I think a lot of people view the billionaire space race as just another version of them comparing super-yachts. At least with the super-yachts, nobody's pretending it's an altruistic endeavour.
Super yachts are not pushing the boundaries of what is fundamentally possible and contributing to the opening of a new frontier or building infrastructure that helps us more profoundly understand our universe.
That's a distinction people are really missing here. Super yachts aren't doing that much to push anything forward besides super yachts. Maybe a bit of interesting tech for ocean going vessels gets prototyped there but nothing anywhere close to the magnitude of what SpaceX and Blue Origin are doing.
How does commercial space flight build infrastructure to help us understand the universe?
I don't think space exploration is super important at this point in our civilisational development. I get the aesthetic appeal from scifi but lack of multiplanetary life isn't really a bottleneck for us right now. So it's not all that different from flexing with yachts. I like Elon's more environment oriented projects (solarcity and tesla) but broadly speaking he's a pretty insufferable tech bro billionaire.
Commercial space flight leads to innovations and economies of scale that radically reduce the cost of accessing space, which means we can do a lot more space science for less money. Reusable rockets alone are incredible in this regard, and if Starship really flies then we will be able to put up space telescopes much larger than Hubble and JWST at significantly less cost.
Air travel was only for the rich and governments at first too, but if they hadn't funded it it would never have become cheaper.
I don't accept the "we have too many problems on Earth" argument about space, though I do understand where people are coming from. I think if we wait for major problems to be solved here, we'll never go. There will always be huge problems. That's life.
That and space is far less than 1% of global GDP. If we were spending loads of money on space people might have a point, but we spend more on porn than NASA. (Not really exaggerating... look it up...)
As for Elon being an "intolerable tech bro," I don't care. He's human. Lots of amazingly productive or innovative people also have huge personal flaws. Look at some of our favorite musicians.
It wasn't supposed to be an argument against space flight in general, but against Musk's specific arguments about "making humanity multi planetary to avoid existential risk" being one of the major things we need to be doing right now. It's no good having a few thousand people on Mars if climate collapse causes critical destabilisation of our society.
The tech bro thing isn't really about personality and more about ideology. The hyperloop and the boring company stuff is pretty dumb and clearly based on a disregard for public transit and publicly funded infrastructure, but I'm still glad he's investing in solar power and electric cars. The neuralink monkey stuff is pretty sickening too, but overall he's one of the less-bad billionaires.
> "making humanity multi planetary to avoid existential risk" being one of the major things we need to be doing right now
If not right now, then when? what should we wait for? space exploration is very hard. It takes very long time and huge investment to make any meaningful progress. Even if we start now it'd be a long time before a sustainable presence in Mars can be established.
It's also annoying to use space exploration as scapegoat for the lack of progress on Earth. You, being a HN visitor, is likely a tech savvy person who probably plays video games. Do you ever ask yourself if video games are a huge resource hog? and if we all stop playing games and devote our time and money to solve problems here on Earth, how much progress would we be able to make?
Once again, I'm not saying that space exploration isn't worthwhile - just that Elon Musk talks about it like getting established on Mars avoids a significant x-risk, where the most obvious x-risk right now is climate change. If he just said "because space exploration is cool and also advances science" then I wouldn't be critical because it wouldn't be a specious argument.
I actually rather like SpaceX but I don't like x-risk arguments from Elon the same way I don't like rationalists freaking out about AI alignment: it's such a far out risk compared to the actual one we are facing (climate change), and they wilfully ignore it because their ideology (libertarianism) has no means to address it.
What about a potential asteroid collision? If you actually check it out, there’s an asteroid flying near to earth every 2-3 years, one’s which at a minimum would wipe out a city and change the climate for hundreds of years. Are you adding that to your tail risk calculations?
We’re pretty lucky we haven’t had a major asteroid impact in over 10,000 years, some people argue that’s when it happened last and completely changed the climate.
I actually think you could legitimately argue this is larger risk than climate change, it’s just that the media don’t write about it.
What about getting resources from asteroids? Ever think about what sort of economy of abundance that could create on earth? Like some asteroids have more metals than what’s on earth. How is that for creating a better world on earth?
I think even today spacex could probably change the path of an asteroid if needed. Which is a massive amount of protection for earth. 10-20 years they can mine asteroids. So It’s not just about creating a mars colony for tech bros. It’s a million other possibilities.
You are being extremely short sighted and your judgement is clouded by not liking musks personality. His personality is the last thing you should be thinking about.
I have no issue with his personality - I have no idea who you're responding to with that point because it isn't me.
I very much doubt they could divert an asteroid right now - and if asteroid defense is the actual reason behind space innovation then why isn't anybody explicitly working on it? Because it's not profitable, and NASA's budget is pretty miniscule. Presumably if they thought it was a significant risk they'd be diverting what resources they have to asteroid defense.
My only issue with SpaceX is that Elon makes the argument that a Mars colony is somehow a counter to x-risk. It isn't, because any colony would be dependent on earth for survival for a long time and if we're worried about asteroids we should probably be defending earth instead of ditching 8 billion people and surviving with 1000 people on an inhospitable rock.
> I don't think space exploration is super important at this point in our civilisational development.
I think it's absolutely super important for our civilization's development. Right now way too many people care only about themselves. Getting people to care about the advancement of society in general is important rather than only caring about what they can personally get out of it. We won't develop as a society if we're shortsighted (shortsightedness caused global warming).
