Yeah. It wasn’t just a random example, but something he did just before atmospheric hearing was added.
SpaceX should hire Scott Manley for their launch and pre-launch commentatings(?).
I don’t have the time to full out nerd about this kind of thing, but I have always been pretty fascinated by it.
Some people freak out about the weirdness of the universe and how tiny and insignificant we really are. I think it’s amazing and awesome.
Cool interview with SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell. Marketplace is an economics show so it’s not super-space-techy, but it’s still really interesting. Humans on Mars in 10 years, eh? Bit optimistic but it’s nice to know there’s someone out there working hard on it!
I don’t think they’ll solve the “radiation is bad for you” problem in just 10 years development time. Unless they encase everything in lead, which will cost a metric shitload to launch into orbit.
Kind of similar to us needing to solve the “Moon dust from Hell” issue before we can start building bases there.
Basically, people are too optimistic.
When I see pics of Mars it looks like such a forsaken place, devoid of life, it makes me wonder why anyone would want to live there.
I understand that we need to expand and get off the planet we’re killing, but Mars is just so unappealing.
Only a couple dozen people “live” in Antarctica, and that’s on Earth, where there’s oxygen. Nobody is going to live on Mars until it’s terraformed.
People will go there, though.
We’re going to end up populating Mars with smarter and smarter robots. Humanity’s children will reach the point where they’re like, hey, why bother with this oxygen crap it just makes stuff rust.
Seems like it would be far far easier to stop killing our planet.
Heaven is the place where all wrongs are righted. If you’ve got heaven to look forward to after you die, it doesn’t matter how screwed up things are in life. It’ll all get erased and be better after. Space is heaven for the space age; it has the same mythos and ties into similar cultural ideas about our place in the cosmos. It’s also similarly chimerical. Earth is our home in profound ways that we mostly fail to appreciate: from microbiology, to ecology, to the chemistry of the air and soil, to gravity. Weather, the length of the day and year, magnetic poles, our distance from our sun, the quality of light–we’re specifically adapted to all of that. We’re irrevocably entangled in our planet’s ecology. We rely on social, cultural, energy, and economic systems that depend on our multitude. Any environment on Earth is many orders of magnitude more hospitable to us than anywhere else would be.
I agree that we should take better care of the planet, but will we? Also, there are things that could still wipe us out if we do take care of the environment – the giant asteroid hit, nuclear war, something like AIDs that is as communicable as a cold virus, AI run amuck, etc.
The idea is if we expand off the planet we increase our survival chances. If we don’t we probably have a much more limited lifespan as a species.
In the end it’s just a question of, is it desirable for intelligent life to go out into the cosmos or not? If so, then tooling around our own solar system is a stepping stone. If not, then we can just settle in comfortably and try not to wear out our little biosphere. Some day the sun will explode, but that’s on a time scale orders of magnitude beyond the entire history of humanity.
I want us to go out into the cosmos, but it’s possible this is just because all that Star Trek viewing in my youth short circuited my rational processes. It depresses me to think that our species might end up stuck in one place, unable to go somewhere new. But, without short term economic incentives and suitable places to go, it’s a big ask to go up there.
For those in the northern hemisphere, Mercury is quite high in the morning and about as easy to see as it ever can be (high enough to see from my drive, well above the local trees and buildings). The picture is for Dec 21, when Jupiter and Mercury will come close to lining up.
Lots of launches to watch today
Saw all 3 this morning taking my kids to the dentist (around 6:30AM). Beautiful :)
A 6:30AM dentist appointment - ouch! It is cool, though. About 10 years ago I realized that I had never knowingly seen Mercury, but never planned ahead enough to go to a place with an unobstructed horizon. Then I finally did make such a plan - and it turns out I can see Mercury from my house right now anyway.
Doesn’t matter what we do, Earth will eventually be uninhabitable. At the latest when the sun burns out and boils off the oceans, and possibly much much sooner. The sooner we become an interplanetary species the better humanities long term survival . In terms of human lifespan, life on earth is the same as 70 year old person. We are 3.5 billion into 4.5 billion window where life as we know it exists. I don’t see dolphins much less cockroaches evolving to space going species in the next billion year.
The timescale for extinctions based on solar evolution is hundreds of millions of years. 100 million years ago, our ancestors looked like shrews. Humanity will not survive that long no matter what we do. We will (most likely) go extinct or (slight possibility) evolve into something or a multitude of somethings that aren’t human.
I feel like we have this weird cosmic notion of our importance. Like the universe conspired to create us so that it could know itself. There’s this noble, tragic sense of human destiny. Those notions are powerful, but illusory. In reality, we’re a byproduct of natural processes. The universe doesn’t need us or care about us. And the long-term fate of our species is entirely irrelevant to our lives now. If we wink out of existence, never having left our home, it won’t be tragic. There will be no one to mourn or regret it.
There are a few species that have been around 500 million years and dozen or so that have been around 100 million years. I don’t see any reason that humans couldn’t join this club.
But frankly, what worries me far more than either climate change or the Sun burning out is nuclear war. I feel pretty confident in humans ability to adapt to a few degrees of warming, and possibly even reverse it with technology. One of the side benefits of colonizing Mars is we have a giant lab to try some of the riskier technology fixes to climate change, without risking almost all of humanity.
But no matter how good a steward of the planet we become, I don’t see the risk of an all-out nuclear war ever going away. We did make good progress in the 80s and 90s and went from 45,000 warheads to 14,000. But even 14,000 warheads denotating have a good chance of making the planet uninhabitable. Even with sane intelligent leaders like Bush 41, and Gorbachev at the helm, there are simply too many close calls in the 60 years for me to think, there is ever less than 1/1000 per year of a nuclear war. A chance that goes up significantly when Trump and Putin are in charge. Add to those countries like China, India, Pakistan, and the crazies in the Middle East or North Korea and we have a serious risk. Humans have always used their weapons of war, and have never been 100% successful in banning them.
@Mak_Asher mention other possible ways of humanity dying out. Here on earth the species that are always most endangered and that often go extinct are ones that are perfectly adapted to a specific niche, while cockroaches and sponges that live everywhere are pretty much unkillable.
Mars is important step in turning humans into the cockroaches of the universe.
I think Gwynee may be the best COO in the world. Tesla would be so much better company, if Elon could clone Gwynee.
Given our current state of knowledge, there is a reasonable chance that we are the only intelligent life in the galaxy. I think it would be a tragedy if the only intelligent life in the galaxy self-destructed such a long way short of potential. Not having anyone left alive doesn’t make it less of a tragedy.