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> This [1] is pretty much exactly what you're looking for. Zubrin is one amongst countless voices, of all back grounds - certainly academic included, pushing for Mars colonization. What about the countless voices, academic included, against it? It's not whether someone thinks it's a good idea but if we have a reasonable consensus on it. 50/50 is a coin flip, not a "peer reviewed" conclusion. It took the blink of an eye to realize putting things in orbit is greatly beneficial. We've been looking at Mars from all sides for decades and the business case is yet to be clear except mostly for people making money by selling you the idea, or the book. > Musk has become demonized mostly because of his politics. ... He's also brought the price to get things to space down multiple orders of magnitude relative to the Space Shuttle. And similarly before him, electric vehicles were glorified go-karts for virtue signaling hipsters. Let's not make this the core of the discussion, my objection to him isn't ideological. The companies he has led have a history of fraud, misinformation, and lies. Tesla is the poster child of this. If I can pick just the most obvious examples, FSD has been promised just around the corner for close to a decade now and the recent retroactive change of the contracts really drives the fraud home. Solar Roof was a sham from the start. Boring Company, sham. See how I'm not listing just a "normal" business failure, like xAI failing as a frontier AI lab. Not everything is destined to be a success. I'm just mentioning the things that were overtly lies told for money. SpaceX is probably successful because by all accounts Musk left the leading of the company to the CEO. His history of lies to enrich himself legitimize the attitude to start with the baseline that any wild claim that could enrich him is a lie and wait to be proven otherwise. For a hammer everything looks like a nail, so for Musk everything is in space. As it happens, he's one of the few parties in the world with easy access to that resource, and acts as a gateway for almost everyone else. I'm not losing or making money on his success so this for me is just a matter of common sense. If someone lies as often as he does, it's "shame on me" to still assume truth until proven lie. |
For instance here [1] is the NYTimes claiming that human flight would be impossible, published just about 2 months before the Wright Bros achieved human flight. Incidentally they also said space flight would be impossible, and were actively patronizing towards the concept. They felt that any child with a basic understanding of science would understand that there's nothing to 'push back against' in space, so spaceflight simply can't work. Until that's proven wrong by actually doing it, some might actually think 'wait that's kind of reasonable - omg maybe it is impossible.'
As for Musk, you're simply assuming malice when e.g. everybody thought full self driving was just around the corner when he made his claims about Tesla bringing it to market. It's kind of the same way that today everybody thinks that in a decade LLMs will be replacing knowledge workers left and right. It's just extrapolating outward from a trendline that exists at one point in time. But it may well be that in a decade we're still predicting that in a decade LLMs will finally be there. Or maybe there will be some revolutionary change, as promised by by all the people pushing LLMs. If it fizzles out, I wouldn't jump to calling them all fraudulent hucksters.
[1] - https://archive.is/F3nnP