Teslabot Abundance on Earth Will Mean Mars Abundance Too

Elon Musk has described a vision for a self-sustaining Mars City with 100k to 1 million people that would be hard on the pioneers to establish. He also has described a vision for Teslabots where it would be useful and perhaps there would be one per household.

Brian Wang explores where SpaceX and Tesla and the Tesla bot will be in 2030 and how it will be very likely that a successful Teslabot makes Earth and Mars abundant and comfortable.

Elon Musk talked about his Mars and Teslabot plans in much of a one hour interview with Chris Anderson of TED. It is Elon Musk who is describing fleets of a thousand Starships going to Mars every two years and having very useful Teslabots in every home and Teslabots creating abundance for every person.

Elon Musk’s Mars Plans

1 Million People on Mars – Self Sustaining
Difficult- Hard but Glorious
First People 2029
Uncrewed Mission 2027
Compares to Antarctica and early US colonies

Elon Musk’s Teslabot Plans

Interesting prototype 2022
Limited Mass Production Useful Bots 2023-24
Usefulness goes up, costs come down, production scales up
Costs at a cheap car or less
Commercial for homes and businesses by 2032
Abundance on Earth

Very Useful Teslabots Will Exist by 2030 With the High Volume Fleets of Starships for Mars

SpaceX 1000 Super Heavy Starship Down to $10 Billion ($10 million each)
Starships will land intact and will be reused
Teslabots 20 times fewer batteries than a car
Teslabot 40 times less mass than a car

Buy two Model Y or up to 50 Teslabots
If more expensive (cheap car) then 8 bots = 2 Model Y

Teslabots to mine Mars and build the supply chain and the products will unlock the Mars economy

A smaller side effect of a fully developed Mars enabled by SpaceX and Tesla, would mean stock valuation for Tesla and SpaceX as high as $10 million per share in the 2060-2100 timeframe.

86 thoughts on “Teslabot Abundance on Earth Will Mean Mars Abundance Too”

  1. Yep, it's sad
    At least if Brian would post 15 sci tech breakthroughs for each 5 Musk posts.
    But it seems like you said, more than 90% is Tesla and Musk, it's kinda boring and because of that I am here 20x less frequent than in the past. In pre Musk times there were more interesting articles here. Now it's mostly the same.

    Hundreds of articles about Spaceship for example, but they didn't even have one successfull launch so far, and reusability and reliability isn't proved.

    or

    "Tesla build a factory"
    "Tesla build another factory"
    "Tesla is building its 4th factory" "Tesla is building its 5th factory"
    "Tesla sold 100k cars in June" "Tesla sold 120k cars in July"
    "Spaceship added an engine" "Spaceship moved to launch tower" "Spaceship was removed from launch tower"

    "Musk offered 40B for twitter", next day "Musk offered 45B for twitter" few days later "Musk will increase his offer to 47B for twitter".

  2. "Select out" is a term from population biology, gene frequencies, genetic or even epigenetic behaviors and such. The way you use the term "success rate" indicates you are not attempting that. Deeper even, "sex" is what you do intending to (re)produce. Many things we do look like sex, but are actually something else. Humans in particular have infantile bonding needs, if those are not met as infants. The related stuff has been integrated into sex behavior as they have been ongoing for millions of years. Why do we not have fur? It could be running/sweating, but could be need to touch. It happened long before clothing.

  3. It's been a couple of decades since I was last "in the market". Though now that I think about it, my success rate at bars and other drinking establishments was about equal to my numbers from sports.
    In both cases the numbers are far too small to have statistical significance.

  4. I wuz wondering if I should be more specific: A *running* track, where humans actually move *on their own*. Mountain bike track would work too. It helps to *select out* both cigs and alc, which bars do not, unless you were thinking ballerinas! But that is a barre.

  5. Yes – the choice of VR or Joystick or keyboard and mouse will depend on the mission and operations. EG: A geologist team surveying territory for resources might have a nuclear-powered mega-tank that can fast-charge all the other EV's and droids that go with them. It might carry and then deploy a whole swarm of various smaller bots, from flying chopper droids to Spot-dogs with manipulator arms or drilling rig drones. Will the mega-tank carry heaps of comms towers the droids need to set up across the land as they go into deep country for the first time – or will they already have Starlink to chat with? This all sounds like a whole team of geologists operating a variety of drones.

    Then years later, once all the data is in and surveys and the search for life is concluded, it might just be time to strip mine the place. By then some huge new fission powered mega-tractor might be scooping up the regolith and sifting through it for various resources. Who knows if that will be mainly GPS driven with one operator covering a dozen vehicles at once?

    But even with the mega tanks, there might be another reason to have great hi-res cameras and VR headsets. It might be more about the Martian's needs for exploration than the mission's need for supervision. The operators might need a little wandering time, and feel less confined if they can almost jack in to another part of the planet. If the cameras are good enough, maybe it will help them feel like they've been out there.

  6. Exactly. And there would be dozens of flex spaces in the interior too. I already discussed this with a flex office rep.

  7. A sad end to be sure, I used to prefer this website to the sea of articles in Physorg because it picked the most interesting for me to view every day/week.

    Now it's maybe 1/20th of that and 19/20ths of Musk or one of his companies.

    It's turned into a IPO stock shilling enterprise for Brian and last almost every shred of its former charm as a result.

  8. "Teslabots make the otherwise difficult to describe process of creating a self
    sustaining independent human civilization on Mars pretty straightforward"

    Oh sure, just completely ignore the already long development of autonomous cars which is still very far from everyday, everywhere use – and the control system for those things is a doddle by comparison to the system that will be required to suit the vastly greater variance in possible scenarios that a humanoid robot must surmount to achieve so called "useful" status.

  9. SLS being ready is meaningless because it isn't reusable and if Musk's figures can be believed the Starship dry cost will be significantly less.

    SLS is nothing more than a bald faced ghost carrot to extract more and more taxpayer funds from congress every year.

    Until the US govmt has a level of control over SpaceX that it does with Lockheed or Boeing they will continue to push for alternative solutions simply because they do not own it.

  10. Humanoid robotics is an entirely different game in control terms to a car.

    Even just using standard 'hard' servo types for limb and digit actuation instead of soft muscle types you still have far more possible control variance to deal with than a car, not to mention having to deal with significantly more variance in possible scenarios in both interior and exterior settings.

    Musk is playing on the ignorance of the public and investors to drum up stock price increases with this Teslabot hype – the truth is that it requires dramatically more revolutionary work than anything done at SpaceX, which is by en large still using tried and tested technology which was simply undeveloped commercially before this point (because it suited Lockheed, Beoing et al to keep it so).

  11. There's a bit more to viable telepresence of a full robot in space than a mere VR headset to say the least.

    Not to mention that if you are not intending it to sub for a human then there is little need for it to have a humanoid appearance at all.

  12. Elon also spoke about the diminishing returns of research into self-driving as a way of explaining how all their optimistic assessments of driving AI had been wrong in the past. The reality is that because we've never done true general AI before, we just don't know if it's possible. It's a fun exercise to guess what an "I Robot" civilisation would be like and the exponential curves it might allow. It's another thing to actually GET general Ai.

  13. Not sure – maybe you intended to reply to Ludus above? One of my points was that a purely humanoid robot may not be the best choice in all cases, and also you talk about using human tools which Ludus refers to.

  14. Interesting approach! I've loved the *ideals* of New Urbanism (as an amateur / activist) for maybe 18 years now – but never thought what that would look like if we built it over a river. It's like you've squished the functionality of this "Built to Last" classic New Urban summary video into an arch in the sky.
    https://youtu.be/pErk61t1N70

  15. I was thinking about this the other day – and in the initial phases I agree. While I love Sci-Fi and thought experiments like this – I'm now dubious that we'll EVER reach human level "General AI". So I really hear your point about humans using tools – and then being able to move whatever those tools are outside and use some sort of humanoid form to operate the same tools outside. However, I wonder if 'humanoid' in this instance will mean the arms and head for viewing and manipulation? Surely the feet could be a tractor or on 4 or 6 legs like "Spot"? Regolith is awkward. I'm thinking Centaur rather than fully humanoid.

  16. Well, lots of people are old enuf to have read O'Neill. Did you? By your focus on Island 3 plans, not ISS as "O'Neill's space stations come true" you are missing the current O'Neill micr0g excitement. "Is the surface of a planet the right place" for micr0g? Correctly answering that question opens O'Neill Space for all the rest of the later stuff. "the colony may be toast." As would the town on the Earth. Thousands, or just a few, such O'Neill settlements are better than one Earth. Think about it. Nit pick: "meteor (not meteorite," should read "meteoroid, . . .", as the meteor is the phenomenon of the meteoroid ionizing in the heat of entry. If they, meteoroid or asteroid, are big, capture and use. Small, shielding will absorb for later use. Really big, move out of the way, unless you are on a planet. "Mars or the Moon are better . . .have resources to construct things without having to drag them up Earth's gravity well." Again, O'Neill sez to use stuff in orbit, asteroids, or Moon with easy mass driver. Never launch material from a planet with atmos, too hard! A basic understanding of O'Neill really would help you.

  17. I'm old enough to have read Gerard O'Neill when he was originally published, when the recent Apollo program made space stations seem like the next logical step. My father bought him and me tickets on Pam Am to the Moon. Yes, that was a thing back then. Of course, nothing like that happened, and now manned American suborbital flights were barely saved by a single over-worked billionaire.
    I won't live to see O'Neill's space stations come true, and absent a dramatic change in international relations and domestic priorities, neither will anyone else reading this site.
    Space is not big, because you can only live in expensive, space-constrained, constructed habitats. And if even one thing goes seriously wrong, or there's a meteor (not meteorite, because that would require Earth's atmosphere, which generally saves us from lethal bombardment every day) collision, the colony may be toast.
    We'll get to space someday, if the species doesn't kill itself off first, which could happen even this year if the Russia-Ukraine war or some other conflicts get out of hand. I still say Mars or the Moon are better choices because even if they lack an atmosphere and have lower G, at least you can protect yourself under meters of rock, and have resources to construct things without having to drag them up Earth's gravity well.

  18. So, getting no answer, I assume you are, as it seems to read, NOT considering micr0g O'Neill as Space. Quickly: "long time, if ever, before there is the kind of space there still is on Earth to expand" ???? Space is very big. The Earth is *in* Space, so are we. "worst places to live on Earth are better than the best places to live in space" ???? Maui on a nice day. Then, "As far as Mars, or the Moon", of course, they are planets, like Earth, but worse. Esp the low g, easy to solve with O'Neill Settlements, not on small planets. Have you read "The High Frontier" by Gerard K, O'Neill? Seems like it has been mentioned, or did you notice. Sept 2024 is 50th of Physics Today, the *hard* start of O'Neill. A good time to catch up!

  19. "resource extraction in the 20th century US." would be a good analogy. For anywhere but Mars. Moon, asteroids, atmos from gas giants or moons of same can be used, not Mars, except perhaps on Mars. Mars is unique in lack of economic opps, other than reality TV or such. ISS has shown this clearly, as there is no micr0g on Mars, micr0g being the main advantage of escaping Earth gravity well.

  20. Actually, sex in micr0g is often cited as the first thing thot of as a good reason to go. "Same" probs, but new opps. More seriously, the micr0g is selectable, so would not introduce new biological problems. Also, a track is a better place than a bar. Hint.

  21. Well the girl at the bar you try to talk to can't "shoot you down" if there is no "down", but other than that the same problems would still be there.

  22. Not to beat my own, possibly dead, horse too much, but the average 2BR in the RiverArch is 1,602sf. This, Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) told us in a meeting, is too large to qualify for subsidized housing. So, there are a lot of things thwarting building in dense urban areas like NYC, by far the densest. Lots cold be done to accommodate families but isn't because the system is skewed towards high income purchasers.
    People aren't having children for lots of reasons, particularly women, who now have other options. That is the "potential" I wrote about at first, and we need more of that, not more mouths to feed.

  23. Yes! Exactly my point – parents, probably mostly correctly, don't feel safe giving their children freedom in modern big cities! Many parents whose own parents gave them more freedom to move around the city on their own now regard their parents as naive or crazy or maybe even negligent!

    That attitude makes raising kids harder for parents – so they limit how many they have. And it raises kids in a manner that discourages them from feeling childhood is a great experience rather than just something they have to get through – so why would they, when they become adults, want to subject MORE kids to that?

    Yes, we haven't yet gotten to the point where depopulation is a serious problem – though it will be causing economic problems pretty much from now onward for many countries. (USA is still set to slowly grow for some time yet, unlike many others.)

    The one thing we MIGHT hope is that countries that shrink by 30% or so revise the design of their cities to make them better for raising kids, so the population decline eventually levels off. Probably the minimum would be making apartments larger and replacing streets in front of family apartments with fenced-off grassbelts closed to vehicles.

  24. In the modern age, parents won't let kids play loose in the street, or go where there might be dangerous strangers, etc. There's a line between freedom and security and parents have to decide that line all the time, depending on the child, their age, and the community they live in.
    Every generation IS smaller than the last, but that's not really a bad thing if each generation excels better than the last. We are a 'K' (Kin) species, not an 'R' (high Reproductive Rate) species.

  25. But would it be safe – and tolerated – to let kids roam wide and freely? That's my point – if the kids have to be shuttled by parents between the limited space at home and 'playgrounds' and schools and activities, and grow up feeling tightly controlled, each generation is going to be smaller than the last, because having kids is inconvenient and being a kid is kind of miserable – no freedom. Walkability doesn't help kids if their parents can't trust the environment enough to turn their kids loose in it.

  26. The RiverArch would have 50 retail/commercial outlets and 300,000sf of parks, plazas, esplanades, and even a beach. There's no space for a second Central Park in NYC, which would then not even be "Central" but there is room for the RiverArch! The RiverArch would be the most walkable neighborhood imaginable, and rideable too, with 3 over-the-river public elevators to carry up to 5m people annually. That's not even counting the most amenity-filled building in the city, with a 420,000sf gym with a half mile circular running track and two Olympic length glass-bottom swimming pools. The 900-student school ensures most school age children never have to leave the campus either.
    The RiverArch would define its own neighborhood: BERM=Brooklyn-East River-Manhattan.
    Of course, it'll take the kind of backing of an Elon Musk, or at least some visionary, courageous, and far-sighted investors to get through the multi-jurisdictional permitting process (City/State/Federal).

  27. Depopulation is closely correlated with urbanization and over-crowding to achieve 'compact and efficient' accomodation of large numbers of people for economic benefit.

    People who want larger families often 'move out to the suburbs' in an attempt at a compromise that gives them more living space yet maintains access to big city jobs and opportunities. City planners hate suburbs, and talk about creating 'walkable neighborhoods'. To avoid creating new depopulation zones, they should instead focus on designing neighborhoods with lots of outdoor space to turn kids loose to play in.

    Maybe "family apartments" enclosing a large outdoor/indoor play volume that limits outsider access and keeps kids from going too far without making them feel trapped. Imagine New York's Central Park surrounded by a wall of family apartments, with outdoor stairs and balconies and walkways connecting the exteriors at every level, including small shops and services.

  28. Ah, you are not arguing for planets, you are arguing for Earth. Certainly agree that we should move our industry to Space, even if many choose to live in the Nature of Earth. I plan to revert the Earth to 50,000 years ago. More or less. Do you want to go or stay?

  29. I read 'The High Frontier' nearly forty years ago. There have been a few developments in thinking since then. Only two years later, James Lovelock published 'Gaia: a new look at life on Earth', which proposed that the biosphere isn't just a handy gas shell to live in, but is a product of life, and essential to it. The whole concept began with Nasa asking Lovelock, inventer of the device that found the ozone hole, to devise a test for life on Mars. Lovelock's insight was that life would push the atmosphere away from chemical equilibrium, to give traces of things like methane or molecular oxygen, which could not survive over planetary timescales. The corollary was that Earth's atmosphere was full of unlikely substances, and that not just the air, but even the geology, was an artifact – of life. Can we build an equivalent, elsewhere ? Maybe, but Biosphere II wasn't one, and the ISS doesn't even try to be. Going inter-, or ex-, planetary won't be like the Mayflower colonists taking over from the Wampanoag. It'll be more like the first fish crawling onto land. The land, and the fish, had to go through a lot of changes before they became us, here.

  30. I think Elon started paying attention to demographic issues before he realized the implications of Tesla’s work on FSD to mass produced humanoid robots. Traditionally demand is generated mostly by young people but more prosperous and healthy older people would fill in and humanoid robots would change the whole game.

  31. The interface could get used to interpreting the meaning of human movements from motion capture and sending appropriate feedback. The Robot NN would match actions that made sense quickly but exercise judgement in both directions. It wouldn’t be dumb teleoperation. More like a horse and rider that were very in synch with each other.

  32. This is the Asimov Robot future history where Spacers have civilizations based on humanoid robots that are used in high ratios to humans like 50 or 100:1.

  33. Only in the current fantastically expensive version of things. The revolution that Starship is bringing will mean things will be done for a tiny fraction of 1% of the budgets NASA has had to do things.

    To be cost effective, there is nothing more efficient than a humanoid robot that can do more or less whatever a human can using tools and systems already built for humans.

  34. Steering goats – unpossible! They're as bad a humans at taking suggestions given for their own benefit.

  35. No it's a "Company Town" where the boss owns all the infrastructure including the house that you rent in exchange for a major portion of your wages. A common form of municipality where the primary industry was resource extraction in the 20th century US.
    Yes, he's planning on building the cities, because unlike Earth, you can't just move there with an axe, shovel and a bunch of seeds hoping to build a house and farm. He needs to have the infrastructure to entice volunteers as colonists.
    Once they build up the capital in terms of resources, they can go found their own towns.

  36. They're already putting collars on cows that tell them when to go to the milking shed, or move paddocks. No implant needed, and you can herd them from bed with your phone. Give them a bit of tasty feed and a back rub machine, and they'd walk right into the abattoir.

  37. '..the *only* advantage planets may have over Space..'
    Life support system tested by a billion years of coevolution, with centuries of inertia against abuse (see global warming.)
    Availability of every element, and of economies to competitively process them, without having to be propelled out of a gravity well, or prospected from the very sparse pickings of the asteroid belt.
    It's home. For somebody always on about psychological health, you ignore the trauma of leaving everyone and everything humans have ever known, to go live in a vacuum.
    Your hero, Bezos, wants to get humanity off Earth and turn it into a theme park. Very few will want to go along for the ride – Earth ain't perfect, but it's 1000% better than the alternatives.

  38. I suspect Mars doesn't need 1 million people to be self-sustaining. That's just Musk's "safe to assume it could be self-sustaining" number.

    E.g. the tech to maintain a colony probably doesn't need to be much better than 1970's. E.g. chips with a couple thousand transistors would be sufficient for simple automation. Such chips could be turned out in small batches on a few lab benches – no need for multi-billion dollar fabs that require a huge number of supporting industries each operated by thousands of workers.

    Solar panels are nice but require either high-tech thin-film materials processing or high volumes of purified silicon ingot production or something equivalently difficult. Concentrated solar driving heat engines should be easier to produce with metal refining and shaping already needed to produce methalox engines for vehicles and mining equipment. And the same sealed heat engines could probably be heated with methalox to produce electricity during long dust storms. (Efficiency isn't great, but better than freezing in the dark.)

    With careful design, a colony of 1000 skilled people might be self-sustaining so long as it didn't get hit with a disaster. Maybe 10K people spread over a dozen sites close enough to support each other and trade, but far enough apart to not be taken out by a single freak accident or act of insane sabotage, would probably be safe enough to rely on it expanding to millions of people eventually.

  39. The human form is a very strange choice for EVAs if you're getting robots involved. I have to imagine we can come up with something much better.

  40. Seems so.

    But is this Elon Musk fanboyism or something else?

    It appears to me that even if scientific and technological advance continue apace, it became kind of boring.

    A new GPT version that can compose a Tolkien like novel from a mere description? a new method for predicting protein folding? meh.

    These advances are great and will impact our lives, but they have the same sameness as previous similar news that came with great fanfare.

    It may be that the site is so focused on SpaceX and Musk, because they are selling the kind of big material advance future we expected, not the gradual improvement one with small discrete steps. Ironic, given the love of Musk for continuous integration and improvements.

  41. Yeah, first wave Mars settlement would be the most freely chosen thing ever. An experience rarely repeated in human history.

    People will go there because they want to. For creating an exciting life for themselves and their descendants, or making a buck and then returning, whatever.

    The main selling point of Mars is to make it an utopia of optimism, science and inventiveness plus free initiative, where NIMBYsm and created interests don't exist yet. Some place where humans can test again their limits of their creativity and civilization creating prowess.

    Reality will be disappointing for many, sure. It won't be a walk in the park (that comes later), but they will have options too. They can come back and tell how much Mars sucks, that's on the table as well given the Starships will be returning anyway

    Those born there (if that turns out to be possible) won't have a choice. But isn't that what life is for everyone? we are just thrown into existence and no apologies for that.

  42. Oh right, herding animals could be a good application for bots.

    Actually I meant bot herder as in managing a group of bots.

  43. You have a long list of issues handled in "The High Frontier" to highly counter intuitive conclusions and/or solutions. Just for starters, are you including micr0g and Space in the "space" category? For those important parts of our civilization, as soon as we figure out how to use them, as on ISS, Space is the only place. Just catching up will open the rest with ease. Maui on a nice day. Enjoy!

    https://www.bis-space.com/membership/jbis/2019/JBIS-v72-no09-September-October-2019%20-%20Subscription%20Copy.pdf

  44. He says he owns no homes and stays at different friends depending on where he is. His needs are pretty modest for a billionaire, private planes being the highest, because he says it gives him more time to work.

  45. It will be a very long time, if ever, before there is the kind of space there still is on Earth to expand to new habitats. As Neil deGrasse Tyson says, even the worst places to live on Earth are better than the best places to live in space. As an analogy, think submarines, not western frontier. As far as Mars, or the Moon, the biggest problems are temperature extremes and most of all, lack of air. Not being able to go outside and breathe is a major handicap and constrains you to enclosed spaces, which are hard to even build if you can't be outside to construct them. Robots will do a lot, but materials are another problem: they require factories and mining, both of which mean going outside again. Temperature extremes, daily, mean lots of extra layers, in addition to oxygen tanks. The long term effects of low gravity are unknown, but not good, based on space station experience. Then, there's Earth's gravity well; the Earth hangs onto its resources tightly, like Mother.

  46. Should, yes, but civilian control of the military means that, if the administration has it in for Musk, (And they do; When talking about electric cars, for instance, they don't acknowledge Tesla.) the military isn't going to rescue him.

    As Obama was fond of saying, elections have consequences. And while you might not be interested in politics, politics is interested in you. Musk isn't the first businessman to learn that lesson the hard way.

  47. I would call it *communalism*, the non-forced but rare form of commie nism that is slipped in to avoid talk of force. Early space people will have to be careful, communalists. Certainly DO NOT want people there who do not want to be!

  48. See O'Neill for where trillions of people can live, as Bezos explicitly mentions, more geniuses. See Janov for the absolutely vital science of repression and neurosis, the other problem you mention. People are as crazy as they can possible be, for 7 million years, and without Primal Science are just getting more dangerous, more crazy.

    The focus of Musk on *lifeboat* Mars makes people have less children, as it is even more depressing for those who either go or stay. Expand into free Space is far more likely to give optimism, children.

  49. Yep.

    However, one element that a virtually present human probably can't do well enough is balance – in particular walking, running, jumping. The feedback lag – not so much speed of light as signal processing delays – might make those awkward. And if used from orbit, speed of light might also add a significant factor. The bot should probably handle balance and bipedal movement itself, cued by the human's intent.

    While android-style robts will have a place, a telepresence bot that is just torso, head and arms mounted in place of the bucket of a bucket lift vehicle would probably be a good combo for Mars – able to carry more, room for more fuel or batteries so it can operate longer, etc. The lift arm could raise the 'human' portion to work high up the side of a Starship, or to examine a cliff face, etc.

  50. AI in general is starting to look pretty effective – could be we're within the decade where it actually does start taking away some jobs.

    Certainly OpenAI's DALL-E – especially the latest version – looks like it has the potential to reduce demand for human-generated art. (So much for the old idea that AI would leave 'creative' work to humans.)

    Maybe OpenAI should put DALL-E and GPT-3 and so on under a non-profit foundation that can spin out wholly or mostly owned corporations that remain under its direction, with revenues going to fund more AI advances. If revenues grow too great, it could fund research in other areas as well.

  51. Brian – do a list of Elon products that have fundamental applications on Mars! Solar, batteries, electric cars, drilling, teslabots – all he does is preparing to colonize Mars. The opposite list would be shorter.

  52. As Mordriel points out, the only reason they're not going flat out anymore is that there was a change of administration last January, and now the bureaucracy are free to obstruct them. SpaceX's development strategy is a tight loop of build, test, build again with improvements. And the government isn't letting them test anymore.

  53. The only strong disagreement I have with Musk is that depopulation is the problem with achieving what humanity needs to achieve. Why aren't there 1,000 Elon Musks? Most people live FAR below their potential. Getting them up to potential would be WAY more important than just increasing the number of mouths to feed. Here is my potential contribution. I think it may be too ambitious for Musk, not technically, but because it would require >21,000 different kinds of people to live, work and play together in one building, the RiverArch: http://bit.ly/BroadsheetRA1 If the last two years has taught us anything, it's that different kinds of people can't tolerate each other. That won't change unless attitudes do, whether that's on Mars, or in a major river-spanning building, like my RiverArch. Full details here: https://bit.ly/RiverArch-Hatcher Video fly-through: http://bit.ly/Riverarch

  54. Force build cities – don't know what that means. But build cities on your own dime sounds like a great thing to do.

    Force people to live in those cities is communism or Nazism or just dictatorship.

  55. To pre plan and force build cities on Mars that's Communism. To build extremely cheap inter-planet rockets and let the market decided where people should go with them and where outside earth people settle, that's that American way. Life on Mars are not going to be healthy nor easy on many respects, very few people move to empty but accessible Greenland.

  56. Seems to me– and I haven't checked in a while simply because of this issue– that the Statship stall is due to the FAA pushing back their orbital launch test more and more. I know I'm paranoid for saying this, but, if people in the U.S. government want to edge out SpaceX from beating them to the Mars launch capability punch, I can see them using the FAA as a bludgeon. "Nope, environmental impact. Nope, can't conduct the study now. Try in three months. NOPE, try in six months. Actually, we'll conduct the study next year. You know what, though, let's just hold off until we can make sure Starship seems irrelevant after we launch our SLS. Does that sound good, Elon?"

  57. The future seems to have become more bleak over the past several years. Musk seems to be the only one keeping optimism alive, for better or for worse.

  58. VR headset + Teslabot = perpetual, no space suit presence in vacuum on planet surface.

    Seriously, space suits are annoying to make for all sorts of reasons. One size fits all Tesla bots can be remote'd in to do your work.

  59. The technology that will transform Earth in to an amusement park will enable the colonization of the solar system… with less amusement of course.

  60. I think Musk vision of Teslabot is not correct. It is way too thin. In reality I expect it to be much fatter, like Mr. Musk lately.

  61. If you think you are disappointed with Musk Mars plans now, see how you feel after reading "The High Frontier" by Gerard K. O'Neill. As I did in 1977. Pathetic!

  62. Before, they were using fairly standard tech plus reuse of boosters. Now, they are doing what BO has set out to do from the start. BO skipped the first step, as they do not need the money. The NG has better landing tech, tested with NS, than F9 by far, and prob than SS booster. They are turning into BO!

  63. You have found the *only* advantage planets may have over Space, enuf mass and surface area to dissipate heat without radiators, just heat exchangers. Until the pop increases too much for that. Now, consider all the advantages of Space over planets! You already mentioned near and dusty vacuum, what about really pretty good vacuum in arbitrarily large volumes, of any (what would be on a planet) height? With far easier energy for the high temps? Agriculture and animals in "created environments" (the subject of the Landscape Architect)? Also, you don't have to land there, but you did not mention that as an advantage.

  64. Settlers will need to come up with a good liquid for environmental heat rejection, as river water is generally used on earth. Maybe it could be water in deep lava tubes.

  65. Other than fossil fuel production, or outside agriculture, and animal husbandry any industry could be started on Mars. High temperature process might work better in near vacuum, not only that, no worry of fires anywhere at atmospheric pressure.

  66. I just had the same thought. A bot to herd goats would be much easier than fencing. Goat Guy needs to see this!

  67. Teslabots make the otherwise difficult to describe process of creating a self sustaining independent human civilization on Mars pretty straightforward. Mars is Human civilization’s first attempt at replicating. If Mars can in turn replicate itself without assistance from earth, it’s self sustaining. Advanced AI/robotics and especially humanoid robots mass produced in factories that they can themselves staff are a path to replicating a whole economy.

  68. Yeah, they appear to be slowly turning into Boeing or ULA.

    Seems the fat government contracts have that unavoidable effect.

    At the current pace, we'll get some lunar missions in this decade if we are lucky.

  69. It is not bad idea. They have a lot of experience with machine learning and developing autopilot, software,.. The hardest thing about tesla bot seems software with enough capital – they have it they could solve that.

    I am a little disappointed with their Mars colony plans. They wanted to send crew there in 2024 and now they are targeting 2029, 5 years later. Starship progress has stalled, they are becoming slow like their competitors. Rich and fat.

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