Naval Ravikant is an Indian-born American entrepreneur and investor. He is worth about $100 million. He is the co-founder, chairman and former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of AngelList. He has invested early-stage in Uber, FourSquare, Twitter, Postmates, SnapLogic, and Yammer.
Naval describes how Elon Musk is different.
Bill Gates had just taken out some huge short on Tesla. It was like a billions of dollar short.
And, Elon was like, “Why would you do that? Why would you short Tesla?” And Bill goes, “Well, you know, I talked to my financial advisors and I looked at the math and it’s say overvalued. And so I’m going to make money on the short.”
And Elon goes, “What do you care about making money? I thought you were into electric cars and climate change and saving the world. What are you doing trying to save a few bucks and betting against Tesla?”. And he just walked away in disgust.
.@naval: There was a story that I read about @elonmusk that really affected me, which was when he was talking to Bill Gates, and Bill Gates had just taken out some huge short on Tesla. It was like a billion dollar short or something.
And, Elon was like, “Why would you do that?… pic.twitter.com/ePM69pyEdU
— Arjun Khemani (@arjunkhemani) November 8, 2024
Elon doesn’t want to go down in history as the electric car guy or even the guy who saved America guy. He wants to go down as a guy who got humanity to the stars. Again, I’ll give him more credit than that. I don’t even think he wants to go down as the “I got humanity to the stars” guy.
He’s just like, “I want to get to the stars, and so I have to make it happen in this lifetime. The only way that I get to experience the science fiction world in my head is if I get to the stars.” And so that’s so inspirational. I think that drives everything.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
I wonder if Elon has a plan for the Moons of Mars.
It’d seem easier to set up production of fuel on Deimos or Phobos first, then transport it to a free-flying depot.
Or, dangle a couple of pipe lines “down” from the moon surface tank farm to directly feed the orbit-matching Starships “on the fly”.
Not needing to bring landing fuel means burning engines longer to speed up/slow down, shortening the trip-time.
Lower Delta-V to the Moons, too.
Travel faster from Earth to Mars, take on fuel for the trip down to the Martian surface and back up, then refuel in orbit for the trip back to Earth.
On-surface production wouldn’t be as useful for refueling incoming craft for landing.
Eventually, the Moons will be utilized too. Maybe first?
NEOs, asteroid belt, stray O’Neil cylinders.
Mars will not be a plum destination until the inner solar system infrastructure has been established.
Mining. fuel. Research. Lone Wolf colonies.
Smaller outposts. Shorter Terms. Frequent Use and Upgrade.
Mars, to start, will be little except a few widely distributed McMurdos and Amundsens. Outposts yes,– but, self-reliant, sustainable, prosperous? — not until a viable path ‘to’ and a significant plan ‘on’ the planet has been established beyond disparate chinese, american, eu, and some miscellaneous space-cult encampments have been expanded and connected.
I personally, hope that the geotechnical stratum supports a tunneled system to provide all services and transport and refuge between surface ‘bases’ — since, it was supposed, that Mars would be a civilization ‘back-up’.
They key, of course, is to ‘front-load’ the infrastructure remotely and substantially throughout before the first serious ‘colonization’ even departs.
Elon Musk is another “Gift from Almighty God”. However, Elon Musk is only mortal, and enjoys the exact same mortal lifespan as us mere plodders. Humans should be helping and not hindering, to maximize the potential of this unexpected gift.
As a starter, we should stop putting nonsense regulatory hurdles in Elon’s way that will only serve to hamper human development out into the stars.
“Does it have to be a City though?”. Probably, at least in the beginning, due to the need to establish a breathable atmosphere and other self-sustainment niceties on Mars.
One solution to Fermi’s paradox is that technologic civilizations routinely destroy themselves. But if we had countries from Apollo to Mars then perhaps the human species could have survived by now and so, why couldn’t aliens from elsewhere have survived long enough to spread throughout the galaxy by now?
The answer could be that the solar system isn’t safe but that only the spread to other star systems is sufficient for survival. But that is a huge leap taking a very long time.
So, Elon’s long-term goal might actually be interstellar travel. Starship could start with chemical propulsion. Elon has said that NTR looks intriguing. A larger Starship sending propellant further out would let us settle the entire solar system. As fusion is mastered then the Starship could take us into the Oort cloud and there are actual starship plans to get to Alpha Centauri using only fusion rockets.
So in summary, when Elon calls his rocket “Starship” he may actually be hoping that a later version of it could literally take people to the stars.
Marvelous vehicle Starship is. But let’s not get carried away: it’s not made for the stars.
No more than Voyager or the Pioneer probes were, regardless of where they are now.
They made them to be a Jack of all trades for delivery of cargo and crew to any place with a surface where we may want to land in the solar system. And it will deliver just that, which is beyond the wildest expectations of even space fans from the Shuttle age.
It may be long lived too, and serve as a Conestoga wagon of the earlier Solar System colonization, but it will have to be superseded several times over by better and more specialized vehicles, to get anything that might be called interstellar.
Does it have to be a City though? That implies density, overlap, governance.
I envisioned more of a multi-100x mile diam warren or other underground high-speed/ common system with various nodes protruding with each surrounded by a loose assortment of residential/ commercial/ industrial/ space port. Build 50% first then robot it up, then widespread ‘settler’ type scattering. We need not regurgitate Earth’s urban planning mentality.
I think it needs to not be a city, actually; Basically every city in human history has been a population sink; Humans do not reproduce well at high population densities.
If it does have to be a city, it’s going to have to be carefully designed to cause people to subconsciously think they’re living at a low population density. Interrupted lines of sight, filtering out the smell of other people, a high ratio of space and plants to people.
Otherwise, people will go to mars and then simply fail to have kids.
You have a point. Humans profess to love cities’ amenities, but they fail on that simple regard: to convince humans to want to reproduce.
Every time we become urban, we start shrinking.
But what’s an equivalent of an open space in space? Does it exist?
The only alternatives I see are societies that are so gung-ho and convinced of the need of growth, that they organize their entire life around the notion of family. That is, not a secular modern society.
1 million is far higher than it’d actually turn out to require, should Mars every get cut off from Earth and be forced to become truly self-sufficient. Maybe 10K, or if very diversely trained maybe as few as 1000 people could survive and expand indefinitely.
They’d just have to focus on a lower average tech level than we currently have – picking and choosing technologies that are simpler to maintain, but sufficient to their needs.
But yeah, at least with so few people, probably one main site plus a few mining villages, because spreading out adds overhead duplicating essential services (air, waste and water processing, etc) that have to be redundant anyhow for reliability, while multiple sites would confer few benefits.