Elon speaking on 09-27-2016 at the IAS

[ecarfan]

As many SpaceX fans know, on Sep. 27 Elon will be making his presentation "Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species" at the 2016 IAS conference in Guadalajara Mexico. See Elon Musk to Speak at IAC 2016 | Iaf

He has stated that his presentation will provide specific information about how SpaceX plans to transport large numbers of people and cargo to Mars. Thought I would start a thread to discuss his presentation, which is now just 10 days away! I am really looking forward to it.

 

[Chet]

This is where I part company with Elon. We need to expend those resources -- and a lot more -- here on earth to prevent the sixth extinction: Homo sapiens.

 

[NikeWings]

As many SpaceX fans know, on Sep. 27 Elon will be making his presentation "Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species" at the 2016 IAS conference in Guadalajara Mexico. See Elon Musk to Speak at IAC 2016 | Iaf

He has stated that his presentation will provide specific information about how SpaceX plans to transport large numbers of people and cargo to Mars. Thought I would start a thread to discuss his presentation, which is now just 10 days away! I am really looking forward to it.

I'm looking forward to it as well. Not ready to pass judgment yet but I do enjoy having my mind stretched and he takes the prize.

 

[Stoneymonster]

This is where I part company with Elon. We need to expend those resources -- and a lot more -- here on earth to prevent the sixth extinction: Homo sapiens.

He's trying to do the same thing.

 

[oneday]

This is where I part company with Elon. We need to expend those resources -- and a lot more -- here on earth to prevent the sixth extinction: Homo sapiens.

He's trying to do the same thing.

SpaceX's budget might be large but you have to remember it is a self sufficient company now. If Elon diverted all of the resources to Earth it would be a one-off without a guaranteed return. Tesla and Solar City are meant to foster our future here on Earth and SpaceX provides the back up plan. Every good plan has a back up plan.

Oh and I am also very excited to see him unveil his plans at IAS and also to hear all the commentary here about it!

Edit: I noticed on Twitter Elon changed the name of the MCT to the ITS (Interplanetary Transport System) since it can go past Mars! Can't wait to get the details in just over a week.

 

[ecarfan]

This is where I part company with Elon. We need to expend those resources -- and a lot more -- here on earth to prevent the sixth extinction: Homo sapiens.

Elon understands that spending a minute fraction of the global GDP on attempting to establishing a self-sustaining off-earth human colony is a rational approach to reducing the probability of human extinction long term.

The relatively tiny amount of money (compared to the sum total of the entire terrestrial economy) that SpaceX will spend on creating a Mars colony would have no significant impact on reducing the likelihood of human extinction if that money was instead spent on earth.

Elon thinks big and long term, which is exactly what is required to prevent human extinction. Viewed long term, the probability of human extinction is 100% if humans remain restricted to earth. That is a fact. In the past approximately 500 million years there have been at least 5 mass extinction events. See Extinction event - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

We are currently in the middle of a mass extinction event caused by human activities (on a human time scale it is barely perceptible but in fact it is happening right now). I am not referring to climate change, which is a near future mass extinction event, I am referring to global habitat changes caused by human activities. E.O. Wilson has written eloquently about what humans have done to the biosphere in the past several centuries. If we continue on that path we could make the earth uninhabitable due to to ecological collapse. Adding anthropenic climate change to that (a change which appears to be inexorable, it is too late to stop it because there is no way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere) and the likelihood of human-caused mass extinction sometime in the next few centuries becomes even greater.

The other near term human extinction event risk is nuclear war. No amount of money spent by SpaceX can reduce the probability of that occurring, and given the increasing number of unstable regimes that have nuclear weapons it remains a real possibility.

All of that makes SpaceX's Mars plans look entirely rational to me. Yes, SpaceX could fail. But for the first time in human history we have the means to develop the technology to enable the successful colonization of Mars. It would be criminal not to make the attempt.

 

[Grendal]

The very same thing that makes Elon an amazing CEO is what gives him the ability to focus on the larger goals for humanities future. I have to applaud the influence he has had. I know with Tesla that he recognizes that it is the influence of Tesla that is helping to speed up the transition to sustainable transport. I wonder if he recognizes that the same thing will happen with colonization of Mars whether SpaceX succeeds or not. His influence has put humanity on the path to colonize Mars. It probably would have happened at some point but I'll bet he has sped it up by 50 to 100 years.

Without Elons influence I could easily see Mars going down a similar path that happened with the Moon. An initial push that diminished as the huge costs associated with going there would create. SLS is a good example of where it would have gone without SpaceX. A massive expenditure with very little gained from the endeavor and no real goals to achieve other than getting there.

Now we have a significant part of the worldwide engineering and scientific community focused on colonizing Mars. That focus will not go away and should even pass into the minds of the younger generation until Elon's vision is one day realized.

Additional edit: The one area I see that Elon is missing on and I hope that others do recognize and act on is industrialization of space. Creating a colony on another planet is an important humanitarian endeavor to protect the species from extinction. That is wonderful but in the long term humanity needs to move industrialization into space and start using resources out there instead of using up the resources of Earth. Basically we need to make a lot of money and have the ability to have a very comfortable lifestyle out there. It's what most of humanity struggles day to day to achieve.

IMO in the very long term, the Earth needs to become a planetary national park as much as possible.

 

[ecarfan]

IMO in the very long term, the Earth needs to become a planetary national park as much as possible.

Agreed. We only have one Earth in our Solar System, and it needs to be protected from increasing industrialization and the burden that billions of humans put on it. I assume you have read E.O. Wilson's latest book, Half Earth.

On the other hand, it is possible to discern a future for our home planet where sustainable energy runs everything, mass recycling with zero emissions is perfected, and the human population has declined significantly from current levels as people realize that mindless reproduction is not necessary for their well-being and tribal conflicts accomplish nothing.

I know, it's a fantasy. We need a back up plan, and that's where Mars comes in.

 

[Skotty]

We may be at the "great filter" right now. Without the foresight and planning hundreds of years into the future, many, perhaps most, intelligent species have doomed themselves to decline and extinction due to greed and careless exploitation of their planets, or less common, possibly just rejecting industrialization and living in a tribal society incapable of reaching the stars.

This is why I am a fairly hardcore progressive environmentalist. Now may be our deciding moment in cosmic history. Those of us who wish our species to live long, prosper and be remembered in the history books of the universe must fight hard to ensure our future takes priority over that of all the blind citizens of Earth who either can't see the big picture or can't see past their own pocket books. We must fight against those who want to return us to tribal life, a respectable but uninspired potential future akin to giving up. The legacy of our species and all life on Earth hangs in the balance. I fear too many of my brothers and sisters on this Earth are blind to this, and may ultimately doom us to failure and oblivion. I will help drag them kicking and screaming into a brighter future for all mankind if I can.

 

[Grendal]

Agreed. We only have one Earth in our Solar System, and it needs to be protected from increasing industrialization and the burden that billions of humans put on it. I assume you have read E.O. Wilson's latest book, Half Earth.

On the other hand, it is possible to discern a future for our home planet where sustainable energy runs everything, mass recycling with zero emissions is perfected, and the human population has declined significantly from current levels as people realize that mindless reproduction is not necessary for their well-being and tribal conflicts accomplish nothing.

I know, it's a fantasy. We need a back up plan, and that's where Mars comes in.

As long as we survive the next couple hundred years, I couldn't agree more. I imagine that we need to work to improve everything. As Elon pointed out, it is now humanly possible to generate enough sustainable power to power everything in the entire world. Humanity just needs to be willing to take the steps necessary to do it. Sustainable transport seems within our grasp as we are aware. There are a number of other significant areas that also need to be achieved as well. We are quickly reaching the point where all of that is possible. It will take a huge amount of will for humanity to take the steps but it is possible.

I have not read that book, so thank you for sharing. I will get it ASAP.

A safety net for humanity is an important step to occur.

We all have a lot of work to do.

 

[ggies07]

Agreed. We only have one Earth in our Solar System, and it needs to be protected from increasing industrialization and the burden that billions of humans put on it. I assume you have read E.O. Wilson's latest book, Half Earth.

Thanks for sharing that book title. I'll check it out as well.

 

[Grendal]

Livestream feed for IAC:

Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species September 27th 12:30 pm

 

[ggr]

Livestream feed for IAC:

Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species September 27th 12:30 pm

You don't mention a time zone... 1t's 12:30 at the conference, but that's 11:30 Pacific, 14:30 Eastern, for those who want to tune in.

 

[Skotty]

You don't mention a time zone... 1t's 12:30 at the conference, but that's 11:30 Pacific, 14:30 Eastern, for those who want to tune in.

Come on now, don't leave us out. 13:30 Central.

 

[dpeilow]

Are you sure about that? The conference is GMT-5 which would be 2 hours ahead of Pacific I think?

 

[Skotty]

Are you sure about that? The conference is GMT-5 which would be 2 hours ahead of Pacific I think?

It's a little confusing, as the time in a lot of places does not show time zone. However, I looked up the conference info, and it's in Guadalajara, Mexico, and I looked up Guadalajara time zone, and it came up Central time (UTC-6), though it didn't immediately provide clarification regarding daylight savings, which I have no idea how that would work there. The time listed for the talk is 13:30.

So if the talk is at 13:30 in Guadalajara, and Guadalajara is currently consistent with current Central time, then the time we listed should be correct. I'd have to do more digging to figure out the whole daylight savings time question.

EDIT -- this page makes it look like Guadalajara should be UTC-5 right now, so now I have no clue. Daylight saving time dates for Mexico – Jalisco – Guadalajara between 2015 and 2019

Daylight savings time is the root of all evil in the world.

EDIT AGAIN -- looking closer, UTC-5 is CDT (the huge mistake many places make is in just saying Central, instead of CDT or CST which adds the necessary clarification). So UTC-6 I found previously is only for standard time (this is what you get on Google search results when searching for something like "Guadalara time zone"), but both the middle US and Guadalajara are currently in daylight savings time (UTC-5), so the original times we came up with should be correct.

 

[Ulmo]

There is now a countdown clock on that YouTube channel, which made calculating the times easy, and agrees with Skotty's research:

11:30 Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) (includes California) and Mountain Standard Time (MST) (Arizona*)
12:30 Mountain Daylight Time (MDT) (includes Colorado)
13:30 Central Daylight Time (CDT) (includes Iowa, and local time for this conference in Guadalajara, Mexico)
14:30 Eastern Daylight Time (EDT) (includes New York)

Daylight saving time dates for Mexico – Jalisco – Guadalajara between 2015 and 2019

* Since Arizona smartly does not observe Daylight Savings Time (DST), they are in Mountain Standard Time (MST) all year, which is equivalent to Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) during Daylight Savings Time in (sometimes overly unenlightened) California (except for "Indian Navajo Nation" in Arizona (in MDT) which does unfortunately follow DST, because they're probably also unenlightened, or are federally mandated by unenlightened federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (Dept. of Labor) bureaucrats to follow stupid DST (or they are smart and get people like me talking about conferences to mention BIA being in the Dept. of Labor (or they are supposed to feel more kinship to Mexico (which does also follow DST) than USA according to border-moving activists))). I think DST is stupid. If California would be more enlightened about this, it could go ahead and eliminate DST, and the rest of the continent would follow its lead.

 

[dpeilow]

Google says it's currently 9:25 in Guadalajara which is GMT-5 or 6 hours behind London (with daylight savings here).

time in guadalajara - Google Search

Ain't rocket science...

 

[ggr]

All ye of little faith...

 

[jbcarioca]

...Daylight savings time is the root of all evil in the world...

.

If you live in the antipodean world it is even worse.
Depending on daylight savings Rio de Janeiro is 1,2 or 3 hours ahead of Eastern time. It requires lots of seasonal logic to keep up with this and some airlines do not manage to get is correctly done including major ones. I arrived for my flight at the correct time a couple of years ago to find that they'd not changed the time correctly so the flight had departed an hour early. Luckily we all just want to hear Elon.