Space X

[Pelagic]

How about a rocket that can drop a bomb on your enemy and then return to base?

 

Oh god no,  I hope Space X continues to focus on getting to Mars and doesn't decide to become a military contractor focusing on helping the megalomaniac ruling class destroy the Earth.

 

Then again this is unlikely anyway.  The only thing reusable rocket delivered bombs does is cut the costs of war.  Since when does the government care about how much it spends on war?  This isn't even a concern.

 

A reusable rocket lessens the cost of putting things in orbit - you can extrapolate on the military applications from there. Whether it's multiple layers of GPS and communication satellites that make crippling space based infrastructure impossible or something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_bombardment there are a lot of military applications for a cheaper path to LEO.

 

Even if SpaceX doesn't go the military contractor route, I'm sure other companies are more than willing to work for the defense department with their own take on reusable rockets.

 

So, does SpaceX have a moat with their reusable rockets or have they just set the bar higher for everyone else? Blue Origin is trying to follow suit, when does NASA, Roscosmos and Orbital have one too?

 

Speaking of Roscosmos, Musk has to be envious of all the open land Kazakhstan, hitting a barge in the middle of the Atlantic was no easy feat, landing on a couple square miles of prepared steppe and hauling it back by rail has to easier.

[Liberty]

Simply amazing!

 

[augustabound]

Simply amazing!

 

 

Oh that is awesome. I follow them on Twitter but don't always follow their links so I didn't see that one.

[Travis Wiedower]

Great video. Even more amazing before I realized it was sped up  :D

[Liberty]

http://www.parabolicarc.com/2016/09/27/video-spacex-interplanetary-transport-system/

 

Live stream starting soon if you want to watch the full announcement:

 

http://www.spacex.com/mars

[Spekulatius]

http://www.parabolicarc.com/2016/09/27/video-spacex-interplanetary-transport-system/

 

Live stream starting soon if you want to watch the full announcement:

 

http://www.spacex.com/mars

 

Looks like a low budged Sci Fi movie. The theory well known, but making it happen is hard. Thank you Elon for trying.

[Picasso]

http://www.parabolicarc.com/2016/09/27/video-spacex-interplanetary-transport-system/

 

Live stream starting soon if you want to watch the full announcement:

 

http://www.spacex.com/mars

 

Looks like a low budged Sci Fi movie. The theory well known, but making it happen is hard. Thank you Elon for trying.

 

I was exhausted just thinking about what it's going to take to make it happen.  I can't imagine what it's like to actually work on it.

 

I remember reading how we're somewhere in the last 10% of the time period where Earth is capable of sustaining life.  If you just think of the intensive/limited resources it takes to launch into space (like fossil fuels which take forever to form), if we wipe ourselves out in the final inning there isn't enough time to restart the clock.  We'd just be another example of life that couldn't make it off the planet... 

[RichardGibbons]

I remember reading how we're somewhere in the last 10% of the time period where Earth is capable of sustaining life.

 

Is this supposed to mean human life?  Because life's been around for 4B years, so another 400M years to get off planet doesn't seem like a big deal.  If they mean dinosaurs, that's still over 200M years, so another 20M years seems like quite a long time, too.

 

(I agree with your main point.  It's a bad idea to trash the earth in an attempt to leave.  I'm just curious about the point the original author (not you) was making when they referenced 10% of time left. )

[Pelagic]

Looks like a low budged Sci Fi movie. The theory well known, but making it happen is hard. Thank you Elon for trying.

 

Somewhere in a portion that I caught, Musk compares SpaceX to the construction of the Union Pacific Railroad and Mars to the west coast of the US. I don't think Musk envisions SpaceX doing it all, just providing a means for people to get there and start tackling the problems on the ground.

 

I still think they're going to have trouble finding early colonists who want to go live on Mars for the rest of their lives. The first century or so of Martian colonization will more likely be rotating scientific outposts with inhabitants living there for a year or two at a time to oversee the terraforming of the planet and study it. A century or so of terraforming should also go a long way toward making Mars a more hospitable place than it is currently, not anywhere close to Earth just quite a bit better than it is today.

[Picasso]

Yeah just life in general, it's in the hundreds of millions of years area.  On an evolutionary scale it's a really small window.  I'm reminded of this quote from Bill Bryson:

 

“If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow.

 

Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It's a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.”

 

A lot of the resources it takes to get to the point where we can actually launch into space are insanely long in the making.  If something bad happens and we have to "start over," we might not have the resources to get off the planet anymore.  In general we're in this small window where we have a real shot at becoming multi-planetary.  It might seem like we have a long time to figure it out (the earth will be livable for many millions of years as long as we don't destroy the environment, develop killer AI, get hit by an asteroid, etc.), but I think that's more of an illusion because from our standpoint a million years is a super long time to accomplish this task.  Because of how our world operates, we might only have a couple hundred years to make this happen.  If that window passes we could very well be locked out forever. 

 

Edit: More simply, the closer we get to inhabiting other planets (as technology continues to advance at incredible rates), that technology becomes an increasingly more problematic danger to staying on just one planet.  It's a real tricky thing.  Not sure you can plot out that probability chart over a million years before you almost positively wipe out life as we know it.  I'm not sure our species has the maturity to handle that responsibility for those kinds of time periods, but we'll see.  If guys like Elon and Bezos can accelerate the multi-planetary outcome they will deserve a tremendous amount of credit. 

[RichardGibbons]

Interesting point.  I kind of feel like within a thousand years, we'll probably figure out how to create arbitrary compounds and possibly arbitrary elements.  If that's the case, I would think the main limiting resource would be energy, which I imagine we could get from the sun.  On the other hand, I have no evidence for that feeling, so who knows.  It would be quite bad if we only have a 200 year runway.

[Picasso]

This xkcd puts the scale and destruction into an interesting format. 

 

http://xkcd.com/1732/

 

Other issues too:

 

http://news.mit.edu/2015/ocean-acidification-phytoplankton-0720

 

That kind of stuff is scary because it's fairly probable to kill off massive amounts of life resulting in death by suffocation across the world, mass extinctions, etc. 

 

Or glitches (bad AI?) sending us back into the stone ages:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident

 

It's really amazing how close we are to being wiped off the planet.  The risks keeping going up every day.... Then again we've wiped off countless other species on this planet ourselves... Hopefully karma isn't a thing :)

 

God forbid some other alien specifies thinks we're a threat and sends relativity bombs our way.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_kill_vehicle

 

Weapons like that seem easily feasible for a somewhat advanced species.  They might look like firecrackers to something that developed over another billion years...

 

Yeah I hope we have more than a couple hundred years.  Given the current trajectory, we should be on track for some real advancements in the next hundred years. 

[Jurgis]

Yeah I hope we have more than a couple hundred years.  Given the current trajectory, we should be on track for some real advancements in the next hundred years.

 

Couple hundred years is pretty enough. If we don't wipe ourselves out (or kick ourselves back to dark ages), we are very likely have superhuman-AI, consciousness I/O, body manufacture (from various materials too), etc. Might not go interstellar in couple hundred (unless there are some huge breakthroughs), but most solar system pretty sure.

[Spekulatius]

The Mars is a bad place for a human colony anyways and won't save mankind. It may be a stepping stone to somewhere else - another solar system with Earth like planets, but right now it's more like learning to swim, compared to crossing the Atlantic and discovering America.

 

it would be way easier to build and sustain a autonomous colony in a polluted and toxic earth, than to build and sustain one on Mars.

 

Most of the things that Elon promotes are not new. fore example the hypercompet - I have a future technology book from the 70's that describes how people could travel in vacuum filled tubes by trains powered by magnetic levitation and thrust with speed is 10k km/h our more. The physics allow this to happen and the technologies are known, but the cost and complexity of this are way beyond our time. We can't even keep a supersonic commercial jet build in the 70's flying.

[Liberty]

http://i.imgur.com/plGZXaB.jpg

[Jurgis]

Most of the things that Elon promotes are not new. ... The physics allow this to happen and the technologies are known, but the cost and complexity of this are way beyond our time.

 

Spek,

 

I somewhat agree with the first part, but I disagree with the second part. A lot of things that were theoretically known in 1970s had "complexity ... way beyond our time" then, but they might not have it now. You could not do the first stage rocket return and vertical landing then, but you can do it now. I would assume there are somewhat similar gains in material science.

 

In general though, I'm in the camp that sustainable non-Earth colonies require either autonomous AI instead of humans or human mind in non-human bodies. Our bodies are just not built for space and Elon is kinda brushing off the issues of hard radiation, micro meteorites, long-term living in non-breathable atmosphere, etc.

[Liberty]

"beyond our time"

 

Time doesn't magically make things better. People have to actually create the technologies and make it happen. If people like Musk and Bezos (Blue Origin) and others at NASA, etc, said "Oh, it's beyond our time" and gave up, then yes, it would take longer. But by working on the stuff they are bringing it closer. In fact, NASA actually lost capabilities over time and we lost decades that could've been used to make progress because there was no political will and the structure of NASA and its contractors probably became too bloated and inefficient to make real rapid progress on a lot of this stuff.

 

In the Musk presentation, he keeps talking about how he always thought the chances of SpaceX succeeding were low, but he wanted to make as much progress on these problems as possible. And on the Mars stuff he also says that it's going to be a long shot, but he's going to do his best. Said the only reason he's accumulating assets is to help make this happen, and he'll do his best, and maybe others will have to take the ball and run at some point.

 

That's how progress happens, and that's how one person can accelerate the timeline of what would otherwise happen with less smart and motivated people in charge...

[Travis Wiedower]

Liberty,

 

What is that picture of? Reverse image search didn't bring up anything.

[Liberty]

Liberty,

 

What is that picture of? Reverse image search didn't bring up anything.

 

It's part of the presentation (PDF linked at the top, video below):

 

http://www.spacex.com/mars

 

It's a carbon fiber fuel tank for the new rocket.

 

Here's the inside:

 

http://i.imgur.com/HR4INZU.jpg

 

And to give an idea of the scale of the rocket + spaceship, here's where that giant tank fits in the whole:

 

http://i.imgur.com/JPZZwZl.jpg

 

[Liberty]

http://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/spacexs-big-fking-rocket-the-full-story.html

[Liberty]

Elon Musk AMA about SpaceX:

 

[DooDiligence]

Thanks for the Kindle book tip!

 

I'll read it after I finish WEB's Ground Rules and Bernard Cornwell's Agincourt (which is just as awesome the second time around.)

 

The next pairing will be the adventures of Musk peppered with a bit of Heinlein (grok it baby...)

[Liberty]

Edit: I posted the wrong link:

 

[rb]

Thanks for the Kindle book tip!

 

I'll read it after I finish WEB's Ground Rules and Bernard Cornwell's Agincourt (which is just as awesome the second time around.)

 

The next pairing will be the adventures of Musk peppered with a bit of Heinlein (grok it baby...)

Switch to Stella or Becks!!!  own BUD now  ;)

[DooDiligence]

Thanks for the Kindle book tip!

 

I'll read it after I finish WEB's Ground Rules and Bernard Cornwell's Agincourt (which is just as awesome the second time around.)

 

The next pairing will be the adventures of Musk peppered with a bit of Heinlein (grok it baby...)

Switch to Stella or Becks!!!  own BUD now  ;)

 

I used to support AmBev a bit when I worked in Brasil (Antarctica, Bohemia & Skol - depending on which was the coldest...)

 

I will immediately switch to Stella in honor of you (I drank it when working in Egypt around the end of the last millenium...)

 

Stranger drinking strange beer!