I agree with that. Building housing is necessary but not sufficient to house the poor.
I can’t imagine that happening without him first building an orbital workspace and putting a ton of shit in orbit. I guess they’re already launching hundreds of satellites, but I imagine those are pretty small. Like even if he had a real plan and started now, it’d be decades away.
SpaceX is building giant rockets in Texas right now, the next test flight is as early as Thursday. The plan is to launch an absolute shitload of these rockets full of gear to Mars as early as 2022 to start prepping things for humans later this decade. They’re developing things insanely fast as far as rockets go, their first successful hop of their new engine design was August 2019 and ~16 months later they launched and nearly landed a full vehicle.
Speaking of which, likely going to be another test flight today:
man working there must be exhausting
This is pretty cool:
Geez, Starlink service is $100/mo plus an initial $500 for the hardware. The Comcast monopoly service is significantly less than that. I guess the target demographic is only people with no other options.
I think that’s definetly who it’s for, I’d never consider it as a city folk but my uncle got it at his cabin in rural northern MN and it is 100x better than his other options.
I’ve heard cosmologists on podcasts bemoan the negative impact of these satellites on their work.
There are parts of northern Canada where a normal internet bill can be in the hundreds. People pay infinite to tether to their phone’s data plan because it’s their best option. Certain jobs - streaming, music or movie producing, etc. are literally unattainable because of data caps/prices.
I was just thinking about this.
The age old complaint about the obscenely rich is when is enough enough.
The two richest guys in the world are dumping crazy amounts of money into outer space. So it will NEVER be enough. They will always find something else to burn their money on.
I am a fan of outer space and going to outer space but the reality is it’s a pretty horrible invest for humanity when there are so many other things that could be greatly improved in a short period of time for billions of people with that same money.
We probably need to stop glorifying all this space stuff as it really is is the new version of the super yacht and other traditional filthy rich pursuits.
It’s crazy these guys make bill gates look like a saint in comparison.
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I have no doubt SpaceX will get a big rocket to Mars reasonably soon. A human mission still has a lot of unsolved problems unless you want to go on a one way suicide mission. Colonisation is a long way off and Musk actually is not even properly working on the surviving on Mars part.
Where do I sign up?
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Kind of. Its worth doing both. The problem with your reasoning is that every resource ever spent in human history on science and technology research could have been “better” spent on helping the poor at that time. But in the long run more science helps more people. The real issue today is that we don’t want rich narcissists running these programs as vanity projects, we want government running them for the benefit of everyone. The problem isn’t aggregate spending on space exploration (which is arguably too low considering the risk that this planet is uninhabitable for our grandchildren), the problem is that the right has succeeded in portraying the government as an inevitable failure.
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Mars will certainly be uninhabitable
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What I had in mind was flyin’ mother nature’s seed to a new home in the sun.
What we need is a tax on research and development to account for the harmful externalities of technological advancement.
Nah. One of the principles of taxation is tax stuff you don’t want people to do. Defense against technology externalities should be dealt with through regulation.
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If we can’t even thrive on Earth, how the fuck will we thrive on a barren rock? Maybe we should learn how not to self-destruct / how not to ruin everything we touch before trying to replicate our experiment elsewhere. Here on Earth we started with every goddamn thing we needed and it could have remained that way for the lifetime of the Sun.
It’s like we have the only pizza shop in NY, but somehow manage to lose money, and we’re turning our attention to opening a 2nd location in the middle of the desert.
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