I think a lot of people view the billionaire space race as just another version of them comparing super-yachts. At least with the super-yachts, nobody's pretending it's an altruistic endeavour.
If orbit is a marathon, two billionaires have made it to about the 10 mile mark, while the third one has run 112 successful marathons in a row.
That's a distinction people are really missing here. Super yachts aren't doing that much to push anything forward besides super yachts. Maybe a bit of interesting tech for ocean going vessels gets prototyped there but nothing anywhere close to the magnitude of what SpaceX and Blue Origin are doing.
I don't think space exploration is super important at this point in our civilisational development. I get the aesthetic appeal from scifi but lack of multiplanetary life isn't really a bottleneck for us right now. So it's not all that different from flexing with yachts. I like Elon's more environment oriented projects (solarcity and tesla) but broadly speaking he's a pretty insufferable tech bro billionaire.
Air travel was only for the rich and governments at first too, but if they hadn't funded it it would never have become cheaper.
I don't accept the "we have too many problems on Earth" argument about space, though I do understand where people are coming from. I think if we wait for major problems to be solved here, we'll never go. There will always be huge problems. That's life.
That and space is far less than 1% of global GDP. If we were spending loads of money on space people might have a point, but we spend more on porn than NASA. (Not really exaggerating... look it up...)
As for Elon being an "intolerable tech bro," I don't care. He's human. Lots of amazingly productive or innovative people also have huge personal flaws. Look at some of our favorite musicians.
The tech bro thing isn't really about personality and more about ideology. The hyperloop and the boring company stuff is pretty dumb and clearly based on a disregard for public transit and publicly funded infrastructure, but I'm still glad he's investing in solar power and electric cars. The neuralink monkey stuff is pretty sickening too, but overall he's one of the less-bad billionaires.
If not right now, then when? what should we wait for? space exploration is very hard. It takes very long time and huge investment to make any meaningful progress. Even if we start now it'd be a long time before a sustainable presence in Mars can be established.
It's also annoying to use space exploration as scapegoat for the lack of progress on Earth. You, being a HN visitor, is likely a tech savvy person who probably plays video games. Do you ever ask yourself if video games are a huge resource hog? and if we all stop playing games and devote our time and money to solve problems here on Earth, how much progress would we be able to make?
I actually rather like SpaceX but I don't like x-risk arguments from Elon the same way I don't like rationalists freaking out about AI alignment: it's such a far out risk compared to the actual one we are facing (climate change), and they wilfully ignore it because their ideology (libertarianism) has no means to address it.
We’re pretty lucky we haven’t had a major asteroid impact in over 10,000 years, some people argue that’s when it happened last and completely changed the climate.
I actually think you could legitimately argue this is larger risk than climate change, it’s just that the media don’t write about it.
What about getting resources from asteroids? Ever think about what sort of economy of abundance that could create on earth? Like some asteroids have more metals than what’s on earth. How is that for creating a better world on earth?
I think even today spacex could probably change the path of an asteroid if needed. Which is a massive amount of protection for earth. 10-20 years they can mine asteroids. So It’s not just about creating a mars colony for tech bros. It’s a million other possibilities.
You are being extremely short sighted and your judgement is clouded by not liking musks personality. His personality is the last thing you should be thinking about.
I very much doubt they could divert an asteroid right now - and if asteroid defense is the actual reason behind space innovation then why isn't anybody explicitly working on it? Because it's not profitable, and NASA's budget is pretty miniscule. Presumably if they thought it was a significant risk they'd be diverting what resources they have to asteroid defense.
My only issue with SpaceX is that Elon makes the argument that a Mars colony is somehow a counter to x-risk. It isn't, because any colony would be dependent on earth for survival for a long time and if we're worried about asteroids we should probably be defending earth instead of ditching 8 billion people and surviving with 1000 people on an inhospitable rock.
You are assuming that everyone in the government works to protect our interests in long-term. Spoiler alert: they don't.
I think it's absolutely super important for our civilization's development. Right now way too many people care only about themselves. Getting people to care about the advancement of society in general is important rather than only caring about what they can personally get out of it. We won't develop as a society if we're shortsighted (shortsightedness caused global warming).