'If he dies there, what should be engraved on his tombstone? Musk frowns a moment, then grins. "Holy shit, I'm on Mars, can you believe it?"'
Of the people alive today, I suspect Elon is probably one of the few who will be widely remembered a thousand years from now.
Perhaps most of all by the inhabitants of Mars.
NB I freely admit it having a romantic fascination with the colonization of Mars after reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and Robert Zubrin's The Case for Mars:
This is easy to overlook, but if he's correct and will be able to achieve his goals, those 80,000 plus people will have one man to thank. Although it is still so unbelievably hard to imagine that, with so many obstacles ahead.
As with any highly risky enterprise, I think he should be increasing his odds by raising one or more prodigies of his own, that would be able to carry on with his work, if he himself wasn't able to.
Grandmaster Judit, Grandmaster Susan, International Master Sophia, and their parents, Klára and László Polgár might disagree.
László Polgár had a thesis that one does simply raise a prodigy and managed to do pretty well on that score, given that he and his wife Klára proceeded to then raise three female chess prodigies.
Of course one swallow does not a summer make, so it could just be blind luck, but it is an interesting and fairly persuasive case.
I believe one can, though it takes intelligent parents who make an effort to do so, and money as to not to be constrained by social norms. Over the last decade of my life, I've been evaluating how my parents raised me, how my generation and the previous two generations were raised, and constantly coming up with solutions based on the opportunities provided by different income levels. While I'm not a sociologist, I believe I could write a book on my observations, reasoning, and conclusions.
Like in Judit Polgár's development; if a child was trained in a subject early on and provided the right opportunities, then "genius" can be developed. When I have kids, my plan won't be to focus extensively on one subject (like chess), but on several subjects, including Esperanto like Judit Polgár was taught.
The resources needed are less than you would think. A child raised with specific kinds of support and challenges is more likely to have an impact on the world than one raised with every advantage. You can get an idea of the useful kinds of challenges and support by looking at the childhoods of actual successful people.
http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0910707561 is a good source of insight based on it. However I would humbly suggest that consciously attempting to follow some of its advice would be legally actionable.
The best thing about SpaceX, in my opinion, is how absolutely stunningly ordinary their basic business strategy is. Build stuff that's valuable using designs that are known to work, iterate on those designs as much as you can to improve them, charge people money for the stuff you build, and just continue doing that.
The Falcon 9 is a dead-simple 2 stage LOX/Kerosene rocket that effectively has a heritage back to the 1950s, as does the capsule based Dragon spacecraft. But SpaceX is continually trying to tighten their OODA loop and doing quite a good job of it.
It's a good model for a lot of startups. Build something, iterate on it, charge for it if for no other reason than to pay for continuing R&D, and just keep getting better until you change the industry.
I think the secret to Space X is there an engineering company in a bureaucracy heavy industry. It reminds me of a technical problem a friend was dealing with he had a basic design for a toy that he was trying to get manufactured and spent a few weeks emailing back and forth why the design was impossible, until he went over and discovered the issue was a base he said should be about 1 inch thick needed to be 1/4 an inch thicker and they just looked at the constraints and said impossible.
It's great for rockets to have more effecency, be lighter, and carry more cargo, but it's hard to balance the design around what is overall cheaper and more efficient rather than just chasing better specs.
"SpaceX's focus on reusable technology has slashed costs – the company says it can get an astronaut to the space station for $20m, versus $70m charged by Russia for a seat on a Soyuz rocket.
SpaceX is testing reusable prototype rockets that can return to Earth intact, rather than burn up in the atmosphere.
If successful, rockets could be reused like aeroplanes, cutting the price of a space mission to just $200,000, for fuel."
I wonder what the Russian's cut is. Since they are the only people that can send astronauts to space right now, they can charge basically any price they want.
They used to have a huge markup some 15 years ago. No longer. It's hard to determine price of a crewed Soyuz mission, but an unmanned Proton rocket, when ordered to launch Russian military satellites (which obviously can't bear much markup because it is the parts of the same system buying from each other, large markup only means increasing taxes) is 1.5x the price of a Falcon 9 launch, with a low orbit payload about 1.5x Falcon's and GEO orbit payload about 1.1x Falcon's. So any and all price advantage Russian rockets used to have over American is now eroded due to increased salaries (an aerospace engineer got about $500-$1000 a year 15 years ago and about $10K a year now) and lower SpaceX prices.
In order to get support they compromised and agreed to pay for essentially anti-environmental ads for a couple of key conservative senators. And that was not right. You should fight on the merits of the cause, not play some Machiavellian game where you agree to support things that are bad in order to get some things that are good passed.
Says a lot about integrity of our beloved Internet giants. Among the key supporters of FWD.us initiative, apart from Facebook, are Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. And also, HN's own PG :)
An old argument for going to Mars is that spreading beyond Earth is necessary for survival in the very long term. It makes sense, but it always seems like there are so many other causes, more urgent, to spend our resources on. Musk's answer to that:
"The lessons of history would suggest that civilisations move in cycles. You can track that back quite far – the Babylonians, the Sumerians, followed by the Egyptians, the Romans, China. We're obviously in a very upward cycle right now and hopefully that remains the case. But it may not. There could be some series of events that cause that technology level to decline. Given that this is the first time in 4.5bn years where it's been possible for humanity to extend life beyond Earth, it seems like we'd be wise to act while the window was open and not count on the fact it will be open a long time."
I find it really hard to imagine our society going back to a dark age though...
You can't wait for perfection. This is the classic Maslow's hierarchy of needs fallacy. If you wait until the "more fundamental" layers are perfect you will wait too long or wait forever. And in many cases you will miss out on opportunities which feedback to "lower" layers from higher ones. It's important to spend an appropriate amount on different sorts of activities, but the appropriate amount is never to spend nothing on "higher level" stuff.
Consider science, for example. A lot of money was effectively invested into very esoteric sciences in the 18th through 19th centuries while the world was generally very poor, struggling to feed itself, struggling with disease, and so on. The seemingly logical, and compassionate, thing to do in those eras would have been to ignore esoteric pursuits and concentrate on dumping as much time, effort, and money into making everyone's lives better.
But that would have been disastrous. It would have meant that science would have lacked an understanding of genetics, of micro-biology, of chemistry, of electromagnetism, of physics, and so on. And that would have stunted the development of the industrial age (steam engines, and later electric motors), it would have stunted the development of new food crops, of fertilizers, of sanitation systems, of vaccines, of radio/television/networking, etc. Without which the entire world would be essentially as poor as it was in the 18th century, instead of with billions of people having access to stable food supplies, clean water, etc. and over a billion people living in wealth with a few billion more on the way to that level of wealth in the next few decades.
"I find it really hard to imagine our society going back to a dark age though..."
Why? It nearly happened on at least two occasions over the last fifty years through nuclear war.
Disease, volcanism, asteroid/comet impact, warfare, general econonmic collapse.... seems like quite a long list. Of course, none of these are terribly likely but I wouldn't rule them out entirely.
>I find it really hard to imagine our society going back to a dark age though...
Do you though? World War I, World War II, etc.
I firmly believe there will be a WWIII in my lifetime. The US government is already a big boys club. You have money? You can join, we have money too. Look at how much the US is capitalizing off of student loans. Where do you think that money goes? It sure as hell ain't social services.
I really think that there are a few people running the country to completely militarize it at some point from a long time ago and their plans are finally coming to fruition.
All spending is going to the army. Police forces are more than equipped to fuck up nearly every city if they wanted to. At some point, the military/police will have so much force that the "people" no longer matter.
One day a switch will be flipped and it will become an entirely military country.
Once that happens, combined with Chinese forces, nuclear warfare, and global tension, I doubt anyone would survive a WWIII.
This is all just off handed bullshit-theorizing though.
You may enjoy the short novel "A Canticle for Lebowitz", which chronicles the cycles of humanity re-birthing through dark ages post-nuclear war, surpassing prior technology and...
http://www.amazon.com/Canticle-Leibowitz-Walter-Miller-Jr/dp...In the depths of the Utah desert, long after the Flame Deluge has scoured the earth clean, a monk of the Order of Saint Leibowitz has made a miraculous discovery: holy relics from the life of the great saint himself, including the blessed blueprint, the sacred shopping list, and the hallowed shrine of the Fallout Shelter.
In a terrifying age of darkness and decay, these artifacts could be the keys to mankind's salvation. But as the mystery at the core of this groundbreaking novel unfolds, it is the search itself—for meaning, for truth, for love—that offers hope for humanity's rebirth from the ashes.
It follows 3x periods: post nuclear, "rebuild" and discovery, and "surpass" technology.
Elon is not the only example. John Carmack is another one. Video Games, Rockets, Cars, you name it. When you are curious AND efficient at learning & developing solutions, you often end up breaking new grounds. There are tons of examples out there of people successful in many fields.
I think the point is that Jobs himself only ran one company at a time, though he had many successes. Elon is doing at least three things at once (Chairman of the board of Solar City. CEO of both Tesla and SpaceX), and the Hyperloops looks to be a fourth.
FWIW, in the case of Solar City he consistently emphasizes in his interviews that he has to basically "just show up at board meetings and hear the good news" and that most of the credit goes to the guys in charge there.
But anyway, I'm deeply impressed by this guy, especially since he is not only CEO but also Chief Designer at SpaceX and Product Architect at Tesla.
Incorrect. Steve was CEO of Pixar and Apple at the same time. He found it to be exhausting. In Isaacson's book Steve believe this weaken his immune system which led to his cancer, which Isaacson discredited.
We can not survive in outer space in our current form. Human body requires too much resources, is sensitive to radiation and needs gravity. But this may change in near future :-)
We can simulate gravity in space with centripetal force. The other problems are definitely present. The ISS is a good testbed for developing solutions to these problems, and I'm optimistic about our future deep-space travel capability.
there's way more radiation outside earth's magnetic field, and then even more outside the solar system - I don't think the ISS is a particularly good example.
Hmm, perhaps you're more right on a second reading - "as a testbed for developing solutions" might work.
They're referring to the re-invented character from the recent Paramount Pictures films. He was their "model" that inspired the character.
That's what they say, anyways. Elon Musk isn't nearly as socially heroic as Tony Stark, he's a stuttering nerd. Not that that's a bad thing. He's a genius, but they're really nothing alike except for them both being overly ambitious and successful entrepreneurs.
Of the people alive today, I suspect Elon is probably one of the few who will be widely remembered a thousand years from now.
Perhaps most of all by the inhabitants of Mars.
NB I freely admit it having a romantic fascination with the colonization of Mars after reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and Robert Zubrin's The Case for Mars:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_trilogy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_for_Mars