What, don't you want to live in a Mars colony where things fall off because A) they were glued on and B) they were glued on wrong?
Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter may soon go through
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…which of course sounds like the same regurgitated bs the media has been spewing the last few years.
Echoing this in a nutshell -
Does Elon Musk Actually Engineer Rockets?
Elon Musk holds multiple titles at SpaceX, including CEO, CTO, and chief designer, and is deeply involved in the design and engineering of rockets. While his direct engineering role may be debated, many believe he directs the design process and makes crucial decisions. Those within the company attest to Musk's fluency in rocket engineering and understanding of propulsion and engine design. Although often credited with the design of SpaceX rockets, Musk's exact role in rocket development is complex.
SpaceX's mission extends beyond building rockets; it aims to facilitate human exploration and settlement beyond Earth, embodying Musk's vision for the future. In an interview, he outlined his five engineering principles vital for creating reusable rockets, which he views as essential for advancing space travel. Musk's heavy rocket plays a crucial role in NASA's plans and his ambition of colonizing Mars. His engagement in the design process is significant, as he evaluates options presented by his team, demonstrating his involvement in detail.
Despite some skepticism about whether Musk qualifies as an engineer due to his lack of formal engineering education, prominent figures from the industry affirm his engineering capabilities. Musk's academic background in physics and economics, combined with his hands-on approach, reinforces his status as a visionary driving forward the aerospace industry.
Elon Musk holds multiple titles at SpaceX, including CEO, CTO, and chief designer, and is deeply involved in the design and engineering of rockets. While his direct engineering role may be debated, many believe he directs the design process and makes crucial decisions. Those within the company attest to Musk's fluency in rocket engineering and understanding of propulsion and engine design. Although often credited with the design of SpaceX rockets, Musk's exact role in rocket development is complex.
SpaceX's mission extends beyond building rockets; it aims to facilitate human exploration and settlement beyond Earth, embodying Musk's vision for the future. In an interview, he outlined his five engineering principles vital for creating reusable rockets, which he views as essential for advancing space travel. Musk's heavy rocket plays a crucial role in NASA's plans and his ambition of colonizing Mars. His engagement in the design process is significant, as he evaluates options presented by his team, demonstrating his involvement in detail.
Despite some skepticism about whether Musk qualifies as an engineer due to his lack of formal engineering education, prominent figures from the industry affirm his engineering capabilities. Musk's academic background in physics and economics, combined with his hands-on approach, reinforces his status as a visionary driving forward the aerospace industry.
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The stuff he himself regularly says shows that he has no idea about the science involved in this projects.
No matter how many people he pays to say he totally does.
It's merely the corrective to the bs that Musk has been pumping out for years.
Musk has a physics degree, has done some reading, and is a smart guy. I am sure he understands the general principles of rocket design, and I am sure he could be a rocket engineer if he set himself to it. But no, he's not a rocket engineer. Sure, he's the company boss, and he has lots of liberty to say "Try this" and "Try that" and there's no-one to second guess him. But of course, he's doing so having seen the summary reports from all the many, many scientists and engineers who have done all the work to produce the reports. Elon Musk can have read about some technology and say "Hey, why not try that" and - I think the comments from the Reddit thread bear this out - it turns out plenty of them don't work.
Does that make him a genius, or just a man with a creative spirit and a lot of power and freedom to make decisions? I'm a scientist, and I've seen lots of scientists in action. You can have scientists look at things they are not an expert in, and apply an enquiring mind and ask useful questions. But they still aren't experts in that field.
Secondly, you also have to think of all the cock-ups Musk has had, like that spat he had over the technology for automated cars, where he told one of the foremost experts in the field he didn't think much of a certain AI technology, despite that being the basis of everyone's AI driver technology, including his own company, Tesla! He evidently didn't know what technology his own company was using.
This article is doing nothing but repeating Elon Musk's own publicity statements back at us with no critical analysis. I'm sorry, but who are these people on this site? Where are their qualifications, where can we verify their credibility? Are they doing anything but superficially scraping waffle off the internet? (Are they even real people, or is an AI doing it for them?)
The problem with the media is precisely that of uncritically parroting back to us the self-publicity of powerful people and corporations. There's no point criticising media bs and then uncritically citing random people on the internet.
The problems with a permanent settlement on Mars go beyond Musk. I mean, sure, he's a big handicap, but even if he just told his people to make it happen and went away except when they needed him to throw more money at them, it's hugely ambitious.
Humanity has yet to put people on Mars, or have a permanent settlement outside Earth orbit (being generous and calling a space station with a handful of people staying there for a few months at a time a settlement). And not for no reason. If a major government was to announce they were going to settle Mars, I'd be skeptical, and Musk isn't one.
Humanity has yet to put people on Mars, or have a permanent settlement outside Earth orbit (being generous and calling a space station with a handful of people staying there for a few months at a time a settlement). And not for no reason. If a major government was to announce they were going to settle Mars, I'd be skeptical, and Musk isn't one.
It's bullshit. It's not going to happen in our lifetimes.
Mars is fundamentally hostile to human survival and bloody hard to get to. It's about building a massive load of ships to cart over a load of stuff at eye-wateringly vast expense (with no financial return for generations, if ever). To set up a colony where everyone is under substantial mental and physical strain (work like a dog, limited entertainment/luxuries, threat of death, no advanced medical care, probably low gravity-related health concerns and potentially with no journey home). It's never going to be long-term self-sufficient. Just think of the effort to maintain power generation; the difficulty and limitations of food production, needing everything delivered because resource extraction and factories are non-starters. Even small mistakes or accidents or natural disasters (storms, subsidence, rockfalls, etc.) could cripple or wipe out the colony - all that life and all that expense - at a stroke.
No-one's going to pay for that, and no-one's going to do it. Not anytime soon, anyway. Sure, someone might carry out a manned mission to Mars, but no way it's going beyond that. Admittedly, if someone really can make an AI for a fully autonomous and mostly self-directed robot, yeah, maybe, they can do... something. But we're not even anywhere near that yet.
I'm not big on predicting what will happen in decades, so couldn't be so sure, but people will colonise the sea floor, Antarctica and the Moon first, because those are much easier. And I don't see anyone really trying any of those any time soon.
Mars is definitely less hostile than the sea floor. The Moon and Antarctica (#Modest Mouse) you're probably right, but I don't think any of the other three come close to the hostility of hundreds of times atmospheric pressure. Low temperature/pressure/gravity/atmosphere are less destructive than super high pressure.
Mars is more hostile/expensive than the sea floor in that it's several light minutes away from supplies and safety if anything goes wrong, whereas the sea floor is conveniently located on Earth, though.
In other news, Elon Musk wants to block out the Sun:
futurism.com
We had enough proof he's not a genius going to get people to Mars, but thanks for providing more, I guess?
Elon Musk Announces Plan to Control Climate by Surrounding Earth in Adjustable Satellites
Elon Musk's brilliant plan for saving us from climate change involves a little help from a swarm of friendly AI satellites.
futurism.com
We had enough proof he's not a genius going to get people to Mars, but thanks for providing more, I guess?
He has a dual bachelor degree for physics and economics. And even within this dual degree his specializations were "finance" and "entrepreneurial management".
That's it.
"Sea floor" is a very variable thing regarding its depth. The continental shelf is certainly less hostile than Mars. Colonizing the deep sea however won't happen either. Except, nothing actually forces you to build your colonies down there. Floating or submerged but swimming habitats are pretty much possible and easy and even can get solar power to them.
If you want to do ocean floor mining, that is a task for robots, not humans.
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Mars has many problems. But the worst is that is has no athmosphere to speak off. And no magnetic field to keep one even if you somehow create one.
Under this circumstance, Mars will never sustain any noticable population. Nor is there any plan even promising to build industry on Mars that could provide the ressources to build and sustain colonies. Currently basically everything needs to shipped over and if it breaks, people die.
Musks plans are only concerned with shipping stuff (and people) to Mars. They lack a lot when it comes to what happens next. And even the "transporting stuff to Mars" part is deeply flawed. He proposes ludicious amounts of rocket launches each month but he doesn't even consider how the distance between earth and Mars changes all the time, how there are optimal launch windows and rockets need longer journeys and more fuel outside of them.
He literally has no clue whatsoever.
It is not really his idea, it has been around in variants for years.
And it is actually more feasable/sane than the Mars colonisation. It is still an idea with many flaws.
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I would say that is a separate factor from hostility. When comparing an uninhabited tropical island to a thorn-infested swamp nearby, you can say it'd be easier to set up residence in the swamp, but I doubt anyone is going to call it a less hostile environment.
on the (not so) bright side, blocking out the sun with satellites is some number of orders of magnitude less expensive than capturing all the sunlight with a Dyson swarm to power your LLM data center(s), Sam.
One might argue that if we have got into space (which is basically everything bad about Mars but even worse) and maintained a long-term habitat, but struggle to get into the deep oceans, then it's harder to get into the deep oceans. But that is deep oceans. If we mean the sea floor on much of the world's continental shelves, that's much easier.
But fundamentally, all these environments are fundamentally incompatible with human life to the point of (near-)instant death, and a comparison is pointless. It's all about our ability to maintain a habitat to resist that environment.
Oh, cool, skipping type I civ. Why stop there tho, let's go wrangle supermassive black holes.
Fair enough. Like most cases I think even here the truth is somewhere in the middle. Are there smarter people at Tesla/SpaceX that do the heavy lifting? Certainly. Is Musk himself merely throwing money at these people with little to no understanding of what’s happening? I don’t think anyone, with any amount of money, could keep such high level companies together for this long let alone grow so much if that was the case. Someone would’ve taken them right out from under him by now. If anything he’s spread himself too thin and could benefit from scaling down, especially on the internet ramblings. But that’s probably his stress release valve these days.
Kinda funny
First: The role of a CEO/ keeping companies together is an entirely different skillset. It involves managing other managers, agreeing targets, reassuring stakeholders, reporting earnings. In any company, the JD of the CEO has very little to do with the actual meat and potatoes of the work. A restaurant's most senior manager isn't an active chef.
Second: why would you assume he must be good at his job to be successful anyway? One of modern capitalism's most enduring myths is that being wealthy is an indicator of particular skill. The majority of the work, even managerial work, at Tesla will be done by people with less than 0.1% of Musk's wealth.
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You forgot one very important skill that Musk has that no one else does. His ability to get dumb investors to keep investing in him.
International investment seems to be very... "vibes based". Relies on the brand someone builds, the perception of confidence, or other such fluff, rather than anything solid or analytical. Musk can create a recognisable brand (though friendly media does a lot of the hype work and quietly ignores the embarrassing bits).