einsteins" in the 20th century already. Most people here can probably name a few dozen physicists on at least the same level as Einstein. Then there's probably quite a few "lesser (or unknown) known geniuses", people working in other fields, etc. etc. This might scale a bit better than music, but it's not clear to me this has that much potential for scaling either, because a lot of discoveries aren't a "just genius working in his office", but require complex machinery and all of that. We'd also have to build a few dozen LHCs.
Bezos views on all of this seem almost shockingly simplistic.
I'm convinced that this guy sees Musk and his outlandish statements and thinks that must be the secret to success and so tries the same thing, but going even further. What he seems to fail to realize, which is strange because what he does deliver in value shows that he gets it in other realms of business, is that you have to actually deliver something. It doesn't have to be your exact claims, but something approximating them.
Musk says he wants to colonize mars. He's currently testing his 2nd generation rocket that's capable of carrying 100 people. His car is orbiting the sun. Bezos says he wants to colonize space with a trillion people, so far he hasn't gotten so much as a brick into low earth orbit, much less even articulated how to create a trillion people.
But he built one of the worlds foremost and innovative logistics networks. I don't understand, he's not disconnected from reality, the existence of amazon proves that. So why the bullshit on space?
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 47.3 ms ] threadIf they are small enough they could keep a lid on the entropy from divergent human behaviors, including the basic tendency to say "I can waste this/destroy this, my action doesn't affect the whole very much". But they also need to be large enough to be functional. If they're all fully automated and people just need to live their lives- wish we could have that on Earth, but economically it will never happen.
This is what I always raise when people start fantasizing breathlessly about mars colonization. Even if we possessed the technology to terraform a planet like mars in a way that could sustain human life long term, the presumable incentives to doing so (escaping a decreasingly habitable earth) don't make sense, because we could then just use that technology to terraform our own environment.
None of it makes sense because it's fantasy used to raise money.
Is that the only incentive? Is that one that is officially claimed as the reasoning for any of the current such endeavors?
> "Why are we doing this?" Musk said at the company's February 2022 Starship progress update. "I think this is an incredibly important thing for the future of life itself ... there's always some chance that something could go wrong on Earth. Dinosaurs are not around anymore!" [https://www.inverse.com/innovation/spacex-mars-city-codex]
greenfield projects are always more fun (until they become messes as well)
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds…
We'd also have 1,000 Hitlers and 1,000 Breiviks. Just sayin'.
Aside from the fact that you can use his argument in exactly the opposite way, this kind of stuff doesn't scale linearly anyway; certainly when it comes to music there's already far more talent out there than any human being can reasonably listen to. We also need to wonder if we really want a musical world dominated by "Mozarts".
We also had "1,000 Einsteins" in the 20th century already. Most people here can probably name a few dozen physicists on at least the same level as Einstein. Then there's probably quite a few "lesser (or unknown) known geniuses", people working in other fields, etc. etc. This might scale a bit better than music, but it's not clear to me this has that much potential for scaling either, because a lot of discoveries aren't a "just genius working in his office", but require complex machinery and all of that. We'd also have to build a few dozen LHCs.
Bezos views on all of this seem almost shockingly simplistic.
https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-plan-colonize-spa...
Musk says he wants to colonize mars. He's currently testing his 2nd generation rocket that's capable of carrying 100 people. His car is orbiting the sun. Bezos says he wants to colonize space with a trillion people, so far he hasn't gotten so much as a brick into low earth orbit, much less even articulated how to create a trillion people.
But he built one of the worlds foremost and innovative logistics networks. I don't understand, he's not disconnected from reality, the existence of amazon proves that. So why the bullshit on space?