Is it really necessary to send humans to those places just to get the knock-on benefits? Couldn’t we do those things directly, without going there?
It seems to me that, today, those who have the money to spend on these endeavors would only do so if there were perceived short-term benefits to themselves. That means they plan to exploit the resources, or increase their own power somehow.
I know the good engineers that make this happen are doing it for the challenge and in the pursuit of knowledge, and I know that’s why we poors support it, but that doesn’t “pay the bills.” What is the motivation behind the money? Why are they really doing this?
The idealistic answer: Science! Lots of things to learn by establishing humanity’s first extraterrestrial presence on our closest celestial neighbor.
The realistic answer: Capitalism. Lots of money to be made in mining the moon.
There is enough material wealth in the asteroid belt to create a sustainable post-scarcity civilization. We could move out, and turn this little blue-green planet into a fucking nature preserve.
Settlements on multiple worlds within the solar system offer protection against risks that might otherwise end with the extinction of Homo Sapiens.
For the ultra rich - moving off world to escape the collapse of the biosphere is ridiculous.
Easier to “settle” the deserts of Utah of the Australian Outback than Mars - plenty of O2 and no worries about ambient radiation, but a very similar environment…
What better place to do all of the dirty work like mining and refining from asteroids that have a ton of metals and resources, then just send the finished product down to earth. No more mining our unique and delicate planet and polluting it.
In the case of musk and his billionaire friends, they just want to escape the consequences of their actions and become above the law. Basically they want to be a king, with no laws restraining them.
It’s also a good distraction, doubt they actually think people will live on the moon or Mars
Someone else pointed out that you could set off every nuke that has ever existed and the earth would still be more hospitable than mars
To repeat myself a little, it’s all a distraction from making things better here, like the bezoes quote about getting 10,000 Einsteins in the future by expanding in the solar system, and it’s like dude, you might have 100 Einsteins pissing in bottles in your warehouse right now but they can’t afford school or groceries or rent
Or in the words of Stephen Jay Gould,
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
getting 10,000 Einsteins in the future by expanding in the solar system
This is incredibly random but I’ve been wondering lately what might happen if we colonized a place where comparatively speaking time moves much faster than on Earth.
In theory you could bring back years of advancement in a shorter timespan, but this is obviously just a pipe dream.
I read that as getting 10,000 Epsteins by expanding in the solar system …
Why not both
I just wished they got the fuck on with it and left earth already, so we can turn off their radio coms and start fixing things
I mean everyone makes a choice everyday to listen to their shit.
Not really. I have never voluntarily listened anything about musk. Good example, this thread lol.
They basically wish they could be Adrian Veidt
One should probably at least consider the military applications. Meteors killed the dinosaurs…
I’d separate this into two different things - what is good for humanity and what is good for billionaires like Musk.
For humanity, venturing out into the solar system will advance science, and also help drive technological advancement which does have benefits for society as a whole. The space race in the 20th century did advance technology, and much of the modern technology we take for granted has routes in the space race.
But also humanity needs to move away from our current capitalistic system and that is very much driven by scarcity. The resource wealth in the solar system is mind bogglingly vast and if we can tap into even a portion of it, it could allow us to change how we as a species live. It would initially be driven by capitalism for sure, but when you have effectively infinite resources for a civilization, that changes everything we do.
Also for the long term survival of our species we need to be looking outwards. Earth is vulnerable - one asteroid strike and out species could be wiped out. Even if only a small number of people were to head out into the stars, it would help guarantee a long term future and resilience for our species.
I think one big mistake people make is that what happens on earth is a zero-sum game: i.e. for some to win, it must be at the cost of others. That is wrong and is a result of our terribly broken economic system. But we can both colonize the moon and mars AND fix the problems on Earth. And it may do good for our species to look up to the stars and have a bigger shared goal than just existing on this rock and acquiring wealth.
In terms of why the moon & mars. The moon is essential as a staging post for future expansion, as it’s very expensive resource and energy wise to launch from Earths gravity well, but much cheaper to build at the moon and launce from there without the added step & complexity in design for launching off Earths surface. Mars meanwhile is the most viable candidate at present for a self sustaining colony long term (with a couple of moons of Jupiter and Saturn other options, and possibly venus as a long stretch).
Meanwhile, Musk is a deranged billionaire idiot. He is nothing more than a investor gambler; other people are doing the hard work making things happen while he is a public face of various companies. He really is peripheral to this, even if he does push the topic into the public consciousness. Don’t conflate the idea of expanding into the solar system with that idiot. The idea precedes him and will run long beyond his life and any influence he has. He is just a narcissistic loud mouth with money.
people love the dream/myth of cutting their old lives free and moving away to start a new one. this is that dream writ large for megalomaniacs who have already run as far as they can from the people they’ve hurt and from themselves.
The moon is a great starting point to explore the rest of the solar system, doubly so if we found water on it.
I’ll quote JFK (probably more Ted Sorensen) on this one « we don’t do this things because they are easy but because they are hard […] »
And to provide a material reason to explore the solar system, if we can mine the asteroid belt, resource scarcity will be a thing of the past. A single 1-mile diameter asteroid can contain $20 trillion in metals.
This is why the billionaires are staging their own space race. Whoever can mine the asteroid belt first owns the world. It’s also why privatizing space exploration is such a terrible idea and why we must have a global socialist revolution before anyone reaches the belt.
So I can’t speak to the actual motivation for the moon, but can for one reason for at-least-temporary human habitation there. Solar system exploration (and, inevitably resource extraction.
When you launch rockets from Earth, a vast majority of the fuel you start with is burnt off just getting to orbit, out of the deepest part of our gravity well. If you want to go anywhere else in our solar system, you’re severely limited to what’s left. The moon’s gravity is low enough that it could work as a refuelling station. Provided we find enough water there and set up solar hydrolysis stations there and build the infrastructure to get it up to orbiting ships. All that will take people to set up, and possibly to manage long term.
Couldn’t we just have an orbiting refueling station though? Seems to me like it would be even more efficient.
The perfect solution would be an orbital station with a space elevator. An 36’000 km elevator is kinda difficult to build and maintain safely though. Without cheaply carrying resources up there, its utility is limited (sure can slowly put things up there, but it’s very inefficient).
What Moon has going on is Helium-3, which can be an amazing energy source by itself.
It may be possible to harvest fuel on the moon itself. Also the amount of work to keep that in orbit, etc, the moon may be more promising.
iirc it also has a lot of fusion fuel in the form of Helium-3
The problem is: is there any evidence for water on the moon?
And even if there is something on the moon, from which fuel can be manufactured, you still have to get the fuel production components there (which includes launching those from Earth). And then anything you launched from the moon originally came from Earth, so now you’re launching it twice.
And that’s the problem: anything that you wanna launch from the moon will have to, almost in its entirety, have to be launched from Earth originally before it can be launched from the moon. So what’s the point?
It would be different if our moon were rich in resources and could be transformed into some sort of manufacturing base for all sorts of goods and fuels, etc., but it isn’t.
The moon, uniquely, has no atmosphere and no magnetic field, meaning the solar wind may have deposited large quantities of Helium-3 in the lunar dust over millions or billions of years. Helium-3 is possibly a viable fuel for fusion energy production at an industrial scale. Current reactors fust Hydrogen-2 with Hydrogen-3. Hydrogen-2 is abundant but Hydrogen-3 is exceedingly rare. If I remember correctly, there are only on the order of 10 kilograms of it currently available on Earth. Helium-3 is possibly a good substitute for Hydrogen-3 in fusion reactions.
Fusion reactions already produce net positive energy in laboratory settings, although it will be some time before this scientific net positive can be turned into an engineering net positive, and even more time still until it becomes an economic net positive.
is there any evidence for water on the moon?
Yes. We know there’s water there and how much accessible water is there.
And it’s plenty for some exploratory uses, but not enough to make an economy extracting fuel from there. So yeah, that entire thing is bullshit, while the idea of using the water there in a way that doesn’t go away may or may not be.
Putting bases on the Moon means we can do more studies, experiments, etc. outside of Earth, particularly tasks that are difficult to complete by current rovers. Human physiology in low gravity situations, lunar geology, possibility of water and life outside of Earth, that sort of stuff. I’ll also echo what others have said about how the Moon could become a launching base for future explorations, given its lower gravity and lack of an atmosphere.
There isn’t a conspiracy by lizard men to set up a Death Star, this is driven by the curiosity of humanity and our desire to explore the unknown. The “race” to have the first base between Americans and Chinese is, like during the Cold War between the former and the Soviets, a push to be the first, trying to show that they are ahead in terms of technology and science. In a nutshell, it’s driven by curiosity and, at least partly, national pride.
They’re planning everything from mining to the rapture
They’re also idiots that don’t understand basic physics
Its the same mental deficiency of people going on about asteroid mining. Yeah, sure, lots of minerals in those asteroids but until you find a safe, cheap, and reliable way to shift those asteroids into earth’s orbit it’s literally the same as those guys jerking off over AI porn: vapid and empty.
I’m not saying that its impossible, I know that one day we’ll get there. I also know that “one day” is at the very least 20 years in the future, still, just to get a simple base. Getting a production base that pulls out minerals, with a reliable way to move said minerals to earth is more likely some 50 years away
I know, musk says we can do all that today, bit musk hasn’t been able to speak a single truth in 2-3 decades at least. He’s full of shit and constantly makes stupid lying claims about mars bases. His starship rockets have spent billions of US tax payer money and still haven’t been able to clear the first easy 1% of the work; getting in yo a stable earth orbit. They managed to roast a banana over the Indian ocean, and to obliterate a launch pad. I suppose those are impressive feats perhaps, but not on the way to the moon, or worse, mars.
Seriously, humanity is at best 1% on the way to a mars base. There are so many known issues that we don’t have solutions for, and there are even more unknown issues that also still need solutions. Yet the moon and mars bro’s can stop talking about how next year bro, next year will be the year bro, musk promised it bro, that is as good as any truth bro…
Musk believes in a sort of secular mormonism except instead of magic he has money so he tries to eventually, after millenia to spread his progeny over the entire known universe
I’ve lost hope that we can ever get to the scale of moving and living anywhere else, not in time before things get worse and resources are scarce. See the start of Interstellar, but without the secret NASA still working on stuff and any extraterrestrial help. So a Earth dying while we fight over scraps. Or the Bladerunner universe but without anything off world, just what we see.
But… if we could find that window and get out there. I still think Gerard O’Neill’s ideas are sound. Gravitational wells can be useful for some resources, definitely great for science, but why go back there once you get into space? Energy-wise it’s stupid. There’s a lot of work and research still on how best to make space habitats safe from radiation and other effects from being away from Earth, but they aren’t unsolvable, it just takes being out there and working at it.
The plus is that once we can build one, we have the whole solar system to use, not just a few planets and moons. Collecting sunlight, or making our own, is the only limit. An old National Geographic on this had one artist concept of a habitat far out past the gas giants, and it was a huge mirror assembly with the habitat as a small speck in the middle. Of course getting around will still take a long time unless we break through with fusion or better, but again, being out there will make us work on that more to improve it.
But that’s if we can stop doing some of what we’re doing on this planet long enough to make the first steps. I don’t see it… but stand to be proven wrong and would be ecstatic to see what we almost started in the 1970s.
For the billionaires talking about future settlements on Mars and the like, there isn’t a short term benefit to actually doing it. That’s why they aren’t investing heavily in realistic plans to colonize the solar system. They are investing in space, but in a much more limited capacity that mostly involves satellites, government contracts and maybe a little space tourism for rich people.
All the talk of taking humanity to other worlds is good PR, inflates stock prices, and feeds into their own egos. It’s a way of projecting the image of being a visionary and being able to claim that they’re building a brighter future for humanity, and taking credit for making sci-fi pipe dreams a reality.
There are potentially massive benefits to spreading out in the solar system. We currently have access to a single planet’s resources, and Earth didn’t vacuum up all the useful materials in the solar system when it formed. There are also resources which are more abundant in space like helium-3.
But that’s all long term stuff. We may eventually build a moon base that refuels ships which support asteroid mining operations, send robots to build industrial complexes on Mars, and even start the long process of terraforming Venus so that one day we can have a second habitable planet. But first we have to get to the point where just getting into space isn’t so monstrously expensive.
And even if we had a working space elevator tomorrow, there would still be a ton of technical hurdles to overcome before we could accomplish something new that actually helps pay for all of this stuff. There’s speculation and research, but don’t expect massive investments until we’re almost there. Once independent researchers and unrelated technological advances have solved 90% of the problems and it looks like there will soon be trillions of dollars to be made by whoever capitalizes on it first, then you can expect the irrational gold rush moment like the one we see with AI now. Until then, it’s all satellites and stock manipulation.
Other people have made solid points, but one thing I think people miss a lot of the time is that “because it’s cool” is a good reason in its own right.
I could argue almost any endeavor that isn’t actively feeding the poor is a waste of resources. Oh, you’re making art? Why aren’t you working in a soup kitchen instead. Oh, you’re building a monument celebrating a civil rights victory? Why not a homeless shelter? Literally any end that isn’t active altruism can be attacked as “why are you wasting time on that.”
But one of the best things about living in organized society is that we can pool our collective resources to do awesome stuff that otherwise wouldn’t be possible. It’s good that there are wonders in the world. I’m glad the pyramids exist. I’m glad the Taj Mahal exists. The Eiffle Tower. The Statue of Liberty. It’s amazing what people can do.
And sure, that money, time, and energy could have gone to helping the poor. And sure, none of those were made in a society without significant social problems.
But we can walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. And the fact that the poor exist shouldn’t stop us from doing cool things. Even if they don’t have immediate and apparent “value.” I don’t have an MBA. I’m not looking to maximize shareholder value. And I’m all on board with doing cool stuff, even if it doesn’t have a positive ROI.
