The Rich Are Planning to Leave This Wretched Planet | Hacker News Reader

The Rich Are Planning to Leave This Wretched Planet

nytimes.com

23 pointscoldseattle32 comments

oh no.. they paid a deposit to take a ride on a space ship? Clearly trying to leave the planet... just like that time I took a flight so I could live in the sky.

If you really believe this, then you clearly don't understand just how inhospitable the rest of the universe is to human life. Antarctica is tough for us... Mars is antarctica without breathable air. Colder, far less pressure. Every resource your life depends on is difficult or impossible to get on Mars. You evolved here, not mars. And probably for the rest of my life, going there without a way back is a death sentence.

Do you really think Musk is planning to go to a lifeless planet to suffer and die?

Concomitant to that: if inequality gets bad enough that we do have a plutocratic class that owns the entire planet, it will be a lot cheaper for them to actually try to fix things here (or at least slow down on the path to catastrophe) than to move to Mars.

The Expanse series, despite not being 'hard SF', does explore a bit of the challenges in detail. Mars is too cold and too dead, and Jovian moons are too far from the sun.

You can build arcologies or other artificial habitats where life can be sustained, but the supply chain for making sure those habitats stay up will still require Earth. If anything goes wrong, most everything a habitat will die, and you will need another supply of ready humans and plant/animals to repopulate it.

If anything goes wrong, you likely will not have a sufficiently self-sustained autarkic supply chain on Mars to bootstrap the process from scratch again, hence Earth.

Earth is an 'infinite' (from the POV of a relatively dead place) supply of biodiversity, genes, organics, people, and manufactured goods.

Being staff on one of those things would probably be the most thankless highly-skilled job in the world. Can you imagine: you're trapped in a tin can with a bunch of extremely rich, extremely bored, extremely motion-sick people, and its your job to not only keep them alive, but also happy enough to justify their $55m outlay?

If you also want to leave this wretched planet, but you're not plutocratically rich, I imagine that would be motivation enough to serve some drinks along the way.

For the foreseeable future life off earth is going to be boring, deadly, uncomfortable and require a high degree of technical skill even from someone who is mostly a passive observer.

It does not sound like something that will be attractive to the leisured wealthy aside from the very few who are into extreme sports and bragging rights. You don't see rich people going on six month camping trips in Antarctica and any space colony that isn't in LEO is going to be even more distant, less stimulating and more dangerous.

The rich people are already visiting Antartica, but certainly not in camping trips.

And when you have visited most wonderful places, the most unlikely one are the one you seek. There are many travel agencies proposing this. And it is better if there is a well known scientist on board:

https://oceanwide-expeditions.com/blog/at-home-in-antarctica...

Ford?

I've got my thumb out but it's not working. >.>

>“My vision is to create a comfortable egg, friendly, where walls are so soft and in harmony with the movements of the human body [...]

That sounds like a padded cell... Apparently, that's also exactly what it looks like[0]. Further... check out "axiom" on Google Images[1].

[0]https://static01.nyt.com/images/2018/06/10/fashion/10AXIOM-i...

[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=axiom+spaceship

That looks ... horrid. I think I'd rather use my $50M to buy a big piece of land somewhere remote and beautiful here on Earth.

After you've bought a few of those and still have plenty left over... Then what?

Might as well go on this trip

I love that the url for this is "pigs-in-spaaaaaace".

A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies! A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!

If we look at this purely from a 'what is the best option to attempt to ensure the continuation of the human race?', then we should be attempting to do this asap. Having 100% of humans exist on earth leaves us very vulnerable and a single point of failure.

Unless we are already a colony that originated from some other planet.

Like Golgafrincham?

At my old job we frequently referred to humans having come from the "B Ark."

Couldn't these projects also be paths to mass destruction? When a group has the ability to safely hide underground or in space for extended periods, what stops them from leveraging their position and exerting force on the rest of us?

Having all humans exist in the solar system leaves us very vulnerable and a single point of failure.

Having all humans exist in the local stellar neighborhood leaves us very vulnerable and a single point of failure.

Having all humans exist in the milky way leaves us very vulnerable and a single point of failure.

Having all humans exist in the local super cluster leaves us very vulnerable and a single point of failure.

Having all humans exist in the universe leaves us very vulnerable and a single point of failure.

When you make your system large enough, it always has a single point of failure. False vacuum is a thing (maybe).

I'm 100% convinced this is what Elon Musk's end goal is. Tesla is just buying him time until he can pull it off. The Boring Company is a backup plan.

Elon Musk has always said he wants to die on Mars. The Boring Company is useful on earth for transport, as well as on Mars (underground habitats).

Edit: now I’m interested in how many BFR flights gets one TBM to Mars surface

"Lots".

It depends on how big the TBM is and you also have to ship a bunch of power generation to run it and so on.

Too bad we won't survive in space. So maybe they should look at making the current situation more livable.

No matter how livable you make it here, there will be people like me who will always want to go somewhere else. Like all of those people in Europe who left and came to the New World. Why didn't they stay in Europe and make it more livable?

Because it sucked ass and there was new frontier that likely was livable... The latter doesn't apply to space.

The investment in commercial orbital stations is more interesting to me than hypothetical Martian colonies, since those might actually get built in the near future. Guess it's another part of Carl Sagan's vision of the future as seen in Contact that's coming true.

Click bait alert. This isn't about living on another planet, it's about a short trip to a space station.

The meek shall inherit the earth.

The rich are going to give themselves cancer, with all that radiation...

The material on those walls absorbs a great deal of that radiation...

thus the reptilian race was born

The sooner, the better? I bet they will send somebody else first...

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