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Elon's Mars ideas has been a real hot topic on HN recently, and generally on average the most upvoted comments seem to be those deriding his ambitions. I think that's fair. They seem quite bonkers at times. Most of the reasons being that it's "ridiculous", "pointless", "a waste of money", "impossible", and so on and so on. Essentially the overriding HN opinion _seems_ to be that something that sounds for the most part irrational, should never be attempted until we have first completed every single possible "rational" incremental step beforehand, so that eventually we've learnt enough to make the initially irrational idea more plausible and therefore rational. For example, on HN i've seen such steps being "colonising the Sahara Desert", "then colonising the moon" , and so on. I really disagree with this view as a whole. It's unsustainable and in the end unproductive. It seems ridiculous to say, and maybe a touch over-zealous I admit, but we as humans could still be simple hunter-gatherers like tens of thousands of year ago, if it wasn't for that one guy who everybody laughed at for mixing mud and water and burning it with fire - which initially seems absolutely bonkers - but actually makes clay. At the end of this ramble is maybe a little sense. Robert Zubrin and similar people love to bash the ISS and the Space Shuttle as complete failures. After all, it _appears_ that they are a step back from the "good old Apollo days", and in some respects that is probably true. But if we didn't try new things, try things that initially seem to have little benefit, then we'd go nowhere, or at least excel much slower. They called JFK mad for asking the US to go from never having sent a man above a few ten thousand feet to over 1.2 billion feet to the moon in under a decade. I think we need a fair balance of rationalism and irrationalism (or at least "optimistic ambition") in technology, since sometimes the best things in life come from a witches-brew of the two. We keep the ambition irrational, the math and science rational, as my Professor always said. |