And now we reach possibly what is the nadir of this series of posts, which is to discuss Musk's actual plan to colonize Mars, such as it is.
He is going to build the biggest flying phallic symbol ever, which he actually calls the
Big Fucking Rocket. It hardly seems appropriate to say anything more. But I will manage a few words.
Before we start, here's a four minute video from SpaceX, showing how a happy crew of 100 astronauts will go to Mars on the Big Fucking Rocket. This is supposed to be happening in 2024, five years from now.
And if you want more details -- here are a couple of papers, in which Musk explains the plan.
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/space.2017.29009.emu
There really is a way that anyone could go if they wanted to.
https://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/making_life_multiplanetary_transcript_2017.pdf
In last year’s presentation, we were really searching for the right way to pay for this thing. We went through various ideas— Kickstarter, collecting underpants, etc. These didn’t pan out, but now we think we have got a way to achieve this.
With all due respect, I'm not convinced that Musk has really figured out "how to pay for this thing." There seem to be two key elements in his current plan. One is to use the profits from the network of wireless Internet satellites, and the other is to get average people to pay $200,000 each for tickets to Mars.
My guess is that funding from NASA will also be a key part of the plan, if indeed it's going to happen. But so far, Musk isn't saying so.
Ultimately, Musk intends to establish a colony on Mars with a population of 1 million people, and a self-sufficient industrial and agricultural base. But that isn't the startup agenda. Instead, in 2022 a pair of BFR's will embark to Mars carrying supplies & equipment. Then in 2024 a crew-carrying ship will follow. They will deploy a solar-powered manufacturing plant that will synthesize enough rocket fuel for their return trip, from local raw materials. And then they will fly back home to Earth. It's an exploration trip / feasibility check / joyride, not so different from the Apollo moon mission plan.
There and back again. With a colossal amount of money wasted in the process.
With the Big Fucking Rocket, Musk is basically providing infrastructure. A way to get around in space. Really, he's counting on entrepreneurial animal spirits to come up with the details for this plan to go to Mars.
Wait -- but what do Musk's old friends from the Mars Society think? This rocket is Too Fucking Big. It's Royally Fucked Up. It's like Musk is building it for some other purpose, because it's certainly nothing you'd want to use to go to Mars. Well, they don't exactly say that, but look at what they do say, and read between the lines.
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/colonizing-mars
Colonizing Mars
A Critique of the SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System
...I was among the thousands of people in the room (and many more watching live online) when Musk gave his remarkable presentation, and was struck by its many good and powerful ideas. However, Musk’s plan assembled some of those good ideas in an extremely suboptimal way, making the proposed system impractical.
http://www.marspapers.org/paper/Haldi_2018_1_pres.pdf
"Too big not to fail?"
Moreover, the very "monolithic" concept makes it difficult to provide "plans B" in case of possible problems.
In addition to these considerations, let's take a critical look at Musk's stated reason to go to Mars:
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/space.2017.29009.emu
I think there are really two fundamental paths. History is going to bifurcate along two directions. One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event. I do not have an immediate doomsday prophecy, but eventually, history suggests, there will be some doomsday event.
The alternative is to become a space-bearing civilization and a multi-planetary species, which I hope you would agree is the right way to go.
So we're going to Mars to avoid extinction. Another paper at the Mars Society maps out the issues in more detail:
http://www.marspapers.org/paper/Davidson_2017_2.pdf
IMPROVING THE SPACEX MARS COLONIZATION PLAN
Craig Davidson
Stay and Die or Go and Die?
There are numerous threats to life on Earth, such as Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), asteroids/comets, local gamma ray bursts, nearby supernovae, and wandering brown dwarfs (pretty much in decreasing likelihood of encountering them in our lifetime). Mankind of course has created its own threats, such as nuclear war, bio-warfare, rogue nanotechnology, and pollution. There are plenty of ways to die, and most of them apply just as well on Mars as they do on Earth, with Mars having no air, no food, and very little protection against radiation of all kinds. A CME that would bounce right off Earth’s magnetosphere would completely fry the people and equipment on the Martian surface. What is important is that the most likely extinction-level natural events (the first two) would only affect one planet or the other. The other three could pretty much kill everybody no matter where we are, until we can expand to another solar system.
Now I'd have to add that in the entire time that life has existed on Earth, at least a billion years, there has never been a CME big enough to be implicated in a major extinction event. Out of five major extinctions, only one is currently believed to be related to an asteroid impact. So the odds of the human race making it through the next million years, at least, without being wiped out by a CME or asteroid impact, look pretty good. And those are the two most likely natural threats listed by these Mars experts. And out of the two, they admit that the Mars colony could be wiped out by a CME event that would be a trifle to Earth.
So these are reasons why Musk wants to go to Mars? Or is he worried about "
nuclear war, bio-warfare, rogue nanotechnology, and pollution"? That doesn't make any sense either.
Would an Earth superpower risk being left second fiddle to a Mars colony? No, surely an empire in distress would have a few extra missiles to send to Mars and destroy the place. Or more likely, the same idiotic ideological pursuits would lead to Armageddon on Mars, either simultaneously or separately from Earth.
Similarly, bio-warfare or rogue nanotechnology would surely pursue mankind to the last person on Mars, if indeed they could get everyone on earth first.
Pollution and global warming? Even with the worst possible imaginable pollution and climate change, the Earth would still have the benefits of natural gravity, protection from the worst of cosmic rays, abundant water and oxygen, and a far better prospect for terraforming than Mars ever could.In the event of the near-extinction of the human race due to any imaginable cause, it's obviously preferable to shelter in place on Earth, rather than carrying one's prepper mission to Mars. As Davidson said: "
There are plenty of ways to die, and most of them apply just as well on Mars as they do on Earth, with Mars having no air, no food, and very little protection against radiation of all kinds."
And as the Davidson paper goes on to explain:
The Sword Over Our Heads
Every summer, we risk the end of life on Earth. Methane hydrate bubbles frozen in the tundra of Siberia are already popping, releasing a greenhouse gas twenty five times more powerful than CO2, while temperatures in the arctic are ten degrees higher than average [4]. But even larger methane hydrate bubbles are trapped within the continental shelf of the arctic ocean [5,6]. Fortunately, we have brave humans willing to pop the methane bubbles for their own enrichment [7], risking releasing 800 years of equivalent CO2 consumption at 25x potency, which might lead humans in the next few years to try to move to Venus to cool off. Carbon poisoning our planet has been bad enough, but now some people in positions of power appear desperate to prove our species is suicidal.
Now admittedly, Davidson is being a bit sensationalist here. Many scientists don't think the arctic methane is going anywhere, or at least not within the next 50 years. Even still, it would be more comforting if wealthy elites such as Elon Musk (and not to mention Jeff Bezos) had some plan to save Earth in the short run, rather than planning an escape to Mars??