Like Thiel, just another power hungry tech bro wrapping themselves in the idea of progress and humanity for PR. Define “progress” and for whom.
https://gizmodo.com/peter-thiel-says-elon-musk-doesnt-unders...
https://www.independent.co.uk/space/elon-musk-spacex-mars-la...
Everything else is just propaganda
I think he would love to be the guy who saved the planet. And if he's accomplished that by 2040, I'll be grateful to him for that. He'll have deserved it.
I think he'd also love to be the guy who colonized Mars. I believe that if you could ask him for one thing he wants, it's to be remembered in one breath with Christopher Columbus.
Of late, he seems to be distracted from both of those approaches. For a while, he thought he could be the guy who drowned the US government in the bathtub, enabling him to pursue his other feats in peace.
If that is ending, perhaps he'll return to being the great green visionary, electrifying the country despite the entrenched power structures working against him. It would take a lot to revise my extremely negative opinion, but if he really can be the guy who defeats global warming, I'll applaud him for it.
> I had a conversation with Elon a few weeks ago about this. He said we’re going to have a billion humanoid robots in the U.S. in 10 years. And I said: Well, if that’s true, you don’t need to worry about the budget deficits because we’re going to have so much growth, the growth will take care of this.
We aren't going to have 1 billion clothes folding robots.
Robot arm vacuums were just released few months ago. It can barely pick up socks and some types of slippers. There's still a long way to folding clothes.
That NYT interview with Ross Douthat is just a lame attempt by Thiel to rehabilitate his image. From the interview, regarding how we as a society entered into a state of technological stagnation, and his subsequent support of Trump in 2016 as a way to "redirect the Titanic from the iceberg it was heading to, or whatever the metaphor is, to really change course as a society":
"I didn’t have great expectations about what Trump would do in a positive way, but I thought at least, for the first time in 100 years, we had a Republican who was not giving us this syrupy Bush nonsense. It was not the same as progress, but we could at least have a conversation. In retrospect, this was a preposterous fantasy."
Really? You, arguably the most influential and successful inventor of the modern age, couldn't foresee that Trump is just going to leverage his populism to further cement the power structures that brought him into power? How was that ever going to lead to societal level change in a way that would bring about an explosion of science and technological innovation?
Nah, I'd believe that Thiel (correctly) sensed that Trump was a vessel through which he could accumulate much more power and wealth, due to Trump's brazen cronyism and corruption.
So now Thiel needs to somehow distance himself from Musk, Trump, and everyone else to try and recover whatever dignity he can. The only good news I can see is that, if he truly has any sort of crystal ball, he senses the winds starting to shift and the political power of MAGA waning.
Thiel: Man, these things are so hard to score, but I think environmentalism is pretty powerful. I don’t know if it’s absolutely powerful enough to create a one-world totalitarian state, but man, it is ——
Douthat: I think it is not — in its current form.
Thiel: I want to say it’s the only thing people still believe in in Europe. They believe in the green thing more than Islamic Shariah law or more than in the Chinese Communist totalitarian takeover. The future is an idea of a future that looks different from the present. The only three on offer in Europe are green, Shariah and the totalitarian communist state. And the green one is by far the strongest.
[...]
[Tiel:]And when Charles Manson took LSD in the late ’60s and the murders started, what he saw on LSD, what he learned was that you could be like an antihero in a Dostoyevsky book and everything was permitted.
Of course, not everyone became Charles Manson. But in my telling of the history, everyone became as deranged as Charles Manson and the hippies took over ——
Douthat: But Charles Manson did not become the Antichrist and take over the world. We’re ending in the apocalyptic, and you’re ——
Thiel: But my telling of the history of the 1970s is the hippies did win. We landed on the moon in July of 1969, Woodstock started three weeks later and, with the benefit of hindsight, that’s when progress stopped and the hippies won.
Also, Mars just kinda sucks. There's dust everywhere and it's nearly impossible to get it all off. Go outside one time in Mars and that dust will cling so tightly that it'll follow you into the cycle of reincarnation.
Also, anyone find it strange that he’s never been up in one of his own rockets? Unless he’s done it in secret without telling anybody (not impossible to believe even though he loves publicity) he seems pretty shy about taking trips himself. Or paranoid about dying in his own Promethean creation.
I think there are at least 3-6 states that either have the capability to send a nuclear weapon to Mars or could quickly develop that capability. That possibility would quickly limit his power.
melling•7mo ago
We got to the moon 50 years ago and still haven’t been back. It’s expensive to send humans into space.
Let’s get those Tesla robots to Mars… and Titan
bigyabai•7mo ago
melling•7mo ago
It’s been 11 years since HN thought manned was better.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8540279
Where’s the guy who told us crab fishing in Alaska is also dangerous?
miga•7mo ago
Now it reaches just 2k$ per kilogram.
dzhiurgis•7mo ago
There’s a fiber there too, but I assume someone is so incompetent to make it reliable and affordable that a $500 dish is able to serve entire resort.
EliRivers•7mo ago
mystified5016•7mo ago
Any hypothetical money to be made on a Mars colony will take generations to become apparent.
However, the technological advances required to build a Mars base and put humans there is within our grasp today. The developments associated with such a program would be of incalculable value to humanity, but are not directly monopolizable and monetizable in the immediate term.
So, no. It will never be economically viable to go to Mars because that question makes no sense. It would make economic sense to invest in asteroid mining because there are returns to be seen within your lifetime. There will be no such returns from any planet-based colony for a long, long time.
xeonmc•7mo ago
bigbadfeline•7mo ago
Compared to what? The cuts to medical and other research necessary to pay for the incalculable money pit that Mars exploration is? In fact, fund research that has some value for humanity now and some of it will be useful for planetary missions in the future, whenever it's possible to do it without strain.
It's insane to waste public money on boondoggles for billionaires, they can fund their Mars missions themselves. Bon Voyage!