Open Threads

This doofus’s birdbrained space-colony takes are important to know; that alone is a very awful and embarrassing true thing to say about the state of things. Capitalist society permits such profound inequalities of wealth and power, and the U.S. has allowed its public sector to lapse into such abysmal decay, that a guy like Musk exerts a terrible gravity on the world around him: What he is interested in seeing done, some number of other people will work on doing, because that work pays better than nearly all others. Whatever pit he wants to throw his money into, some appalling volume of the world’s resources and human labors will follow it down…

In a saner society, a rich guy with Musk’s well-known and unapologetically expounded views would sooner find himself under a guillotine than atop a space agency with the power to dragoon the world’s resources into his k-hole John Galt cosplay. The certainty that he will never make another planet habitable is no comfort to the rest of us, when in the act of trying he may do the opposite to this one. The doomsday scenario is coming from inside the house. I hope he dies on Mars.

Since I started reading sf almost as soon as I learned to read (my dad had a huge collection of 50s/60s paperbacks, which he never bothered telling me not to read), I used to wonder what it would be like to be isolated in a small spaceship or alien outpost for more years than I’d been alive. And, as an introvert living in a dysfunctional family in one of the more crowded urban environments, the idea didn’t seem so bad — if only I could be guaranteed a sufficient supply of my favorite foods, books, and hobbies.

I have the impression that Elon Musk suffers from an advanced, drug- and money-fueled version of this fantasy, to which he reverts whenever ‘real life’ becomes too stressful. Given state-of-the-art internet connectivity, all his favorite hobbies (‘designer’ drugs, pr0n, a stable of AI-augmented RealDolls, a virtual-reality closed track for pretend-racing fast cars and setting stuff on fire, energy drinks, soylent), and a guaranteed audience of gullible sycophants, wouldn’t it be great to just leave the normies and their mundane world behind?

A certain percentage of the Space, bitches!!! enthusiasts I’ve met over the past 60 years have had a similar bias towards Human Hamster Habitats. Sometimes I wonder if it wouldn’t be a net good for humanity and the environment if a ‘priesthood’ of True Believers were given their own biosphere in some otherwise inhospitable area (Mount Everest?), where they could dedicate themselves to worshiping Musk as the Chief Genius of their sealed terrarium…

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Further reading, for entertainment purposes only:

Thread time. This one may go on for a whiiile. I've been reading up on Elon Musk's plans for Mars colonization and… woof. We're not getting into the ethical arguments around space colonization, just focus on the practical aspects because man there's a lot to discuss. 1/

— Patrick S. Tomlinson (@stealthygeek) February 1, 2021

SF writer Tomlinson just reposted this thread, in response to the same Musk ‘announcement’…

Elon Musk, through his company SpaceX, has set the crazy ambitious goal of building a self-sufficient city of one million people on Mars by 2050. The fact Musk turn 50 this June has nothing to do with this aggressive 30 yr timeline, I’m sure. 2/

To achieve this, SpaceX is developing an interplanetary heavy-lift rocket called “Starship” to ferry a hundred people at a time from Earth to Mars to begin construction and occupation of the colony. And therein lays the first problem. 3/

At 100 people a pop, you’ll need 10,000 launches to land a million people on Mars. But that’s just the people, not all the equipment, supplies, and construction materials they’ll need to actually build the colony. Even Musk thinks it’ll take 100,000 launches. In 30 years. 4/…

And here’s the other thing, those launches can’t happen day in, day out throughout the year. Because of the orbital mechanics between Earth and Mars, there are narrow windows of opportunity to launch spacecraft from one planet to the other. 6/

These windows for a minimum-energy launch only open up every 26 months! You /can/ launch for a period of time outside those windows, but at an ever-growing penalty to how much mass you can carry for the available fuel load until it eventually becomes physically impossible. 7/

So, every two years and two months, you’d have to be launching an average flurry of almost SEVEN-THOUSAND Starship rockets over the course of a few weeks. Let’s put that launch rate in perspective for a second. 8/…

So what you’re talking about is developing a heavy-launch capability more than a thousand times larger than that of the most wealthy and technologically advanced country on Earth. In the next handful of years. With private capital that has no real chance of turning a profit. 11/

That’s just to put a million people on Mars by 2050. And that’s if everything goes right. Which it absolutely won’t. Spaceflight is dangerous, and living on Mars will be even more so. Launches will fail. Rockets will malfunction. People will die. 12/…

Let me digress just a bit to talk about another billionaire-funded dream project: Biosphere II. My wife and I had the chance to visit last year on our annual Spring Training trip to AZ. It was immensely fun and educational. 25/

Far from being the failed experiment it’s often portrayed in the media, Biosphere II was a remarkably successful and innovative endeavor. However, one bit of trivia we learned on our trip still sticks out to me. The first 8 person team was all scientists. 26/

They expected to spend their two-year mission doing experiments in Earth science as they explored their habitat, studied the interplay between the various species and biomes, and placed stress on various components of the closed system. 27/

Turns out they got to do fuckall of that. Almost no science was done in that first mission inside Biosphere II, because the scientists spent more than 50 hours a week per person just growing and preparing the food they needed to survive. 28/

And remember, this was in a sealed experiment that had already been built for them. They didn’t get dropped off on a cargo plane in the middle of the desert with an erector set nd told to build their house before they went out to plant corn. 29/…