The SpaceX Thread

[new2mac]

Dawn of a new age...
https://twitter.com/spacex/status/679400723851829251

 

[jbode]

Megalodon[/url]":a8m81ecc]

Syonyk[/url]":a8m81ecc]Oh, come on. I'm sure NASA will petition Congress to get some funding to do a committee to research the possibility of making SLS reusable, if Congress could only shake up another few billion dollars for them to do the work...

You have a profound lack of understanding of the situation. NASA doesn't want SLS, and administrators have gotten in trouble for hinting in roundabout ways that it's stupid (the response to which from politicians is, and I quote, "it's the law").

This has now settled into a detente where NASA continues with SLS and maintains the pretense it's not stupid so they can continue funding for other programs. You're getting it exactly backwards suggesting NASA will petition congress to make a reusable SLS, they're going to studiously ignore the fact that it's getting even dumber than it already was.

Syonyk[/url]":a8m81ecc]NASA has been doing some really good work with robot landers lately, but it mostly depresses me that they've been almost entirely captured by the aerospace industrial industry as a funding pipe from Congress to do not a whole hell of a lot.

This is backwards. NASA isn't captured, congress is captured and they control NASA's funding. They can tie the funding to implementing specific programs.

SLS is a jobs program first and foremost; its primary purpose is to keep the legacy Shuttle manufacturing sector employed. Whether it does anything useful is irrelevant as far as Congress is concerned.

It doesn't matter what SpaceX and Blue Origin and any other NuSpace company do; Congress wants a Big Dumb Booster, and by God they're getting a Big Dumb Booster, economics and common sense be damned. They want to pretend they're reliving the glory days of Apollo, but they don't actually want to pay anything for it, so they've funded a rocket without any missions.

It would be nice if Congress just gave NASA a budget and said, "do something cool with this", but that's not how it works. And that's really how it should be. We just need to elect better Congresscritters.

 

[RobDickinson]

Not only have they funded it they want it man rated too, which is plain stupid.

 

[davidtheweb]

I can't fathom a Martian economy, it makes no sense to me. It's not the western frontier. You can't just walk off into the prairie and grow corn. Or hunt for skins. Or dig a mine. Anything done on Mars will require a huge amount of resources, technology and capital. How do you manufacture anything without basic industry like mining and smelting? Then all the The equipment for that will be immensely expensive to bring to Mars. Any manufacturing has to be of high order technological products. Selling shovels and buckets on Mars is not exactly going to be a winning business. Even if you manage to make something, how will anyone else afford it if they can't also make something worthwhile. You can only have so many people growing hydroponic tomatoes! It'll be like a Sunday farmers market where everyone is selling squash because that's the only thing they can grow!

All I can say at the moment is: Don't underestimate human ingenuity.

 

[Lee L]

I could see any Martian economy to be more like a mill company housing and store setup where you are essentially slaves rather than entrepreneurial.

 

[Statistical]

I could see any Martian economy to be more like a mill company housing and store setup where you are essentially slaves rather than entrepreneurial.

Good way to lose the company. Treating people like defacto slaves on a hostile unforgiving planet where rule of law is a couple billion kms a way is pretty much a nothing to lose situation.

 

[Megalodon]

How do you manufacture anything without basic industry like mining and smelting? Then all the The equipment for that will be immensely expensive to bring to Mars. Any manufacturing has to be of high order technological products.

Clearly early manufacturing has to be upmass multipliers like habs from native materials. More can be done as the footprint is increased, the footprint is increased within the resource constraints using mass multipliers.

 

[Megalodon]

It doesn't matter what SpaceX and Blue Origin and any other NuSpace company do

I think it does after a fashion, it looks to me like NASA is playing the long game. They can't stop SLS but SLS is inherently self-limiting, it can only use heritage shuttle engines until Aerojet Rocketdyne completes RS-25E, which they never will. What happens when SLS runs out of engines? Well, there's going to be ~2 human rated commercial launchers, and there's going to be Falcon Heavy, probably Vulcan with the option of doing a Heavy if missions require it, and possibly a SpaceX BFR. So the landscape the next time they try to resurrect Shuttle will be very different.

 

[Deleted member 32907]

I could see any Martian economy to be more like a mill company housing and store setup where you are essentially slaves rather than entrepreneurial.

Good way to lose the company. Treating people like defacto slaves on a hostile unforgiving planet where rule of law is a couple billion kms a way is pretty much a nothing to lose situation.

Seriously. That's pretty much the setup for Red Faction.

 

[UserJoe]

SLS is a jobs program first and foremost; its primary purpose is to keep the legacy Shuttle manufacturing sector employed. Whether it does anything useful is irrelevant as far as Congress is concerned.

It doesn't matter what SpaceX and Blue Origin and any other NuSpace company do; Congress wants a Big Dumb Booster, and by God they're getting a Big Dumb Booster, economics and common sense be damned. They want to pretend they're reliving the glory days of Apollo, but they don't actually want to pay anything for it, so they've funded a rocket without any missions.

It's also possible that the publicly stated mission for SLS is not the real mission.

 

[Xavin]

Lee L[/url]":en3fh7ym]I could see any Martian economy to be more like a mill company housing and store setup where you are essentially slaves rather than entrepreneurial.

Something like that simply won't be viable, because people on Mars aren't going to be dumb manual labor or cut off from communication with Earth. You will need scientists, engineers, doctors, electronics and robotics experts, etc, not blue collar labor. While Earth is going to have a hell of a transition period while all the remaining blue collar and service jobs get automated, there's no reason to have anything but robots for all that stuff on Mars in the first place. The people going to Mars will be very skilled and/or famous, and until it grows into the hundreds of thousands, it will probably be the most studied and viewed society in history. Streaming nearly everything anyone does back to Earth will not only get them some money and convince more people to come, it will keep them connected to Earth. I'm willing to bet that pretty quickly it will become politically untenable to let the Mars colony fail, because so many people will be so invested in watching it.

 

[Lee L]

Maybe slave is a a bit of an exaggeration. But I just don't see people going to Mars without ties to a larger corporation for a good long while. They are going to be beholden to the corporation in major ways. Maybe more like the crew of the Nostromo from Alien.

 

[new2mac]

jbode[/url]":2govfgk2]

SLS is a jobs program first and foremost;

That's not right either. SLS is not a jobs program. Our economy has huge demand for the skills these people have, they can easily find new work.

It's pork. A re-election program. It's one and only purpose is too keep the same congresspersons in office.

 

[Megalodon]

I don't think SpaceX has disclosed publicly what the latest launcher can do in fully expendable mode but it seems like estimates are starting to show a GTO payload not far off the better Proton configurations. Meaning SpaceX should be able to compete for most of the current GTO launch market without Falcon Heavy.

Lee L[/url]":1ie2qam6]Maybe slave is a a bit of an exaggeration. But I just don't see people going to Mars without ties to a larger corporation for a good long while. They are going to be beholden to the corporation in major ways. Maybe more like the crew of the Nostromo from Alien.

Syonyk[/url]":1ie2qam6]Seriously. That's pretty much the setup for Red Faction.

I see that now that SpaceX has landed a stage the shitposting has had to venture out into really distant speculative territory.

 

[Hat Monster]

jbode[/url]":2ono24dh]

SLS is a jobs program first and foremost;

That's not right either. SLS is not a jobs program. Our economy has huge demand for the skills these people have, they can easily find new work.

It's pork. A re-election program. It's one and only purpose is too keep the same congresspersons in office.

Congress critters don't need SLS to stay in office. Despite Congressional approval ratings hovering around all-time lows, their re-election rate is over 90% thanks to (among other things) gerrymandering. I'm not looking it up, but I'd be very surprised if Congressional districts move from the Red plutocrats to the Blue plutocrats at any more than a 2% change rate.

It's military-industrial make-work paid off by the bribes/donations which keep congressionals in Congress. SLS is fundamentally a big GOP big government where if they talk about small government enough, people might believe they're not enlarging it, because military. If some Democrats can get local funding out of it, so much the better. It's not needed, not important, not necessary and intrudes on work SpaceX, ULA, etc. are delivering commercially.

The capitalist in me is telling me that if SpaceX or even the profit-subsidised ULA can do this shit, they should be. Invest in Falcon Heavy rather than some SLS bullshit that gets cut from 20 flights to 15, to 10 to 5 to a partially loaded demo, to a mock up and then to cancellation. Congress is shit at delivering long-term projects and development, they make agencies to take the fall for it. NASA is one of those agencies. Meanwhile, the ISS just had a few crew guys sent up from a version of the R-7 rocket which the Soviets developed 70 years ago. The US Congress has cancelled more rocket families than Russia has ever made, while Russia is still using its original one - and charging the US for using it.

NASA is good at doing the one-offs. It's good at dropping robots on Mars, developing and running Earth observers, mapping the Moon, discovering amazing things at Saturn and Jupiter, showing us what Pluto is made of. It's bad at being a taxi service. NASA is at its best when announcing the discovery of new and cool, at its worst when delivering payload 17,229 with crew rotation whatever to the ISS. On a Russian carrier. Because it's busy fucking about with Constellation or SLS or whatever gets cancelled next.

 

[Lee L]

Megalodon[/url]":1nyq5sj9]I don't think SpaceX has disclosed publicly what the latest launcher can do in fully expendable mode but it seems like estimates are starting to show a GTO payload not far off the better Proton configurations. Meaning SpaceX should be able to compete for most of the current GTO launch market without Falcon Heavy.

Lee L[/url]":1nyq5sj9]Maybe slave is a a bit of an exaggeration. But I just don't see people going to Mars without ties to a larger corporation for a good long while. They are going to be beholden to the corporation in major ways. Maybe more like the crew of the Nostromo from Alien.

Syonyk[/url]":1nyq5sj9]Seriously. That's pretty much the setup for Red Faction.

I see that now that SpaceX has landed a stage the shitposting has had to venture out into really distant speculative territory.

I'm certainly not one to "shitpost" for the hell of it. Was just offering my honest opinion. Sorry.

 

[Dmytry]

There are two obvious things that could be created/manufactured on Mars that Earth will pay for. One is entertainment. The low gravity combined with the inherent drama and newness means there will be a lot of movies, documentaries, reality tv, video bloggers, sports, etc. How much money that will bring in I don't know, but but it will be something.

By space standards any sort of revenue from that is utter peanuts. For the first few years it would maybe just about pay for shipping cameras and extra communication gear necessary for that, as well as for editing. That's about it. Hell have you watched TV recently? Discovery channel: building tree houses. (Not tree houses of that amazon tribe that lives in the trees, no). A good nature documentary a year, about things which are going away forever within next 50 years.

Look at NASA stuff on youtube, look at view counts for the day to day stuff. It really is quite depressing.

edit: Do you remember the names astronauts on Apollo missions other than the first? Here's your answer.

Another example, nobody yet even coughed up the money to even film porn in orbit, not even for the first space porn ever and it being something that'd be genuinely very interesting in addition to being porn (I think they did a bit in suborbital flight once). If you can't fund orbital station with porn (not even 1 delivery for the first ever) you sure as hell can't fund mars base with reality TV.

 

[Megalodon]

Dmytry[/url]":d9gtxw7c]By space standards any sort of revenue from that is utter peanuts. For the first few years it would maybe just about pay for shipping cameras and extra communication gear necessary for that, as well as for editing. That's about it. Hell have you watched TV recently? Discovery channel: building tree houses. (Not tree houses of that amazon tribe that lives in the trees, no). A good nature documentary a year, about things which are going away forever within next 50 years.

What I think will make a difference is when the science budgets of smaller countries can afford to start participating. Look at their antarctica budgets for a ballpark on how cheap it needs to get, basically tens of millions. I think SpaceX will get there this decade (7 seats in a ~$100M manned launch, without pricing in reusability). And nontrivial unmanned spaceflight need to be possible on grants available at big to mid size universities, basically single digit millions, that's also got a good chance of happening due to all the smallsat launcher startups (also works as secondary payloads).

 

[Hat Monster]

Will smaller countries participate? Spaceflight has always been a "Because we can do this with ICBMs too" statement and affirmation of military might (with the occasional bit of brazen penis-posturing).

What does a country without ICBMs gain? You need a certain type of long-sighted stability, which democracy actively selects against, to invest in the admittedly nebulous prospects of "X, but in space!" If you're not waving your dick around, and wanting to do something you can't already buy from the likes of SES, you're looking at a really expensive niché case.

Cubesats were promised to fill this, an explosion of secondary payload. Think of the possibilities! Orbit on an already purchased rocket! Well, it turns out that rocket launch organisations would prefer to subsidise their primary customer with the income from secondary payloads, so cubesats pay a bit more per kg than the guy who's bought the launch. Cube racks are going up partly filled. It appears there's a fairly small market for menial measurements in LEO from a platform which cannot even perform attitude control, let alone stationkeeping without adding reaction wheels and a Hall-effect thruster which instantly increases the cost of the cubesat by an order of magnitude.

 

[Hat Monster]

Dmytry[/url]":2jrz51pt]
Another example, nobody yet even coughed up the money to even film porn in orbit, not even for the first space porn ever and it being something that'd be genuinely very interesting in addition to being porn (I think they did a bit in suborbital flight once). If you can't fund orbital station with porn (not even 1 delivery for the first ever) you sure as hell can't fund mars base with reality TV.

What does orbit add to porn that zero gravity doesn't? Yes, parabolic arc aircraft have been chartered to make porn.

 

[Deleted member 32907]

Hat Monster[/url]":1ecw5rev]
What does orbit add to porn that zero gravity doesn't? Yes, parabolic arc aircraft have been chartered to make porn.

The phrase "millions" in the context of the budget, I think...

I have to admit, I've been trying to come up with something neat to do with cubesats since I heard about the concept, and I really can't come up with much. It's just not a very capable format.

 

[Megalodon]

Hat Monster[/url]":9qk5440o]What does a country without ICBMs gain? You need a certain type of long-sighted stability, which democracy actively selects against, to invest in the admittedly nebulous prospects of "X, but in space!"

18 countries have flown astronauts to the ISS, the only assumption this requires is that if it gets cheaper it'll happen more. Also if cheap commercial launch is available it no longer requires the kind of long term commitment the ISS program did.

Hat Monster[/url]":9qk5440o]Cubesats were promised to fill this, an explosion of secondary payload. Think of the possibilities! Orbit on an already purchased rocket! Well, it turns out that rocket launch organisations would prefer to subsidise their primary customer with the income from secondary payloads, so cubesats pay a bit more per kg than the guy who's bought the launch. Cube racks are going up partly filled. It appears there's a fairly small market for menial measurements in LEO from a platform which cannot even perform attitude control, let alone stationkeeping without adding reaction wheels and a Hall-effect thruster which instantly increases the cost of the cubesat by an order of magnitude.

You're missing a lot here.

-What you're talking about is about 2 orders of magnitude smaller than what I am. Cubesats are 1.33 kg per U with larger than about 3U being rare, this would be up to about 400-500 kg. There's useful commercial satellites in this mass range, for example the Orbcomm OG2 satellites SpaceX just launched are 172 kg each.
-The small payload market has historically been very poorly served. The go-to launcher here for a quite a while was the Orbital Sciences Pegasus, which cost basically as much as a Falcon 9 for a few hundred kg.
-Secondary payloads are constrained because they have no control over orbit or schedule. Launchers targeting small payloads are an important improvement.
-There's cheap cubesat propulsion and attitude control, where cheap is defined as ~low tens of thousands USD. link

Syonyk[/url]":9qk5440o]I have to admit, I've been trying to come up with something neat to do with cubesats since I heard about the concept, and I really can't come up with much. It's just not a very capable format.

I'd tend to mostly agree, though Hat is incorrect about the limitations of the format. The smallsat launchers I refer to are closer to Orbital Sciences Pegasus which is much more useful. For example the Orbcomm satellites SpaceX just launched are 172 kg, and that is manifestly a useful commercial satellite in its own right. They originally contracted for Falcon 1 as it's better not to take the chance of blowing up your entire constellation all at once, but SpaceX discontinued that to chase bigger rockets when they got the NASA contract. No doubt Orbcomm got a Falcon 9 at a deep discount, but the takeaway is obvious, this is a very poorly served market.

A Pegasus costs about as much as a Falcon 9 so it's not really economical for this size class and I think that's one of the big reasons this market has languished as secondary payloads with schedules and orbits they don't control. Certainly Orbcomm has been jerked around quite a bit. With the advent of low cost dedicated launchers that can handle Pegasus-class payloads I think it's reasonable to expect more activity here.

 

[Dmytry]

Hat Monster[/url]":1i7jp73w]

Dmytry[/url]":1i7jp73w]
Another example, nobody yet even coughed up the money to even film porn in orbit, not even for the first space porn ever and it being something that'd be genuinely very interesting in addition to being porn (I think they did a bit in suborbital flight once). If you can't fund orbital station with porn (not even 1 delivery for the first ever) you sure as hell can't fund mars base with reality TV.

What does orbit add to porn that zero gravity doesn't? Yes, parabolic arc aircraft have been chartered to make porn.

A parabolic flight gives you like 30 seconds of "zero gravity" (bobbling around hitting walls).

Seriously, with the reality tv and such you probably won't even beat Earth-borne "big brother" a few months in. The public interest in something like this vanes very rapidly.

Look at the view counts here. Compare to view counts for, I dunno, reviews of some space flight videogame, or trailers for The Martian, or what ever. I don't know WTF is going on but the public interest level in real space exploration is utterly depressing. And yes I'm aware that there are other ways to view said videos - nonetheless it's clear it's orders of magnitude below gangam style and even gangam style won't fund a mars base.

edit: realistically speaking we're talking of a worldwide hit the first landing on Mars, maybe worldwide hit important discovery of something (life?), followed by public becoming rapidly bored of looking at that place. Long term large viewer base requires entertainment value, and having to do filming on Mars would only decrease entertainment value compared to Earth-bound CGI. That's the best case, worst case there's some sort of disaster with loss of crew and space exploration takes a huge funding hit.

If there will be space economy that's paying for itself, that'll first be in actual space rather than on Mars, mining things out of an asteroid or manufacturing something in zero-g.

 

[Tom the Melaniephile]

NASA produced videos are typically just so damn dull. The production values are just abysmal.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=p ... sP9ra_t8Bc

Contrast that with the recent SpaceX launch and landing posted 3 days later (and with 2 orders of magnitude more views)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5bTbVbe4e4

Did anyone else notice that the ORBCOMM satellite deployments were notably early compared to the on-screen timeline? Max thrust ended up being higher than anticipated, or were they sandbagging the timeline?

Side note: The internal diameter of ISS seems so darn small compared to Skylab.

 

[Dmytry]

That's the point, the day-to-day matters are dull. NASA's alka-seltzer in water has a lot of views too, and first step on the Moon was pretty popular. But you can't stretch that into some long term export for the Mars colony.

And against some earth-based production, a year after the base's established it's like how many people would pay to read raw spy leaks vs how many would pay to watch a James Bond movie. In the former case you have a few people who value it a lot, and many who don't value it pretty much at all, whereas in the latter you have many people who would pay 20$.

If anything a single video-sending probe into Jupiter atmosphere (sending to a bunch of orbiters or maybe floating recording then sending it back over long time or something of that kind) would be far more valuable for entertainment. We have no references of what it looks like for good CGI. And I bet it looks awesome.

edit: I think the potential entertainment value could actually be higher for orbiting space habitat, because it's in zero-g and shows something that is very hard to replicate well on Earth. Of course, we've had space stations for a long time now, so it's not very new any more. But that novelty won't last for actual Mars base.

edit: or here's another example, how does James Cameron fund his deep sea exploration? With CGI stuff like Avatar, not so much with deep sea documentaries. The main value for entertainment is in inspiration.

 

[RobDickinson]

I have an excellent way to get a mars mission funded and keep popular interest in in it.

The Kardashians On Mars. ...

 

[NavyGothic]

RobDickinson[/url]":1qojby5v]The Kardashians On Mars. ...

Already done - Mars One. And it's hard to take Mars One much more seriously than your glibness

 

[nj_kruse]

Dmytry[/url]":37at7gd8]If anything a single video-sending probe into Jupiter atmosphere (sending to a bunch of orbiters or maybe floating recording then sending it back over long time or something of that kind) would be far more valuable for entertainment. We have no references of what it looks like for good CGI. And I bet it looks awesome.

Is there a low-radiation zone if you get into a low enough orbit around Jupiter, like there is around Earth?

 

[Dmytry]

nj_kruse[/url]":1qd3nizb]

Dmytry[/url]":1qd3nizb]If anything a single video-sending probe into Jupiter atmosphere (sending to a bunch of orbiters or maybe floating recording then sending it back over long time or something of that kind) would be far more valuable for entertainment. We have no references of what it looks like for good CGI. And I bet it looks awesome.

Is there a low-radiation zone if you get into a low enough orbit around Jupiter, like there is around Earth?

I think so, for equatorial orbits at least. I used to work on software for rendering clouds and other atmospheric phenomena (this), I always wanted to make a Jovian storm and I'd love to have a reference to work off.

 

[Dmytry]

.劉煒[/url]":1tua8xll]Mars/colonies. The new Sili Valley/etc.

There's gonna be a heck of a brain drain.

Sili Valley is not on the Amundsen–Scott base or something, it's around where you had the actual gold.

 

[Xavin]

. Our economy has huge demand for the skills these people have, they can easily find new work.

Sort of. Most of them can transition into other industries, but they won't be doing anything all that similar. The purpose is to keep the domain knowledge about rockets and space alive, and keep the facilities open in certain places. It's not completely wrong headed, SpaceX and their competitors would not have been able to ramp up like they did without hiring experienced people. Were about at the point where that kind of knowledge is going to flourish without government help.

By space standards any sort of revenue from that is utter peanuts.

By current standards yes, but the whole point of all this is to bring the costs down into reasonable ranges. The initial setup will be expensive, but after enough equipment is there, they should be able to manufacture and grow the vast majority of what they need, and rockets from Earth will mainly be personnel and highly specialized but light things like CPUs and medicine. That's the whole point of growing the colony fast, a small colony will always be reliant on Earth, a large one can easily be nearly self sufficient.

 

[Technarch]

Alamout[/url]":35a1a1kr]The economics aren't any more complicated than the economics on the ISS. Until the place is self-sufficient (well past it, most likely) it will not really have an economy.

That's not what I meant. The point is that there is no ROI for a Mars colony. There's nothing there that isn't many orders of magnitude cheaper here. Creating a self sufficient presence there would require an investment of $trillions, which is why it's so improbable.

 

[Tegid]

Technarch[/url]":1jz8j5od]

Alamout[/url]":1jz8j5od]The economics aren't any more complicated than the economics on the ISS. Until the place is self-sufficient (well past it, most likely) it will not really have an economy.

That's not what I meant. The point is that there is no ROI for a Mars colony. There's nothing there that isn't many orders of magnitude cheaper here. Creating a self sufficient presence there would require an investment of $trillions, which is why it's so improbable.

I think it is a reasonable, but forward looking case that as a forward depot/processing facility for the Asteroid belt, there is an ROI. I agree however, that there isn't an initial one.

 

[Alamout]

I don't agree that it would require trillions of dollars anyway, unless you're counting a lot of stuff that would have been done anyway. I don't think anything will happen until the costs are lower than that, and I think the costs will become lower due to other motivations.

The main arguments to colonize Mars are not amenable to conventional economic analysis. The timescales are too long and the outlook too uncertain.

What is the ROI on having people on two planets in the event of a planetary disaster? The difference between "humans extinct" and "humans not extinct" would justify a lot of investment.

 

[Tom the Melaniephile]

Alamout[/url]":2t8ojxfp]I don't agree that it would require trillions of dollars anyway, unless you're counting a lot of stuff that would have been done anyway. I don't think anything will happen until the costs are lower than that, and I think the costs will become lower due to other motivations.

The main arguments to colonize Mars are not amenable to conventional economic analysis. The timescales are too long and the outlook too uncertain.

What is the ROI on having people on two planets in the event of a planetary disaster? The difference between "humans extinct" and "humans not extinct" would justify a lot of investment.

Right. The ROI is having a "backup" of human civilization.

I do wonder if it would make more sense to "backup" with a Stanford Torus to get our feet wet, followed by O'Neill cylinders. Major advantage is that everything is out of the gravity well.

 

[RobDickinson]

What does mars offer for a backup colony that empty space doesnt.. A little water(obvious plus if you can get at it) Some gravity (plus and minus), mass for protection against radiation.

We most do all that by capturing/farming comets and spinning things and be more mobile too.

Mars as a backup colony (well anything as a backup) only works if its self sufficient in the long term.

 

[.劉煒]

'Mars' is a stand in for the capabilities needed to get there. If you have 'Mars', you have the belt, the moon, etc.

 

[Dmytry]

Yeah, exactly, it's not a backup if it can't even survive an economic recession on Earth let alone anything major happening.

From what I gather Musk is concerned about skynet like total apocalypse scenarios. When it comes to nuclear war, Earth is still left far more habitable than Mars can ever be, ditto for any asteroid that is not absurdly huge, and the nearby supernovas and the like would wipe out a Mars colony at lower levels than where they would wipe out people on Earth.

With the skynet nonsense I'm thinking it's 1: quite severely ridiculous at the current tech level, and 2: if it actually happened as described by various AI doomsayers, it would very rapidly take over the entire solar system, probably the neighbouring stellar systems, etc.

The gap between something being not a threat and it out-thinking the entirety of mankind is really huge, the gap between out-thinking entirety of mankind and going to Mars is, well there's no gap.

edit:
IMHO, nothing about this AI mythology makes any sense. Their idea of how AI would end up massively superhuman is "self improvement", which would require that the AI is very massively superhuman to start with. Their survival plans are downright idiotic in one way or the other. Go to Mars, hide in the basement, pay some shady wannabe AI programmer to verbalize his version of laws of robotics. Some even outright talk about attacking Intel (paramilitary style) if it's building brain emulations (never mind that a full blown, working brain emulation is still basically an infant but with energy cost for which you can hire dozens if not hundreds very smart adults, never mind that we can't get a simulated C. Elegans with all of it's 302 neurons to work right).

 

[Statistical]

Yeah, exactly, it's not a backup if it can't even survive an economic recession on Earth let alone anything major happening.

I don't think anyone is saying start a colony and day 1 it is now a backup. It will takes decades for a colony to become self sufficient but you aren't going to get to that point without starting. On a long enough timeline all species becomes interplanetary or they go extinct.

 

[RobDickinson]

Sure we have to start somewhere, just questioning if Mars is the best place to do so. We already have a permanent base in space with the ISS though that will never be self sufficient