[apolloartemis]

I am a huge fan of SpaceX and I think that establishing a multi-planetary civilization is the most important thing to do, and, I’ll say bluntly, will save lives. But I think that knowingly causing miscarriage of a pregnancy should be investigated as manslaughter.

[nicoty]

I know I'll sound like a rube but somehow it rubs me the wrong way that the rich and powerful are spending billions trying to establish multiplanetary civilisations despite the fact that we still have plenty of unfixed problems here at home that also deserve attention and resources, if not more so.

[adastra22]

It's not either/or, and you shouldn't reduce things to false dichotomies.

[foxglacier]

It's probably more because of the news than the world. It's not possible for there not to be plenty of unfixed problems. No matter how many problems we solve -- and we've solved a hell of a lot over the past decades or century -- other existing problems will take their place as seeming to be important.

If I'm being too extreme, can you describe a world where you'd consider enough problems have been solved that it's worth spending billions colonizing space?

[josefx]

> that the rich and powerful are spending billions trying to establish multiplanetary civilisations

Citation needed. What are the current projects to make this happen? Starship is a work in progress, but that by itself wont be able to create a colony out of thin air.

[bravetraveler]

I can't believe that pipedream being anything but the largest company town. Who needs Scrip when you have to work for... every vital resource, even air?

Not Rube-ish or rubish at all, IMO. I believe they're more interested in power or recreational drug use than problem-solving. Horses for courses.

[saubeidl]

It's even worse than that: They're messing up the environment we do have by burning tons of fuel in pursuit of their pipe dreams.

Instead of establishing multiplanetary civilisations, they're burning our single-planetary atmosphere in their hubris and ego.

[BobaFloutist]

How will it save lives? It'll maybe create more lives that persist beyond those on Earth, but I don't think it will meaningfully lower our global population, so a planetary catastrophe would still kill just as many people.

Also "the most important thing?"

You don't think there's any lower hanging fruit on-planet we could attend to first? Maybe addressing hunger, poverty, pollution, resource wars? You think getting the first ten-thousand people to Mars is a bigger priority than eradicating diseases that kill 10 times that many annually and that we have all the tools necessary to control? Really really?

[itsyonas]

> I am a huge fan of SpaceX and I think that establishing a multi-planetary civilization is the most important thing to do, and, I’ll say bluntly, will save lives.

How can we credibly talk about saving lives on other planets when we are demonstrably unable to protect life on the only habitable world we actually have? If we are failing at basic stewardship here, what evidence is there that we would act more responsibly anywhere else?

[moi2388]

Well, one easy argument would be they we don’t have multiple countries on the other planet.

It’s easier to provide for your own people as a BDFL over your own assets than navigate politics between 250 different countries with their own interests.

[thrance]

How would sending a few dozen people to the subzero anoxic radioactive and sterile desert known as Mars help Humanity? Would be cool, don't get me wrong, but utterly useless for anything other than scientific research.

[foxglacier]

That's why Musk's plan it to send a lot more so they can keep the human species going if human life on earth is destroyed by, say, a meteorite.

[seg_lol]

What does that have to do with causing someone else to miscarry?

[halfmatthalfcat]

How is a woman who is hosting the fetus’s decision the same as the choice being made for her (by involuntarily poisoning)?

[OKRainbowKid]

No, it wouldn't.

[jonesjohnson]

you know what would save lives?

If the top 1% would spend 1% of their wealth on preventing "low-hanging fruits" like

  * children starving
  * children dying from diseases whose vaccinations cost 1$
  * educating people on things like STDs, etc

You call "knowingly causing miscarriage" manslaughter, but boy have you looked at what "we" ("first world") are causing elsewhere in a global scale?

[sokoloff]

> children dying from diseases whose vaccinations cost 1$

If there’s a government anywhere that isn’t providing this for its citizens, perhaps looking into why that government is such a failure would yield greater and more durable change than a point patch of just a few vaccines.

> If the top 1% would spend 1% of their wealth

Why should we expect/demand more generosity from only 1% of the population? Maybe everyone should spend 1% of their wealth on these efforts? It’s easy to be magnanimous with someone else’s wallet.

[RobRivera]

Are you advocating for prolife policy, and advocating for a woman to lose her right to choose?

[exomonk]

SpaceX is NOT about going to Mars, it's about Golden Dome. Always was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

[panick21_]

So sick of this dumb conspiracy theory. The whole theory boils down to 'many people have worked in the US space industry since the 80s'. It very fucking dumb.

The increasing in funding for Space companies by DoD in the early SpaceX area (early 2000s) was related to DoD realizing they don't have enough assets over the middle east and wanted smaller companies and rockets to do faster deployment. This evolved further from DoD and since then with Firefly having done a number of missions based on that. Keyword is 'responsive launch'.

Space based missile defense in this period was clearly not the priority and communication, spy sats and navigation sats were getting the overwhelming amount of funding.

NASA on the other hand certainty didn't create COTS for missile defense reasons even if the leader of NASA was a supporter of investment missile defense (as many space people were and are). And the people who designed the COTS program certainty didn't think of that. There are detailed interviews with many of the people involved where they explain their reasons and how and why they came up with the programs.

As for Musk himself, there are details interviews with pretty much everybody that was involved early in SpaceX. And it quite clear that from the beginning Mars was the focus. Musk was not very well informed or interested in US space defense policy early on. And just like literally everybody, he knew much more about NASA then the DoD side of space. Remember that back then, there was much less information available about these things. Musk lived in Canada and then was busy with Internet stuff, he hardly was some kind of US defense nerd.

Its only when SpaceX moved on from the 'Greenhouse on Mars' project to a rocket company that Musk had to start seriously learning about the funding opportunities and commercial opportunity for small rockets. And eventually this lead him to sue DoD over access to contracts.

This whole conspiracy theory hinges on reinterpreting everything that happened in US space development from 1980 to 2020 as some hidden behind the scenes crusade to create Golden Dome and only collects evidence for this to be true and ignores literally all evidence that suggest this isn't the case.

The only thing that is totally clear, and nobody has ever disputed is that many space people in the US have thought about space missile defense since the 80s and always hoped that it would eventually happen.

Missile defense was always part of wider US space consideration, but claiming it was always the driving force for everything is simply not true.

[JumpCrisscross]

This is a particularly-dumb conspiracy theory as far as these go. It’s like arguing Ford was founded to build tanks.