Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "Why Musk Is Wrong About Mars" video.

  1. You are correct, humans won't be living on Mars (at least not many of them). But trans-humans will. Trans-humans won't need air and they will be temperature and radiation resistant. Our successors will be living all over the solar system and they will, eventually, be living among the stars. They just won't look like us. No loss. You ain't that pretty and neither am I. ;-)
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  2. It's not defeatism but rational analysis. You can go at it from an entirely different angle and using the tools of an entirely different profession. Ask a real estate agent what they think about buying lots on Greenland, the Moon and Mars? What do you think will they say about value? Location! Location! Location! There is simply no market for Greenland real estate and that is, at least, accessible without risking your life for it. So why would there be a market for lunar and Martian plots?
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  3.  @MarkBranham-t2b  Just for the record: we are Venusforming Earth right now. We can easily cause it to become a runaway greenhouse. ;-)
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  4.  @owenlouisdavid  Here, kid. Let me give you some attention. You are begging so nicely. Just like Sabine. ;-)
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  5. Congress isn't funding untested arms here. The new fleet of spy satellites that is being launched by the US government is choke full of technology that has been financed by Congress and tested over the last 30 years. The concept of flying large constellations of cheap satellites has been sufficiently demonstrated by SpaceX. Did you ever spend a waking minute on asking the question what the US government needs a 150ton LEO payload capable, rapidly reusable rocket for? It is, for sure, not to launch another weather satellite to monitor global warming. The motives here are much, much more sinister and they have to do with a credible replacement for the aging nuclear bomber and ICBM fleets. We are building a space based nuclear deterrent system right now, for those who can't complete the thought that I have just outlined.
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  6. No he doesn't. Realistically Elon Musk has a cash value of maybe $50 billion. If you divide that by the number of people on the planet who could use some serious support (at least a billion plus), then he could, at most, hand out a couple of twenty dollar bills each. That will last a couple weeks, tops.
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  7. Hyperloop didn't kill California high speed rail. If anything it has led to a healthy discussion about what can and can not be done with rail systems, even if we assume that we can go to the outer limits of technological feasibility. One can say the same thing about spaceflight. SpaceX is demonstrating that the Saturn V was not the last word and neither was the Space Shuttle. There is a lot of life left in the field and we have people who want to explore that. Having said that, the reason why there is funding for these things is rather mundane and the same why there was funding for the Apollo program: we are in a new cold war (which is the extension of the old cold war, with China replacing Russia). There is a side of Musk that is irrational, but it's got nothing to do with this particular topic. Here he is basically just executing a new phase of clandestine technology buildup for the US government, similar to what another crazy billionaire did in the past.
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  8.  @owenlouisdavid  Fairytales are nice, kid, but they don't belong in the science section of the library. If you think that SpaceX is about saving money, then you are, unfortunately, not even half as intelligent as you would have to be to be called a realist. ;-)
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  9.  @owenlouisdavid  Keep begging. ;-)
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