[apolloartemis]

I am a huge fan of SpaceX and I think that establishing a multi-planetary civilization is the most important thing to do, and, I’ll say bluntly, will save lives. But I think that knowingly causing miscarriage of a pregnancy should be investigated as manslaughter.

[nicoty]

I know I'll sound like a rube but somehow it rubs me the wrong way that the rich and powerful are spending billions trying to establish multiplanetary civilisations despite the fact that we still have plenty of unfixed problems here at home that also deserve attention and resources, if not more so.

[adastra22]

It's not either/or, and you shouldn't reduce things to false dichotomies.

[mikelitoris]

It is though, when you have a fixed budget, even at planetary scales.

[adastra22]

Are we still talking about private enterprises, not space agencies?

[jimnotgym]

They are indeed private companies, being subsidised by space agencies.

[sokoloff]

Are they being subsidized the same way my employer subsidizes my lifestyle?

If I sell steel, grain, boots, or launch services to the government and that gives me profits that I invest into some aspect of my business, I’m not sure that “subsidized by” is the clearest term.

[foxglacier]

It's probably more because of the news than the world. It's not possible for there not to be plenty of unfixed problems. No matter how many problems we solve -- and we've solved a hell of a lot over the past decades or century -- other existing problems will take their place as seeming to be important.

If I'm being too extreme, can you describe a world where you'd consider enough problems have been solved that it's worth spending billions colonizing space?

[josefx]

> that the rich and powerful are spending billions trying to establish multiplanetary civilisations

Citation needed. What are the current projects to make this happen? Starship is a work in progress, but that by itself wont be able to create a colony out of thin air.

[bravetraveler]

I can't believe that pipedream being anything but the largest company town. Who needs Scrip when you have to work for... every vital resource, even air?

Not Rube-ish or rubish at all, IMO. I believe they're more interested in power or recreational drug use than problem-solving. Horses for courses.

[saubeidl]

It's even worse than that: They're messing up the environment we do have by burning tons of fuel in pursuit of their pipe dreams.

Instead of establishing multiplanetary civilisations, they're burning our single-planetary atmosphere in their hubris and ego.

[BobaFloutist]

How will it save lives? It'll maybe create more lives that persist beyond those on Earth, but I don't think it will meaningfully lower our global population, so a planetary catastrophe would still kill just as many people.

Also "the most important thing?"

You don't think there's any lower hanging fruit on-planet we could attend to first? Maybe addressing hunger, poverty, pollution, resource wars? You think getting the first ten-thousand people to Mars is a bigger priority than eradicating diseases that kill 10 times that many annually and that we have all the tools necessary to control? Really really?

[itsyonas]

> I am a huge fan of SpaceX and I think that establishing a multi-planetary civilization is the most important thing to do, and, I’ll say bluntly, will save lives.

How can we credibly talk about saving lives on other planets when we are demonstrably unable to protect life on the only habitable world we actually have? If we are failing at basic stewardship here, what evidence is there that we would act more responsibly anywhere else?

[moi2388]

Well, one easy argument would be they we don’t have multiple countries on the other planet.

It’s easier to provide for your own people as a BDFL over your own assets than navigate politics between 250 different countries with their own interests.

[thrance]

How would sending a few dozen people to the subzero anoxic radioactive and sterile desert known as Mars help Humanity? Would be cool, don't get me wrong, but utterly useless for anything other than scientific research.

[foxglacier]

That's why Musk's plan it to send a lot more so they can keep the human species going if human life on earth is destroyed by, say, a meteorite.

[thrance]

Sure, his ketamin-addled brain has been promising us that there would be millions of humans on Mars very soon for years now. That doesn't make it real. And that does not explain either how they'd survive, or even how they'd get there in the first place. Sending one ship to Mars is something, sending thousands is unfeasible in this century.

Also, I don't believe they'd ever be auto-sufficient, because of the aforementioned qualities of Mars: anoxic, sterile, radioactive and subzero. They'd certainly never thrive. More probably, they'd live in a kind of inescapable company-town, millions of miles away from the nearest jurisdiction, at the mercy of a guy known for brutalizing his workers, where going on strike means you probably just die. Sounds like absolute hell.

So, unfeasible, unrealistic, pointless. You can do much more good for humanity by investing here on Earth, obviously.

[NonHyloMorph]

That sums it up quite well.

[IshKebab]

A completely unrealistic plan though, to anyone who has thought about it for half a second.

A mars colony is probably doable. A self-sustaining mars colony? For the length of time it would take a completely devastated Earth to recover? Absolutely impossible, at least with our current technology.

Think about the level of supply chain you'd need to get something like a computer or a solar panel made on Mars. Where do you get plastic? Iron ore? Copper? Pure fantasy.

It would still be cool to have a colony on mars.

[foxglacier]

I don't know what it would take to be self-sufficient but neither do you. Eventually humans will have to have a sustainable presence off Earth if we don't want our species to go extinct. Why can't somebody give it a try? Maybe we don't quite have the technology for it yet but it doesn't hurt to have a good go at it. Extinction would be a real tragedy because we might be the only hope of intelligent life in the whole universe ever. It's incredible how not a single other species we know of even comes close despite millions of years of evolution.

[Ylpertnodi]

Mars colony? After just a few generations the racists among us will positively jump with joy.

[jonesjohnson]

you know what would save lives?

If the top 1% would spend 1% of their wealth on preventing "low-hanging fruits" like

  * children starving
  * children dying from diseases whose vaccinations cost 1$
  * educating people on things like STDs, etc

You call "knowingly causing miscarriage" manslaughter, but boy have you looked at what "we" ("first world") are causing elsewhere in a global scale?

[sokoloff]

> children dying from diseases whose vaccinations cost 1$

If there’s a government anywhere that isn’t providing this for its citizens, perhaps looking into why that government is such a failure would yield greater and more durable change than a point patch of just a few vaccines.

> If the top 1% would spend 1% of their wealth

Why should we expect/demand more generosity from only 1% of the population? Maybe everyone should spend 1% of their wealth on these efforts? It’s easy to be magnanimous with someone else’s wallet.

[jonesjohnson]

> Why should we expect/demand more generosity from only 1% of the population? Maybe everyone should spend 1% of their wealth on these efforts? It’s easy to be magnanimous with someone else’s wallet.

I was mainly referring to the "super rich" (Musk, Bezos, etc.) since this topic was about how SpaceX treats people and because "multi-planetary civilization" is primarily a thing I connect with their companies. I do donate ~10% of my income. Not sure how much the average FAANG-CEO does donate.

> If there’s a government anywhere that isn’t providing this for its citizens, perhaps looking into why that government is such a failure would yield greater and more durable change than a point patch of just a few vaccines.

Failed States and Corruption do exist. They have various complicated reasons which to address would certainly not be "a low-hanging fruit". Of course, solving these would be a good thing, but not within the scope of "donate food, donate medicine, pay teachers"

[sokoloff]

Suppose there’s a failed state or widespread corruption somewhere and a child there who needs $1 worth of vaccine or $1 worth of food.

What’s the chance that or fraction of your dollar, my dollar, or a billionaire’s dollar will end up actually reaching and helping that child? We’ve all seen food aid donations fail to reach those in need for precisely the same corruption that caused it to be needed in the first place.

[latexr]

> Why should we expect/demand more generosity from only 1% of the population?

“More” generosity? As if any is given. And it’s not about “generosity”, it’s about contributing to the society they are taking from. Billionaires exploit everyone else to the point of causing disease and death then hoard all the money produced from that for themselves.

[RobRivera]

Are you advocating for prolife policy, and advocating for a woman to lose her right to choose?

[exomonk]

SpaceX is NOT about going to Mars, it's about Golden Dome. Always was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

[panick21_]

So sick of this dumb conspiracy theory. The whole theory boils down to 'many people have worked in the US space industry since the 80s'. It very fucking dumb.

The increasing in funding for Space companies by DoD in the early SpaceX area (early 2000s) was related to DoD realizing they don't have enough assets over the middle east and wanted smaller companies and rockets to do faster deployment. This evolved further from DoD and since then with Firefly having done a number of missions based on that. Keyword is 'responsive launch'.

Space based missile defense in this period was clearly not the priority and communication, spy sats and navigation sats were getting the overwhelming amount of funding.

NASA on the other hand certainty didn't create COTS for missile defense reasons even if the leader of NASA was a supporter of investment missile defense (as many space people were and are). And the people who designed the COTS program certainty didn't think of that. There are detailed interviews with many of the people involved where they explain their reasons and how and why they came up with the programs.

As for Musk himself, there are details interviews with pretty much everybody that was involved early in SpaceX. And it quite clear that from the beginning Mars was the focus. Musk was not very well informed or interested in US space defense policy early on. And just like literally everybody, he knew much more about NASA then the DoD side of space. Remember that back then, there was much less information available about these things. Musk lived in Canada and then was busy with Internet stuff, he hardly was some kind of US defense nerd.

Its only when SpaceX moved on from the 'Greenhouse on Mars' project to a rocket company that Musk had to start seriously learning about the funding opportunities and commercial opportunity for small rockets. And eventually this lead him to sue DoD over access to contracts.

This whole conspiracy theory hinges on reinterpreting everything that happened in US space development from 1980 to 2020 as some hidden behind the scenes crusade to create Golden Dome and only collects evidence for this to be true and ignores literally all evidence that suggest this isn't the case.

The only thing that is totally clear, and nobody has ever disputed is that many space people in the US have thought about space missile defense since the 80s and always hoped that it would eventually happen.

Missile defense was always part of wider US space consideration, but claiming it was always the driving force for everything is simply not true.

[JumpCrisscross]

It’s a troll account. Go back through its comment history.

[shuttlestock]

I was there at early meetings of the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy.

The Mars concept was absolutely grounded in the same strategic goals for global missile defense. It was about aligning those pieces.

Many forget the DC-X.

[panick21_]

The 'Mars concept' by SpaceX was not grounded in the same 'strategic goals' as anything NASA or DoD were planning at the time.

NASA at the time primary was doing a moon program called Constellation. And DoD was not really thinking much about deep space at all.

If you are talking about the other Mars program then I don't why that would be relevant in this context.

> Many forget the DC-X.

Not sure what you are implying here. NASA and DoD had periodic programs to do various things and test various things, including reuse. See X-33 and Rotary Rocket. But all those concepts involved Single Stage to Orbit and were arguably pretty dumb and incredibly unlikely to ever work.

If the question were about, did SpaceX invent re-usability or vertical landing then your point might be relevant, but it isn't.

Even if it was true that DC-X is the pure expression of some kind of missile defense obsessed deep state, then this would still be irrelevant for SpaceX.

[JumpCrisscross]

> Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy

What bearing does this have on any of this?

> Mars concept was absolutely grounded in the same strategic goals for global missile defense

No shit. A launch vehicle is a launch vehicle.

[JumpCrisscross]

This is a particularly-dumb conspiracy theory as far as these go. It’s like arguing Ford was founded to build tanks.