I prefer the Big Friendly Rocket interpretation. :)

&quot;The video appears to show SpaceX&#x27;s new rocket — the BFR, or &quot;Big Fucking Rocket&quot; — as well as the company&#x27;s interplanetary spaceship — the BFS, or &quot;Big Fucking Spaceship.&quot;&quot;

28 million pounds of thrust is 4 times what the Saturn V was capable of.

Speed to Mars though is really relative speed along whatever orbit (Hohmann transfer or the moral equivalent) that you choose. Only in SF stories do we have fully powered propulsion to Mars.I am very curious what the selected family of orbits is, and even more importantly how long &amp; how much life support for the large passenger number.

I don&#x27;t think they would stick to pure ION drive or pure chemical rocks. Mixing them seems like a great option depending on how cheap they can get fuel to orbit. The could also refuel in mars orbit.A pure ion drive for all the equipment even if this means it takes 4x as long to get there, then a &#x27;small&#x27; capsule back and forth for people.

Ok, now it&#x27;s starting to make a little bit more sense to me.They massively oversize the second stage and launch it almost empty, so it can just do the 5 km&#x2F;s or whatever is needed for orbit. Then they launch multiple tankers to refuel it.They don&#x27;t need lots of engines on the second stage because it&#x27;s launched light.So it&#x27;s pure chemical propulsion.But still with only 4 km&#x2F;s exhaust velocity, no matter how you slice it, the mass ratios required from a single stage get impossible, ie even if the rocket tanks and engines didn&#x27;t have any mass, payload sets an upper limit to the mass ratio.EDIT:
So looks like it has 10 km&#x2F;s delta vee. Not 30.

The 30 km&#x2F;s is speed relative to the Sun, at a half-way point between Earth and Mars.Most of it, you would get for free, since the ship is launched from the Earth, which is already moving at ~30 km&#x2F;s. The delta-v cost is much less then that.

Unconventional design.The rocket looks very large and they mention 120 million newtons takeoff thrust so the weight is about 10 million kg, 3 times Saturn V size.The first stage lands back on launch stool, the tanker stage is put on top of it and it launches again. This implies a relatively fast turnaround.Both the second stage and the tanker seem to have complete heat shields and stub wings and ability to re-enter either Mars or Earth.So all parts<pre><code> 1) big
 2) landable and 
 3) short turnaround time 
</code></pre>
This would imply they will launch them a lot, so they&#x27;re really ramping up the traffic to Mars, not just a few missions?I don&#x27;t understand the 100 000 km&#x2F;h which is 30 km&#x2F;s speed for the Mars cruise. Would be really hard to achieve with chemical propulsion. With 4 km&#x2F;s exhaust velocity and delta vee of say 20 km&#x2F;s you get a required mass ratio of e^(20&#x2F;4) which is 150. And they lug the upper stage engines all the way, and there&#x27;s heatshield and wings. Impossible.Also the 200 kW electrical power advertised is puny for electrical propulsion. With an ISP of 1000 (exhaust 10 km&#x2F;s) you get an 20 Newtons of thrust [correction from 200N], which is nothing for their ship size. If they only have ten tons of mass, then it takes 200 days to accelerate to full speed.Typically you might need 10 to 20 km&#x2F;s speed for Mars.Their plan does not compute for me.EDIT: So it can work if they only go for 10 km&#x2F;s.

If they do, I assume because it&#x27;s easier to transfer fuel than passengers.

I believe his answer in the QA was that you would launch an empty rocket first, and once that rocket is fueled, a 2nd rocket with passengers would launch and transfer to the fueled rocket, and then the new passenger-empty rocket would be in orbit to be fueled for the next trip.

In the Q&amp;A part he addresses this. I think they showed passengers first for the video just for stylistic purposes. He said he thinks you&#x27;d probably be launching spaceships and begin fueling between trips (26 months), keeping them parked in orbit, and then passengers would go up last before the trip and board fully fuled ships. I think it&#x27;s a detail that&#x27;s not determined yet. Watch the video.

In the QA he clarifies that they are unsure about refueling time, it might be that they launch a vehicle, refuel it, and then launch another vehicle with passengers, then transfer those passengers to the refueled vehicle. It depends on refueling time.

Why do they launch the passengers first? Passengers eat and shit and breathe while they wait. They&#x27;re also liable to be more upset if their mission is aborted, due to a failed tanker launch, while they&#x27;re in orbit.

My reaction, after thinking about this for a bit, is more &quot;This is going to be everything the Shuttle was supposed to be!&quot; than anything to do with getting people to Mars.  That&#x27;s all, of course, predicated on getting the turnaround for this thing fast and cheap.  With orbital refueling I wonder how much one of these could land on the Moon?

SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=0qo78R_yYFA" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=0qo78R_yYFA</a>

&gt; CSTsighCentral standard time I&#x27;m guessing, so mid-US I guess &quot;central&quot; and &quot;standard&quot; mean here, so I&#x27;m guesstimating GMT-7. That would put it around 8:30 GMT.

It was supposed to start at 1:30PM CST [0], but it sounds like it is delayed [1] a few minutes [2].[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=1%3A30+cst" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.google.com&#x2F;search?q=1%3A30+cst</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jeff_foust&#x2F;status&#x2F;780835809696092161" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;jeff_foust&#x2F;status&#x2F;780835809696092161</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;elonmusk&#x2F;status&#x2F;780838839644483586" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;elonmusk&#x2F;status&#x2F;780838839644483586</a>

On the ArsTechnica liveblog, they said the talks a few minutes late but should be starting soon.

Should be any moment now.  Earlier, a countdown was being held on the page.  We&#x27;re about 5 minutes late.

I would guess he&#x27;s pretty busy actually running his companies, hence the delays for the PR events.

I guess time is hard to measure when you deal with fast things???? (Terrible, non-sensical joke)

I&#x27;ve never watched an Elon Musk livestream that started on time. Not sure if I&#x27;m spoiled by Apple keynotes always starting on time, or if live stream start times at SpaceX are just as loose as the company&#x27;s other timelines

&quot;Waiting for everyone to reach their seats and get settled. Starting in 5 to 10.&quot; Elon said that about ~3 minutes ago on twitter.

Mars launch is delayed waiting for rocket passengers to fasten their seatbelts

Finally introducing Musk at about 18.59 UTC (i.e. +00:00)

&quot;Livestream starting soon&quot;. Does anyone know what time they&#x27;re starting? (And please use a numeric timezone, I&#x27;m not a walking timezone database.)

The whole process is kind of built against showing any solid plans until as late as possible. It&#x27;s hard to argue against the nebulous idea of &#x27;create more jobs&#x27; other than &#x27;that&#x27;s not an actual plan&#x27;. Once your opponent provides a solid plan you get all sorts of new ways to attack it like cost (especially cost). Another reason to not put out a detailed plan is that the actual bills&#x2F;regulations you can get in office are going to look pretty different than what the base of $PARTY would like to see because you have to actually get it passed, but then you&#x27;re not delivering on the promises and no one likes to hear &#x27;we knew the proposal was ambitious and impractical to get passed but we told you we would to get your vote&#x27;.

Agree. I watched my first and last presidential debate yesterday, they raised no relevant solutions. I&#x27;m so giddy, what a better way than to spend such historical date with my fellow HN users!

Maybe I&#x27;m misunderstanding but you seem to be saying &quot;Let&#x27;s not be excited about colonizing another planet-- life will be just as depressing there.&quot;

Throughout human history, there has always been a new&#x2F;unexplored land to emigrate to for new opportunities or to escape political persecution. Nowdays there is nowhere left for someone in the West to emigrate to that is not substantially the same or worse. Mars and the stars could potentially offer that opportunity, which might be why some people are excited.

&gt;&gt;The earth isn&#x27;t the problemIt is. If you are yet not convinced, you might want to take a look at how many species go extinct every day.There are a many threats to human existence beyond human behavior and preparing for them is a good move forward.

That&#x27;s fine. The goal isn&#x27;t to escape our problems, it&#x27;s to explore new places, live there, and set up humanity so one big asteroid won&#x27;t kill it.

The problems we take with us aren&#x27;t the problem this project addresses---there is one problem we unequivocally leave behind if we successfully colonize Mars.For all our accomplishments, the human species is one unavoidable planet-scale disaster away from total extinction. We know this class of disaster has happened in Earth&#x27;s past, and we know we lack the capability to stop it. Colonizing Mars gives the species that much more chance to extend its survival past the terrestrial-impact threshold.There are myriad other ways we could wipe ourselves out that myriad people are working on. None of them matter if something kills Earth&#x27;s biosphere (much like this project doesn&#x27;t matter if something like war kills us off before we succeed). They aren&#x27;t mutually exclusive.

&gt; What about going to a different planet makes you think we won&#x27;t just be taking those same problems with us?It&#x27;ll just be wealthy people for a long time. Wealth is strongly correlated with intelligence, peace, and other desirable factors. Perhaps the social baseline will be a lot higher. This is hard to predict given that we don&#x27;t really know what the psychological and epigenetic effects of going to mars will be.

What about going to a different planet makes you think we won&#x27;t just be taking those same problems with us?The earth isn&#x27;t the problem - The problem is the human brain. We aren&#x27;t genetically capable of processing the world we have built.Expect there to be Trump IV vs Clinton IV 2117 hosted live on Mars if we haven&#x27;t made significant improvements in human engineering.

...and then you get to the Q&#x2F;A section and start to understand how we ended with a self-aggrandizing anti-intellectual presidential candidate

I have big problems with US foreign policy and the treatment of blacks. But stuff like this makes me want to move to LA and work at SpaceX. I guess I&#x27;d essentially be living at work, so ...

This is so pleasant to see after being bombarded with US presidential politics.  Science, hope and progress!

Oh, wow! I put the video in my watch-later-list, until then: What&#x27;s the time frame, roughly? Are we talking 5 years or 20?

OMG; he says is going to build it, exactly like his demo. As a youth I received a brand new Matt Mason for birthday; it has been a very, very long time.

God, my lifetime would be so boring if it wasn&#x27;t for people like Elon.

&quot;Waiting for everyone to reach their seats and get settled. Starting in 5 to 10.&quot;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;elonmusk&#x2F;status&#x2F;780838839644483586" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;elonmusk&#x2F;status&#x2F;780838839644483586</a>

Thank you for posting this. Have been excited about this all week!

The answer is the same as why the Falcon 9 uses propulsive landing.  Parachutes are heavy, and generally require a water landing which seriously damages the booster (not to mention requires a recovery operation).  The vast majority of the weight in these spacecraft is fuel, so when it&#x27;s time for it to return to the pad it requires a comparatively small amount of fuel (as most of the weight has been burnt up).  The fuel itself is also a tiny percentage of the total cost of the craft, at interplanetary scale $10k for a little extra fuel is nothing.

&gt; SpaceX experimented with using parachutes in the past (mainly for their Falcon 1 vehicles), but parachutes are poorly suited to this application, as extreme speeds and loads cause them to shred. Parachutes large enough to recover the stage are also quite heavy, a weight which could be used for fuel for a propulsive landing and for primary mission assurance. Parachutes also cannot be steered.&gt; Essentially, this becomes a problem of people overestimating the amount of fuel required to bring the stage back, underestimating the weight of the parachute system (which would be in the hundreds of kilograms at least), and underestimating the fragility and controllability of a parachute system.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;spacex&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;faq&#x2F;reusability" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;spacex&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;faq&#x2F;reusability</a>

Parachutes put large loads on the structure when opening and don&#x27;t have much precision in choosing a landing site.

Part of it is that there&#x27;s not a good middle area for them to work. F9 has to use rockets at the beginning for the boost back burn in space and would need to use it again around landing because parachutes aren&#x27;t gentle or controlled&#x2F;precise enough for a landing on land or a barge.

Fuel is cheap, and the parachutes you&#x27;d need to soft-land a rocket like this would be gigantic. The weight and cost of the two systems are more similar than you might realize. Propulsive landing gives you much more control over where you end up.

Because Mars doesn&#x27;t have a thick enough atmosphere to parachute-land a big spacecraft. The atmosphere is thin not only in density but in altitude.It wasn&#x27;t until about 15 years ago that it was realized that we had no clue how to land a large craft on Mars. &quot;Plainly put, with our current capabilities, a large, heavy vehicle, streaking through Mars’ thin, volatile atmosphere only has about ninety seconds to slow from Mach 5 to under Mach 1, change and re-orient itself from being a spacecraft to a lander, deploy parachutes to slow down further, then use thrusters to translate to the landing site and finally, gently touch down.&quot; - JPL.[1]The approaches used for the small landers don&#x27;t scale. Giant supersonic parachutes a hundred meters across don&#x27;t look workable. There are some exotic parachute&#x2F;heat shield concepts such as &quot;hypercones&quot; which have never been tried. Deceleration outside the atmosphere with rockets takes huge amounts of fuel, but should work.The refueling in orbit plan makes sense. (Sending the fuel tank up first would be simpler, if less impressive visually. Build up fuel storage in orbit with multiple launches. This was von Braun&#x27;s original lunar plan.)[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.universetoday.com&#x2F;7024&#x2F;the-mars-landing-approach-getting-large-payloads-to-the-surface-of-the-red-planet&#x2F;#" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.universetoday.com&#x2F;7024&#x2F;the-mars-landing-approach-...</a>

Musk answered that in the talk.Using parachutes limits you to only landing on places that have a thick(ish) atmosphere.Being propulsive, they can land this thing anywhere in the entire solar system. (Then he said Venus would be tricky, and it must be solid, not liquid)

It looks from the videos that the boosters return to land using strictly thrust from the rocket. Can someone explain why  it&#x27;s done that way and a parachute isn&#x27;t used for at least part of the descent? Seems like an awful waste of fuel.

SpaceX can buy an off the self launch from someone. They are prohibited from giving them any rocket tech or anything else that falls under ITAR (quite a few things).As far as ITAR is concerned there are no friendly nations (there are a few that have reduced paperwork needs, but still fall under ITAR).

Someone more knowledgeable then me can probably answer this, but under ITAR, can SpaceX contract a Mars launch with another nation on friendly terms with the USA?

Can&#x27;t believe we&#x27;re in that moment here.

We can&#x27;t solve simplest problems on Earth (like re-capturing CO2 for example), but believe we&#x27;ll be able to terraform a planet to which we haven&#x27;t even been able to send a human yet?

Watch the end of the video. I think he intends to terraform it.Edit: looks like he&#x27;s aiming for a city of 1m people in the short term, Terraforming in the long term.

Are you going to need bones to play them?

&gt;What are we going to do on Mars?Probably the same stuff we do on Earth? Also- sports would be pretty cool in low gravity (37% of Earth&#x27;s gravity)

Well, the title of the post is &quot;making humans a multiplanetary species&quot;. Not &quot;asking humans if they want to be multiplanetary species&quot;. I was speaking of &quot;we&quot; in that sense, &quot;we as humans&quot;. But I get your point.

Nobody&#x27;s making you go, so it&#x27;s not really &quot;we.&quot; Lots of people do want to go, so you could ask them what they&#x27;d like to do there, but you&#x27;d get better answers if you ditched the condescending language.

VR work+play in a Musky geopolitical climate, with a Martian exploration theme park for weekend excursions.

What are we going to do on Mars? Live in a plastic box? Send in a bunch of slaves to mine minerals in insufferable conditions? I don&#x27;t get it.

Hm. It either hasn&#x27;t started yet or its not working for me. I just see the logo and hear music.

What I meant is, until Mars is self-sustaining and eventually capable of recolonizing Earth. Colonists rocketing back to a nuclear wasteland or planet infected with super-viruses won&#x27;t protect us from extinction.And it&#x27;s much easier and cheaper just to have underground bunkers than to bring a few people back from Mars on a rocket right after some disaster.

Getting back is actually much easier, and we won&#x27;t send anyone until there&#x27;s a return ship ready for them on the ground.Mars escape velocity is ~5 km&#x2F;s compared to 11 km&#x2F;s for Earth, so right off the bat it takes half as much delta-v to get off Mars. The numbers get even more attractive when you consider that Mars&#x27;s atmosphere is so thin you can use vacuum-optimized engines on the surface.It&#x27;s a near-certainty that the second stage of ITS will be able to launch fully fueled from the Martian surface and return to Earth orbit, and possibly Earth&#x27;s surface, without any refueling on the way.

Elon has been clear in the past that this is a fully reusable architecture. i.e. he needs his spaceship back! Bringing some passengers is (relatively!) trivial.

Why can&#x27;t we be money based and have relatively high redistribution and taxes?

I finished Red Mars two days ago. A+, hardest scifi I&#x27;ve ever read.

One reasonable definition of &#x27;colonizing&#x27; as distinct form &#x27;exploring&#x27; is that colonists plan to die there.

Yup, Re: the danger. Later on:Q: Who should be the first humans on Mars?
Q: Who should be the first humans on Mars?A: The first journeys will be very dangerous, the risk of fatalities will be high. Likely no children - must be prepared to die. 
A: The first journeys will be very dangerous, the risk of fatalities will be high. Likely no children - must be prepared to die.

&gt; I don&#x27;t think Mars is viable until we enter a post scarcity world.Why? Moving a few thousand humans to mars really isn&#x27;t that expensive, in money or energy.

&gt; Make no mistake, people are going to die in the first several runs.I agree, and I would even say this is the main challenge of the project long term - whether we have the stomach for seeing hundreds of people blow up on the launch pad, suffocating in interplanetary space, or dying from exposure on Mars when a hab block fails (and all of that possibly repeatedly). For some reason we don&#x27;t have problem sending millions of people to their deaths where they don&#x27;t happen publicly, but that&#x27;s where we are right now.You have to weigh these risks (and PR impacts) against the severe drawbacks of civilization-wide stagnation, of which a potential mass extinction event on Earth is just one example.Personally, I would choose to go even if there was a 50% chance of blowing up on the launchpad.&gt; The first colonists will most likely not come back.If they survive for a few years, there will be return opportunities. There is no downside to offering people a ride on returning transports. I would say establishing a reasonable transfer rate between Mars and Earth is vital to the program on several levels. Update: just made it through the QA and Musk seems to agree with me, he says having the option of going back is vital, and they&#x27;ll be offering free return trips on their transports.&gt; I don&#x27;t think Mars is viable until we enter a post scarcity worldThat amounts to never. As a transhumanist and futurist myself, I have grown far less optimistic about the political will to even work towards such a state in recent years. People are violently opposed to switching away from capitalism, for many irrational and even some rational reasons. I allege that technologically speaking the industrial nations of the world could switch to a post-scarcity scenario for the everyday needs of citizens pretty much right away if they wanted to.There is also no compelling reason in my mind why colonizing another planet is something we just can&#x27;t do using our current means. Some people say there is not enough money to do it, but in reality money is a malleable entity, and we&#x27;re not batting an eyelash at wasting literally trillions on it. But for some reason investing mere billions into technologically progressive ideas suddenly brings up fundamental questions about the scalability of our economy?Lastly, I also believe starting self-sustaining colonies elsewhere might be the only way of rebooting into a post-scarcity system. Not saying that&#x27;s what will happen, but at least there is a chance.

The first colonists will most likely not come back. Make no mistake, people are going to die in the first several runs. This will be one of the most dangerous endeavors mankind can attempt.As far as war breaking out, we&#x27;re not going to make it to Mars in our current state. I don&#x27;t think Mars is viable until we enter a post scarcity world. I find it unlikely we can even attempt it if we&#x27;re still in a money based economy.I highly recommend The Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. It&#x27;s one of the most believable and well thought out sci-fi novel about what populating Mars would be like conceptually.

And if the company goes belly-up while you&#x27;re there?

Musk just answered a question that said you can come back if you want to.&quot;The spaceship is coming back anyway, you can get on if you want. Free&quot;

The point of being multiplanetary is if there is an extinction event on Earth, people survive on Mars. You don&#x27;t need to _immediately_ be able to come back, although you need to be able to move off Mars at some point.

We won&#x27;t really be an interplanetary species until we can get back from Mars.Imagine being colonists on Mars without the ability to be totally self-sustaining without technology and supplies from Earth and nuclear war breaks out. It&#x27;s going to be a long time before any Mars colony can survive on its own.

elon musk debuts his foray into electronic music

People are still filling in the seats. There&#x27;s a reddit live thread that&#x27;s gathering some of the tweets from people there.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;live&#x2F;xnrdv28vxfi2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;live&#x2F;xnrdv28vxfi2</a>

Is SpaceX trying to simulate the long, tedious trip to Mars with this scheduling delay and &quot;endless space&quot; intro graphic?

Are you certain of that?  It&#x27;s mentioned in a few places (including Wikipedia), but I&#x27;ve not seen any SpaceX sources saying this was a sub-scale test article.  On the contrary, we&#x27;ve heard Elon say that because of the very high chamber pressure, you can get the thrust they&#x27;re looking for out of an engine about the size of a Merlin.  And while it&#x27;s hard to be 100% sure, from the pictures I&#x27;ve seen the unit tested at the weekend looks kind-of Merlin sized.  Not conclusive, of course, but likewise I&#x27;ve not yet seen any hard evidence to support the idea that it is sub-scale.

It&#x27;s full size they just use 27+ of them on the heavy lift version of their rocket, and 40+ on the proposed rocket for lifting the Mars ships off of Earth.

A scale model of the engine. It&#x27;s not full-size yet.

While this remains a paper rocket for now, its engine (which looks to be a pretty big deal in its own right) was test-fired for the first time yesterday:<pre><code> https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;elonmusk&#x2F;status&#x2F;780275236922994688</code></pre>

Musk just addressed this. Mars has an atmosphere of CO2 and Nitrogen, so we can grow plants, a day length similar to Earth&#x27;s (24.5 hours), and is larger.

Some possible reasons; Mars has a c02 atmosphere, water ice, it has a ~24 hour day as opposed to the moons 28 day-day, Earth and Mars have similar sizes.

Better yet, why not asteroids first? If we really want to be living in space, don&#x27;t switch one gravity well for a much shittier one.

To me the moon would be the obvious place to start, especially as the NASA plans I&#x27;ve seen for Mars have been based on using a space station at a Earth-Lunar Lagrange point, and associated moonbase, as ideal staging post. That and I might one day afford a ticket.I guess direct to Mars is sexier. :)(I&#x27;m behind live too.)

I wonder if silicosis is a major concern on Mars (as it is for lunar colony considerations).

The moon is high ground from anywhere on Earth, which makes state action involving colonization efforts very likely.  It&#x27;s easy to point out that there will be no bombardment or invasion from Mars in the next half century, regardless of how things go for settlements there.

This brings up a good point. Why mars first? Why not a moon colony first?

With so much that happens on this planet I agree. We&#x27;re doing an appalling job of keeping our only planet viable or leaving a better place for our children. Our species is not fit to be let out. But...On space and Mars we must agree to disagree. Apart from the exploration and new discoveries that may arise from another planet, like the space race of the 60s many new technologies will arise. By introducing research on other planets (as we have done on ISS) there&#x27;ll be a lot of basic and blue sky research that&#x27;s hard to fund down here as it&#x27;s not thought commercial. Some will be commercial, some might help save the planet. We don&#x27;t know what we might discover, but it&#x27;ll be vastly more than staying here arguing about fracking.That commerce is getting us there and NASA hasn&#x27;t in 50 years is telling. But it&#x27;s as telling that there&#x27;s a willingness to fund ridiculous wars on drugs and terror, and ill-conceived adventures in many places than develop the species with global missions to our home system, or alleviating hunger. I suspect for a fraction of the cost. If Mars were a threat we&#x27;d have been there decades ago.Having an escape route, or at least the start of viable interplanetary travel, even if most wont get to use it might be handy too.

Pardon the cynicism, I&#x27;m a bit tired of tomorrows. It&#x27;s the same story over and over. I believe we don&#x27;t need a new &quot;next&quot;. So much is unused or wasted here.. I can&#x27;t stop thinking we&#x27;re just gonna spread human absurdity further.ps: I heard Musk incentive to research interplanetary escape as a safety measure. But this is not what&#x27;s sold here IMO, it smells too much of space travel tech infused greener (sic) heaven.

&gt; But on the other end, we have lots of movies expecting much more from us on the &#x27;space&#x27; end of things.&quot;Expected&quot; may be the wrong word. People that have the capacity to travel through space but basically interact in familiar ways may just be a better fit for the medium than people who interact in unfamiliar ways.

&gt;I find it interesting that when watching old movies, few got the communications networks of the future rightThere&#x27;s some old video made in the mid-1960s showing &quot;a view of the future&quot;, which basically depicts every home as having a home computer connected to some kind of communications network, where people would be able to read news, send messages, and even do shopping.While a lot of sci-fi really seemed to miss the bus as far as communications go, there were some people who really did see what was coming. For some odd reason, they never got involved with anyone who made movies. But the internet really is pretty simple and easy to understand to an intelligent person from before the internet: they had news programs and TV, they had newspapers, they had magazines, the had snail-mail, they had telephones, and they had mail-order (and telephone-order) shopping. All the internet did was tie it all together and make it easily accessible to everyone, which had gigantic network effects that were unexpected.&gt;But on the other end, we have lots of movies expecting much more from us on the &#x27;space&#x27; end of things. Many movies that occur in space have us already having permanent moon bases in the timeline.That&#x27;s because those movies were all extrapolating, accurately many times (like with 2001: A Space Odyssey), based on then-current trends in aerospace technology. Just look at the progress of aerospace between ~1900 and 1970: we went from just figuring out the airfoil wing to making airplanes that decided a world war (II, they had a good part in I too), to making supersonic planes, to making rockets and then landing men on the Moon. That&#x27;s pretty remarkable progress for 70 years. After that, what have we done for the last 45 years? We&#x27;ve sent out some neat deep-space probes and rovers, we&#x27;ve had a few rickety space stations in LEO, and we&#x27;ve made passenger aviation much more ubiquitous and inexpensive, and (related) improved fuel economy. We haven&#x27;t progressed remotely as much. We&#x27;ve made huge strides in computers and electronic networking though... We&#x27;ve also made some big strides in medicine. If we had kept up our attention and funding in the space program like we had in the 1960s, we would have a rotating space station and a Moon base by now.&gt;&quot;Seveneves&quot; by Neil Stephenson mentions our modern communications software at one point in the book, how it alters our brains, and how future civilizations avoided the same fate intentionally. However, I&#x27;m not about to make a causality assessment between our communications software and our lack of advancement in spaceI will.We cut back our funding for space exploration long before the Internet became publicly known. The Internet was conceived in the early &#x2F;mid1970s IIRC, and only become commonly-used in the 1980s in academia. It only became known to the general public in 1989 thanks to Robert Tappan Morris and his worm, and only become generally used by regular people in the mid&#x2F;late 1990s after the invention of the WWW and the HTML browser. By contrast, the funding for space exploration was cut in the early 1970s, before the Apollo missions were even done. There were a bunch more Moon missions planned; they never happened because Congress cut their funding and redirected what was left to the bloated and ill-conceived STS (Space Shuttle). Things went downhill from there. In a nutshell, once the US landed men on the Moon, the &quot;space race&quot; was considered done and won by the Americans, so the Soviets mostly gave up on such highly-ambitious goals, and both space programs instead turned to much more practical matters, namely coming up with ways of more cheaply launching spy satellites, navigation systems (GPS, Glonass), etc., instead of giant national-prestige projects that served no military use whatsoever (but instead advanced science and civilian technology tremendously). The US had given up on things like a real space station or a Moon base long before the Internet was something people had any serious interest in using.

I find it interesting that when watching old movies, few got the communications networks of the future right (edit: meaning that they are always behind the curve. We&#x27;ve advanced a lot more than expected). Other than perhaps &quot;Ghost in The Shell&quot;.But on the other end, we have lots of movies expecting much more from us on the &#x27;space&#x27; end of things. Many movies that occur in space have us already having permanent moon bases in the timeline.&quot;Seveneves&quot; by Neil Stephenson mentions our modern communications software at one point in the book, how it alters our brains, and how future civilizations avoided the same fate intentionally. However, I&#x27;m not about to make a causality assessment between our communications software and our lack of advancement in space (or any other scientific&#x2F;technical endeavor for that matter).

Where is this from? I&#x27;d really like to see this part. It&#x27;s an idea that bugs me too.It&#x27;s like &quot;well the others are going to cure cancer, fix the internet, make it so that machines can talk with us and make gold fall out of the sky&quot;.

I was so inspired by Elon saying &quot;people have this expectation that technology just continues to improve on it&#x27;s own,&quot; before going on to talk about ancient civilizations reaching peak technology and backsliding hard.

Honestly, the quote is a reflection of a distorted understanding of reality transposed over from utopian science fiction. The stars are incredibly far away, and are overwhelmingly utterly hostile to human life. The &#x27;dirt&#x27; is one of the very few places in the galaxy, perhaps the only place, actually well suited to human life, and the ecosystems that support it.If our understanding of fundamental physics is correct, there will never be an interstellar civilization of the sort that sci fi depicts. Only balkanized civilizations separated by many decades of travel. Within a solar system, no doubt interplanetary colonies will happen, but the conditions for life on other planets within our solar system are overwhelmingly harsh, difficult, and expensive.Most of the work that needs to go into making either of those things happen will occur here on Earth. Although a Mars colony could help, if there was some economic imperative which could sustain and drive it.

There is a line in the film “Interstellar” that stuck with me: “We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.” Now the film plays in a dystopian future, but I 
think the quote is still appropriate for us as a civilization. If Elon can change that, all the better.

&gt; One of my earliest strong memories was the last moon landing.One of my earliest memories was the challenger explosion. I&#x27;ve basically missed out on any of the truly revolutionary space accomplishments.

&gt;I&#x27;d really like to see us taking space seriously. While I&#x27;m still hereYou can help make it happen. The Planetary society is actively lobbying Congress to increase funding for space research.

You were told the moon landing was about human progress and exploring frontiers. In reality it was just about beating the Russians in the cold war.Sorry.

I&#x27;d really like to see us taking space seriously. While I&#x27;m still here.One of my earliest strong memories was the last moon landing. This was followed by years of &quot;Tomorrow&#x27;s World&quot; and &quot;Horizon&quot; telling us about the Moon bases, Mars bases and orbital platforms that would soon follow. We got Skylab and some very interesting probes. I&#x27;m a tiny bit disappointed in that. We were meant to be en route to Starfleet Command and global cooperation (which always seemed a big ask as we were at the height of the cold war).However, I can&#x27;t help thinking if we do become a multiplanetary species before resolving the issues of this one a few things are just a matter of time. That some politician claims we don&#x27;t need to care about emissions as we now have a spare, so he&#x27;s going to build loads of new coal. That Esso wants to know if there&#x27;s oil. That we have an interplanetary falling out (OK that&#x27;s probably a while away). That we start littering and buggering up the rest of the solar system.

If everyone in the world could afford an iPhone 12, that would be a net gain dwarfing anything we&#x27;d get from a Martian colony.It would also imply a world economy that could easily support the development of such a colony. It&#x27;s not an either&#x2F;or.

Hope! To be honest I don&#x27;t think it matters if mars will be any better but at least it&#x27;s progress.and in a totalitarian sort of way, which would be better for the human race, getting off this rock or having the world upgrade from an iphone 11 to an iphone 12?

Does Mars colonisation increase the chances of Earth becoming (more of) a corporate dystopia? If not, then if there is a chance of a Mars colony which supports your values what are you losing by the attempt? [edit: this is awkwardly phrased ... it is like a free roulette shot, it may or may not pay off, but if it&#x27;s &quot;free&quot; the net value is positive.]And I also think if colonisation ever was big enough to absorb a significant (i.e. 5%+) portion of Earth gross product (i.e. the sum of GDPs) then it could also improve life on Earth by improving the effective ROI of the capital deployed elsewhere.

&gt; Who gets to go?According to Musk, whoever pays.&gt; Who rules?Not to be flippant, but who cares? The worst case scenario is that we repeat British colonialism and the martians overthrow the despotic earth government in a few generations. Same as always, the colony is too far away for the motherland to effectively maintain control. The important thing is getting humans to Mars; all the short-term stuff is important, but it&#x27;s just small beans in the long run.&gt; Are we going to Terraform Mars?Musk clearly wants to. It is not clear how feasible this is with current tech.

&gt; I just finished reading these books for what seems like the millionth time, and Mr. Musk hasn&#x27;t even begun to answer the questions they raise. What is the legal structure going to be on the 1MM person colony? Who gets to go? What are the transplants allowed to do there? Who rules? Who do the rulers answer to? Are we going to Terraform Mars? If yes, under whose auspices and with what restrictions?Musk has basically stated that he has no interest in being involved at that end. He has said SpaceX is making the transport, it&#x27;s other peoples&#x27; job to figure out what to do what we get there. He likens this to building a railroad into a new frontier. California was barely populated when the Union Pacific was built, and yet it was not the railway&#x27;s job to govern the colonies that popped up alongside it.Now it&#x27;ll obviously be more nuanced than that, but if there is a viable sustained transportation strategy to Mars, you can bet a lot of people

While I wouldn&#x27;t personally mind a &quot;corporate dystopia&quot; (or at least a sci-fi version of such) on Mars at all, it seems exceedingly unlikely, even conditional on the success of the whole enterprise -- for one, there wouldn&#x27;t be any actual profits to be made there for a very long time :)BTW, I haven&#x27;t read these particular books, and perhaps they are different from other KSR stuff that I&#x27;ve seen, but at this point I would honestly take pretty much anything over what he would consider an ideal or even a good society. It kinda puzzles me why people who value things like caution, leasure, and social cohesion above actual progress so insist on calling themselves &#x27;progressives&#x27; -- they certainly have a right to their opinions, but couldn&#x27;t they have picked a term that was less of a misnomer?

I just finished reading these books for what seems like the millionth time, and Mr. Musk hasn&#x27;t even begun to answer the questions they raise. What is the legal structure going to be on the 1MM person colony? Who gets to go? What are the transplants allowed to do there? Who rules? Who do the rulers answer to? Are we going to Terraform Mars? If yes, under whose auspices and with what restrictions?FTR: this is Elon Musk&#x27;s show and I don&#x27;t trust his ability to keep his pet project from turning into a corporate dystopia.Edited to add: Guys, I&#x27;m not against Mars exploration and colonization at scale -- I just want us to put our best foot forward. That means not rushing the process, and doing it in a democratic and non-chaotic manner.

Having read the trilogy (as well as &quot;2312&quot;), I must agree that it was poorly written, with some very poorly constructed characters.  Having said that, and despite my distaste for and disagreement about the political outcomes, the technical vision was very interesting.

fwiw I found Red Mars to be a pretty boring, badly-written space soap opera (and murder mystery for who-knows-what-reason) with caricatured ethnicities.

Required reading:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Red-Mars-Trilogy-Stanley-Robinson&#x2F;dp&#x2F;0553560735" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Red-Mars-Trilogy-Stanley-Robinson&#x2F;dp&#x2F;...</a>

I agree! We could be working on projects to improve the ecosystem of Earth, exploring the oceans, and exploring space. We have the bandwidth to do so. We just need more people who are motivated to do it and make a change.

That point is not in dispute.  What I think would be better than spending the amount of effort and time to get to Mars, which I am unconvinced solves our long term problems in any way, would be to better pool those resources into solving the root issues that afflict humanity like aging, pathogens, degenerative diseases, the need for so much food, the pollution we create, and the resources we consume.  Working towards changing the human into something better, whether it be through improving our own hardware(biology) or bringing us into a digital realm(cognition).  If we don&#x27;t do that sooner, we&#x27;re more likely to continue to suffer from the problems we are inevitably facing and end up, as I said earlier, turning planets into mere storage compartments.  We can certainly do multiple things at once, but resources are not infinite, and I don&#x27;t think all avenues of spending those resources make sense.

Humanity can work on more than one project. We&#x27;re 7 billion people.

&gt; We get to experience the Brand New again.So what? Does it improve the human experience more than addressing human biology &amp; cognition?&gt; We get to leave behind a planet whose ecosystem has been screwed by its current population and try to make the right choices on a new one.Unless you can substantiate that claim, I don&#x27;t necessarily agree. You are also speculating that we would somehow make better choices with a different planet than this one. Not that it&#x27;s impossible, but I find it hard to believe. Are you saying that it is more practical to terraform a planet that doesn&#x27;t support life than to address existing environmental issues on Earth?&gt; Because it&#x27;s hard[...]That&#x27;s not a very good reason to do anything. It might give people motivation to do things, but &quot;because it&#x27;s hard&quot; speaks nothing to what we stand to benefit from doing said thing. There are plenty of things that are hard to do, like building a giant pogo stick that can bounce you into outer space, but that doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean it&#x27;s worth the time and money to do.

We get to experience the Brand New again. We get to learn things that are unlearnable right now. We get to leave behind a planet whose ecosystem has been screwed by its current population and try to make the right choices on a new one.But mostly?Because it&#x27;s hard, and rising to the challenge can supersede politics and superstition and, we can only hope, recapture the sense of, &quot;holy shit, we did it!&quot; not experienced by a large percentage of our population since 1969.

I&#x27;m trying to work toward that goal every day in my lab! Sure would be helpful if a billionaire hired me though. Kernel is the closest thing we have to an industry effort, but they don&#x27;t quite know exactly what they&#x27;re doing yet.

I have a better idea:Let&#x27;s focus all the money and effort we would spend on getting to Mars and living on its wasteland, and use it to understand the human mind and digitize it into a realm not individually constrained by physics? I actually think that may be a more realistic and practical goal, and our quality of lives could be much better. I mean, what do we really get from living somewhere like Mars? A storage compartment for excess humans? To what end? What will happen to it when we cure aging?The idea of terraforming Mars cracks me up. Maybe when Musk completes his hyperloop will also be when I start taking him more seriously.

&gt; Assuming one in five are crewed, with 100 crew per vehicle, that means 3000 deaths over the life of the program.A failure in the rocket does not mean everybody dies. There is a launch abort system for that. Musk has confirmed this after the presentation.

&gt; As of 17 September 2016, there have been 310 manned spaceflights [...] 8 of which were sub-orbital [1]There have been 302 manned orbital launches according to [1] and from adding up the successful launches in [2] there seem to have been a total of 5057 orbital launches so far, in the 70 or so years of spaceflight.Apparently the Mars fleet needs from 3 to 5 tanker launches per manned craft, so this program will require between 4000 and 6000 orbital launches, so around 5000 - which is about the same number as the total number of (successful) human rocket launches to date!Looking at the table in [2] we can see that the best success rates for manned launch systems are 97% for both Soyuz and the Space Shuttle. using this as a worst-case estimate, out of those 5000 launches we can expect 150 to fail. Assuming one in five are crewed, with 100 crew per vehicle, that means 3000 deaths over the life of the program.I guess that we can expect improvements in reliability with a program this size, and using a mass-produced vehicle which is re-usable is not something we have safety data for in the space-flight arena yet. You would hopefully expect reliability and safety to improve, getting towards the standards of modern aircraft, or at least experimental aircraft or military systems perhaps. But even three nines (99.9%, or one failure per 1000 lanches) is still multiple orders of magnitude better than we can achieve with spaceflight right now, so SpaceX are setting a pretty tough goal for themselves here. Still, I really do hope they succeed, and it will be exciting to watch them try...[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_human_spaceflights" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_human_spaceflights</a>
[2] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spacelaunchreport.com&#x2F;logsum.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.spacelaunchreport.com&#x2F;logsum.html</a>

If Hans Zimmer doesn&#x27;t provide ambient music at that juncture then there is a sense in which we will have totally failed.All glory to the Empire!

The Mars colonial fleet would depart en-masse - about 1000 ships

The biggest similarity I see is given away by the Methane&#x2F;Oxygen engine. This means he&#x27;s aiming at generating fuel on Mars.The biggest difference is the emphasis on reusable craft.I&#x27;ll post something more in depth once I watch the whole video (or some rocket-head will beat me to it).

Watched the video finally and I think this is a good explanation.Mars Direct is all about the cheapest, simplest way for a state-sponsored space agency to send 4 people at a time to Mars, with a slow build up towards permanent settlement via increasingly concurrent missions.SpaceX is trying to start a permanent settlement within the first 5 or so missions, with the first few hundred people being uber-qualified astronauts, and everyone thereafter being whoever can put up $200k for a trip, potentially one-way.It&#x27;s like a fusion of Mars Direct and the very plans Zubrin was opposed to (Elon acknowledged this by making a reference to &quot;Battlestar Galactica&quot;, which Zubrin used many times as a pejorative in The Case for Mars). The only reason the multiple in-orbit refuelings and re-usable rockets makes sense is the ridiculous scale (100 people per trip) and the ultimate goal (Mars Trips for anyone who wants to go).

Musk defiantly knows about the Mars Direct and he has ideas from it in his presentation.Mars Direct did not do any refiling in orbit, but rather does multible direct launches. That allows them to use smaller rockets. Zubrin worked under the assumption that the best he could get was a modified version of Shuttle (pretty similar to SLS actually).Mars Direct assumed a rocket with a normal upper stage that then deployed its payload to mars.SpaceX makes the spaceship itself the 2nd stage.Mars direct leaves large the hab behind and does a direct fly back with the MAV. In the SpaceX plan you fly back with the hole ship, this gives you the same comforts in both directions.Mars Direct assumes continually new HABs, MAVs and rockets to be built to keep up the exploration or base building. Its a very good plan if you have a space agency that has a budget every years and wants to continue doing what they are doing.The SpaceX plan want to massively decrease price and thus makes more extrem choices such as re-usability to not waste anything.Basically, SpaceX makes a spacetruck that can transport a lot for cheap. Mars Direct aims to deliver what you need for long exploration in the simplest way.Both are great plans.

I hope Musk gets together with Robert Zubrin, Zubrin would make a great ambassador.

Can someone with expertise to compare Musk&#x27;s plan vs. Robert Zubrin&#x27;s Mars Direct plan proposed in the early 90s?

It&#x27;s part and parcel of the zero-sum game mentality.  It&#x27;s what drives Wall St.

In the same way nerds got beat up because the jocks are just jealous of their brains?There can be criticisms of a plan to send a few people to die in a metal box millions of miles away at incredible cost that do not require jealousy as a motivator.

Simple. They are jealous they are on the sidelines.

It&#x27;s especially exaggerated here -- almost comically so -- when the subject is JavaScript or when something isn&#x27;t quite right with a project&#x27;s website.

Don&#x27;t stop contributing if you&#x27;re one of the good ones!

I would never say &quot;it won&#x27;t work&quot;, but I do think we humans have a tendency to turn to technology to solve our most basic problems, while the real solutions lie within us (where most people never look).I believe we should first learn to clean up our act on planet Earth before we export anything of our existence and what we do.To me, the real revolution that needs to happen is a spiritual one - a statement that will only be understood by those practicing meditation. Our brain has so many &quot;undiscovered&quot; capabilities. Discovering them will change our behavior and ultimately allow us to survive on Earth.

&gt; Any time any single person does something positive, some armchair &quot;expert&quot; comes out the woodworks to tell you how it won&#x27;t work or can&#x27;t work.All public forums go bad once they reach a certain size. Since everything is on a gaussian curve (fat mediocre middle, and two asymptotes, one for greatness, the other for the opposite end), it&#x27;s just pure statistics that junk comments will start creeping in once the population grows beyond a certain threshold.

Yeah check out today&#x27;s electric airplane thread for another example. Apparently the concept is impossible.

When a discussion forum discourages skepticism and criticism, you tend to end up in an uninteresting &quot;That&#x27;s awesome, bro!&quot; echo chamber. There&#x27;s a big difference between trolling &#x2F; negativity and battle-hardened cynicism &#x2F; constructive criticism. Good mods help sort it out.

What would you prefer? Rolling applause for every idea anyone presents?One benefit of criticism is we might get to read an angle of attack we hadn&#x27;t thought of and thereby improve our ideas and designs.Sure, when people blow off an idea by saying &quot;pointless, let&#x27;s save the baby dolphins first&quot; I don&#x27;t find those comments helpful, but HN almost always has far more in-depth critiques.Edit: fixed a word

&gt; some armchair &quot;expert&quot; comes out the woodworks to tell you how it won&#x27;t work or can&#x27;t work.“Always listen to experts. They&#x27;ll tell you what can&#x27;t be done, and why. Then do it.” - robert-a-heinlein

Because it&#x27;s no longer filled with hackers.

While this does happen, I think it&#x27;s because some on HN enjoy spirited argument and aren&#x27;t intending to hurt anyone&#x27;s feelings, just issue a worthy challenge.

It&#x27;s these armchair &quot;experts&quot; which make hacker news interesting.  It&#x27;s certainly preferable to Youtube +1s or emoticons to say how wonderful someone&#x27;s comment is.  The root comment is fine and makes a good point about how most billionaires outsource jobs and don&#x27;t think big like Musk does, but this reply I am not so sure about.

That&#x27;s just part of the hard work of producing something and  distributing it. You have to overcome criticism. Both armchair experts and real experts will shit all over what you do for different reasons. It&#x27;s a necessary evil, you have to pick out the good feedback and ignore the bad.

You&#x27;re my hero! This attitude is why I quit regularly contributing to this site. Any time any single person does something positive, some armchair &quot;expert&quot; comes out the woodworks to tell you how it won&#x27;t work or can&#x27;t work.

You&#x27;re free to advocate for other things, but most of the critics aren&#x27;t doing this, they&#x27;re just shitting all over this idea and then making vague waves in the general direction of other ideas.Further, why so much focus on this particular billionaire, who at least is focusing pretty hard on driving progress even if you don&#x27;t agree on the precise direction, and ignoring all the ones just wasting it, or being actively counterproductive?That&#x27;s the part that really drives me nuts. A lot of wealthy people are doing things that are highly questionable or are outright destructive, but they don&#x27;t get this much criticism.

&gt; better allocation of resourcesLet me argue that allocation of resources as a zero-sum game is a deeply flawed view of the situation. There is competition, but this is not a bucket-for-bucket transfer and given the figures displayed here as well as ballpark estimations, there is more than largely room for all of those to develop simultaneously. As mikeash points out, there is an untapped audience as well as boatloads of resources going down the sink that totally dwarf the resources put in any of those endeavours (and this extends way past &quot;wasteful&quot; billionaires)

Just pass a few laws. Outlaw the First Amendment, so people can&#x27;t spread these dangerous ideas. Put people like yourself in charge of 1st world nations. Then confiscate the wealth of anyone who attempts travel to Mars. Anyone who attempts this dangerous idea in secret would be locked up, of course.I&#x27;m sure you have it all figured out.

&gt; it&#x27;s also my prerogative to advocate for what I believe to be a better allocation of resources.Honest question, not trying to be rude: what makes you believe you have a better idea of what a good allocation of resources (and Elon Musk&#x27;s &#x2F; SpaceX&#x27;s skills) would be?If you&#x27;re so smart and good at allocating resources, what prevents you from pursuing that other project instead of demanding from other people to follow your lead?

If you don&#x27;t like it, then you&#x27;re free to go do whatever it is you do like.Right. And as what appears to be the loudest voice in this discussion, it&#x27;s also my prerogative to advocate for what I believe to be a better allocation of resources.Lets not pretend there is not competition for attention, capital and enthusiasm for vision based projects. That I advocate for one over another - in competition - is exactly what is supposed to happen.So, bring the merits of both and have the conversation.Just saying yay this thing is credulous and doesn&#x27;t actually evaluate what are possible futures.In my case I advocate for Transhumanism and AGI as our solutions to his existential questions and promote those (as does Musk actually but to a lesser extent).

&gt; If you don&#x27;t like it, then you&#x27;re free to go do whatever it is you do like.Well, maybe they like to shout &quot;the King is naked&quot;. Or maybe they want the interest in space exploration to go towards what they think would be more realistic and&#x2F;or reasonable plans.

If getting stuff to Mars becomes cheap enough, then the rest becomes pretty easy.He&#x27;s proposing a system for getting stuff to Mars cheaply enough.Characterizing this as &quot;emotional manipulation&quot; is ridiculous. You want to see what emotional manipulation actually looks like, watch an Apple keynote. This is a guy risking his fortune on a crazy dream and presenting his efforts in a technical and factual manner.

I don&#x27;t know if you actually stayed for the Q&amp;A session after the video, but this question came up and he addressed it directly.His viewpoint is that SpaceX is a transportation company, not a colonization or habitat company. He drew an analogy to the railroad companies that built the first railroads to California. Once they made California easily accessible, others came after them to settle down to and build the state.Two-way transportation is the biggest obstacle in the way of Mars colonization. That&#x27;s why SpaceX is focusing on it. But colonization is what gets people excited, and it is the long-term vision, so it has to be the central pitch.

&gt; Human colonization, in this context, is a bait-and-switchA switch with what, exactly? If he&#x27;s just trying to make money, just space tourism alone would be more than enough, since he could charge the same as he&#x27;d charge for a Mars trip . Also, if your goal is to colonize Mars, a pretty critical step one is getting humans to Mars. It&#x27;s not some nefarious plan.

Having a sustainable transport scheme is a necessity in moving to Mars. I don&#x27;t think anyone is naive enough to think that in practice transport is the hardest problem. But it&#x27;s psychologically important - without transport there is nowhere to go. Either we become multiplanetary or not - I don&#x27;t know - but if we become multiplanetary then transport is a necessary step. Building the transport scheme from economically self sustaining processes is only for the better for the robustness of it.The fact that something is marketed does not diminish the utility of a thing.

Alot of people react negatively to overt emotional manipulation. Musk&#x27;s live stream is called &quot;Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species.&quot; The only actual information in his talk was about the new line of rockets he&#x27;s building. Transportation is certainly Musk&#x27;s specialty, but with the information given combined with what we already know about the man&#x27;s companies, he cannot even begin to address the scope of the opening promise. Human colonization, in this context, is a bait-and-switch.

&quot;we choose to go [...]; not because [it is] easy, but because [it is] hard;&quot;

Because we don&#x27;t have access to another pale blue dot. Turning Venus, Mars or one of the gas giant moons into a livable planet in any way comparable to Earth is a gigantic long term undertaking.

&gt; So why are you upset with this one and not all those others?I&#x27;d venture that&#x27;s because it somehow silently challenges the humanocentric point of view that many (unconsciously, mostly) hold onto. Why would anyone seemingly cling so much onto that pale blue dot unless it&#x27;s held as deeply special in some way?

At least in my case, I see trying to start a Mars colony as a death trap. It&#x27;s the illusion of carrying on the human race, but it&#x27;s really just dooming a bunch of pioneers to a grim fate in an extremely hostile environment. I think making a south pole colony would be hard enough, let alone a Mars one.

That might be true in this context, but otherwise a rather flawed generalization:)

There&#x27;s a phrase I&#x27;m fond of:The man who says it can&#x27;t be done needs to get out of the way of the man who&#x27;s doing it.

Just an idea: sentiment analysis has gotten pretty accurate.What if HN included sentiment in the sort algorithm?The post score you see would stay the same (upvotes minus downvotes). You&#x27;d just multiply the sort score by, for example, 1.25 for posts positive in tone and 0.8 for posts with negative tone.So if two comments have about the same number of upvotes, the nicer one appears higher up.Criticism or disapproval could still become top post with enough upvotes, but it wouldnt happen as often as it does now.

I think it&#x27;s the opposite trend actually over the last two years. HN has become a lot more positive. Frankly I think it&#x27;s reduced discussion quality a lot; people are unwilling to be frank and point out flaws.

&gt; I can&#x27;t agree more. I&#x27;ve seen HN degrade into that kind of discussion over the last 2 years and it really disappoints me.You say it&#x27;s &quot;degraded&quot;, but it&#x27;s more likely that HN&#x27;s audience has diversified as it&#x27;s grown, and therefore it&#x27;s less likely for you to agree with any given comment.

I think hackaday is a good example of a community with similar (techie) people to HN that has gone further down the same path of negativity, cynicism, and salt. HN is great and the moderators here do a good job (I&#x27;m always impressed by the way dang handles issues), but I do think some sort of push is needed to get us off of that path.

I don&#x27;t think this is a recent trend, look at the presentation post of Dropbox[1] from 9 years ago. On the one hand, YC is a relatively contrarian community. On the other hand, if you agree with something you may not have much to add, but if you disagree you&#x27;ll probably want to express why.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8863" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8863</a>

&gt; Part of me wishes HN had a really strong moderator that slapped down nay-sayers.Slapping down dissenting opinions leads to an echo-chamber. One mans sceptic is another&#x27;s &quot;nay-sayer&quot;, I think community moderation (via votes) is filtering high value comments rather well,so specific moderation is hardly required: egregious flaming excepted.&gt; If you&#x27;re not contributing something valuable, comment deletedJust because you disagree with a given opinion does not make it worthless.

&gt; Part of me wishes HN had a really strong moderator that slapped down nay-sayers. If you&#x27;re not contributing something valuable, comment deleted.Pointing out flaws == not valuable?

&gt; Part of me wishes HN had a really strong moderator that slapped down nay-sayers. If you&#x27;re not contributing something valuable, comment deleted.What a load of rubbish. Note that HN already has strong moderation, and does delete &quot;way out there&quot; contrarian views. If this was taken to the extreme, only back-patting allowed, the comments would become useless. And I feel, like others, this already goes on a lot (e.g. the top karma posters all tend to agree&#x2F;compliment each other, there isn&#x27;t that much disagreement although it happens sometimes).

&gt; Nobody&#x27;s making you participate in this venture. If you don&#x27;t like it, then you&#x27;re free to go do whatever it is you do like.I can&#x27;t agree more. I&#x27;ve seen HN degrade into that kind of discussion over the last 2 years and it really disappoints me.Part of me wishes HN had a really strong moderator that slapped down nay-sayers. If you&#x27;re not contributing something valuable, comment deleted.

&gt; Nobody&#x27;s making you participate in this venture. If you don&#x27;t like it, then you&#x27;re free to go do whatever it is you do like.It should make its way to HN guidelines.

Meaning what, that this guy is attempting something amazing but people like him too much so you need to be disproportionately negative to compensate?

Bingo! Aside from his dot-com successes, his other ventures are still in the early stages with uncertain futures. History could prove him a visionary or merely foolhardy. I don&#x27;t get the hero-worship.

&gt; So why are you upset with this one and not all those others?Because most others aren&#x27;t constantly being worshipped by people on HN and the like. Musk worship was the reason I stopped bothering with the technology subreddit.

What, you&#x27;ve never heard of H. Ross Perot?

I don&#x27;t know of any billionaire that&#x27;s run for president. &#x2F;s

My dictionary defines &quot;critique&quot; as &quot;a detailed analysis and assessment of something.&quot; That is not what I&#x27;m seeing here, nor is it what I&#x27;m arguing against.I have no problem with people arguing against SpaceX&#x27;s Mars plans, either on the basis that the plan is infeasible, or that he should be doing something else. I have a huge problem with people arguing against it on the basis that the commenter doesn&#x27;t like it and the whole idea is dumb.I just want to see an intelligent conversation.

You&#x27;re also free to critique an idea that&#x27;s been put out there in public. The so called free market of ideas where people get to express their opinions on said idea. Or do you only want to see cheerleading? Because not all ideas are good, or feasible, or appropriate for now. The might be ahead of their time, and so forth.

Not yet, although that is apparently the plan. If someone argued that it should be entirely privately funded, I&#x27;d be fairly sympathetic, although I don&#x27;t agree.(It is indirectly funded through some tax dollars with things like their ISS resupply missions, but that&#x27;s money the company would get with or without a Mars plan, and could easily just take as profit instead.)

We are being made to participate in this venture via taxes.That said, its incredibly exciting.

This. I too go back to Usenet and Compuserve. I&#x27;m really close to giving up on Slashdot altogether. I&#x27;ve only recently come across HN and love it. Vast majority of discussions are polite, thoughtful, considered and interesting. There are almost zero personal attacks and very few content-free comments. It reminds me SO much of the early days of the net.
My greatest fear is that HN too shall fall to the trolls and numbskulls.Reading this whole thread I&#x27;m reminded of something from my childhood that greatly impressed me. My mother emigrated in the sixties from a country which had undergone a communist-fomented civil war in which her father, a policeman, was killed (when she was four). When she arrived here she know no one other than my father. One of her first and greatest friends here was a woman that along with her husband was a card carrying member of the communist party. When I was old enough to understand these things I was pretty stunned that two people who by rights should probably hate each other, could get along and be so friendly. That has stayed with me to this day. We can seek consensus and argue positions and come together or stay in our corners. But the ability to do it without being dicks is very special.

HN achieves excellent S&#x2F;N, even with some negativity.  It&#x27;s run very, very well.  I go back to USENET and pre-internet fora.  In some cases it was impossible to have intelligent conversations because six users &quot;owned&quot; the list.  Nah, this is really good.  Negativity and all.  I&#x27;ve run into moderators a few times and, in retrospect, it&#x27;s always fair and justified.

I still think it&#x27;s many, many orders of magnitude easier to survive on a messed up earth than on a fresh Mars or Venus.

Then we should probably prefer levels of organization that have a track record of pulling off these types of feats, instead of private sector wanking.

Seriously, this 1000x. if we are going to survive the next millennia, we need to get off this rock.

I don&#x27;t think knee-jerk negativity creates healthy tension, it just sucks down the conversation.I have no problem with intelligent, well thought out negativity. It&#x27;s just the &quot;why would anyone want to spend $100,000 to die in a metal box?&quot; stuff that I really dislike.

I agree, but the tension is healthy. HN wouldn&#x27;t work if everyone was overwhelmingly positive or overwhelmingly negative. We need skeptics as much as we need optimists to keep our sense of reality in check. The 90&#x27;s Dotcom Bubble was arguably driven by unchecked optimism.

Musk got in the position to do what he&#x27;s doing by figuring out a new way to pay for stuff.

&gt;We don&#x27;t progress the species with digging up more rocks, building more stuff, selling more stuff, or dare I say it, finding a new way to get a cab.I think you are assuming that being wealthy is just a state someone gets into magically.While the things you mention aren&#x27;t on their own crazy species changing ideas, the selling stuff, the getting a cab is what allowed some folks to become wealthy and go after crazy things. So don&#x27;t discount the process of acquiring resources.

&gt; What will the moon landing conspiracy theorists do then? :)they say NASA has changed Mars colors in the photos, it is more Earth-like, because something

&gt; We don&#x27;t progress the species with digging up more rocks, building more stuff, selling more stuff, or dare I say it, finding a new way to get a cab.Oh but we do. Statistically such things contribute a lot more to humanity overall, it&#x27;s just less visible because the benefits are widely distributed. What enables projects like this is the huge amounts of human labour that have been saved by less glamorous projects, along with general innovation in manufacturing.

We need a lot more like Musk, whether you agree with space or not. Investing their resources in crazy ideas of their heart, some might just work.We don&#x27;t progress the species with digging up more rocks, building more stuff, selling more stuff, or dare I say it, finding a new way to get a cab.A few more vastly wealthy eccentrics building teams to play with space, fusion (carefully I hope), generation, or whatever pipe dream they have could easily make up for some of the global short termism.Does it matter if he sells enough tickets to Mars to profit? I doubt it. I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s the point. The moon landings were excellent for helping humankind dream big, Mars will be too.What will the moon landing conspiracy theorists do then? :)

&gt; If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance.~ Orville WrightYep. I&#x27;m sure plenty of detractors tried to pull down the Wright Brothers. Human innovators have had these detractors as always.

Yes, but there is more than enough effort&#x2F;energy&#x2F;enthusiasm available to do both things. Both things are valuable and we need them both. And we can afford them. What Musk presented costs about as much as an Olympic game.

With a Martian colony, we could - if worst came to worst - start a zero-child policy, and &quot;go silently into the night&quot;.That would be unacceptable if it meant the end of humanity.

Pulling other crabs back into the pot is a pretty poor use of resources that could otherwise be used to improve conditions within it.

&gt; Some of the comments here make me think of crabs in a pot pulling down the ones who try to climb out.It&#x27;s fine with me if some of my fellow crabs climb out, but it is very important not to lose sight of the fact (and to his credit, Musk gets this right) that unless all of us climb out (and we won&#x27;t) then conditions in the pot are still going to matter to those -- almost certainly the vast majority -- who are left behind.

He was completely up front about how early they are in this project. He even acknowledged his overambitious timelines, saying that the one he presented was the most optimistic and probably wouldn&#x27;t happen.I can&#x27;t understand how this kind of openness gets labeled &quot;a reality-distortion field.&quot;

But why do you care if Musk and SpaceX have a reality-distortion field? Worst case (or best case for you) is that he fails and you get to gloat.

It&#x27;s human nature to attacks a reality-distortion field.If he would have said &quot;You know guys. We&#x27;re going to Mars. But right now, we&#x27;re working on making rockets that go up, on time, in one piece.When we finish with that, we&#x27;ll show how to go. It&#x27;ll be hard. Here are the technical and sociological issues involved. When we&#x27;re getting close to being ready to go, we&#x27;ll get working on them.&quot;

Some of the comments here make me think of crabs in a pot pulling down the ones who try to climb out.Nobody&#x27;s making you participate in this venture. If you don&#x27;t like it, then you&#x27;re free to go do whatever it is you do like.You might think Musk could better direct his efforts and resources elsewhere, but most other billionaires don&#x27;t do anything all that interesting, they just invest their money in mundane stuff, outsource jobs, build hotels, run for President, etc. So why are you upset with this one and not all those others?

Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species [video]