Nobody, Telmo, could accuse you of not thinking outside the box! On anything these billionaires do, it comes down to (duh! on me) Profit of Loss. Hyperloop is less practical then say Renfe in Spain. Or so it seems to us peasants! Musk could likely give me a sales pitch by offering counter arguments, especially on profitability. My objection to space ventures, beyond science is what is the benefit for us as a species, or less than that, a nation state(s)? How much of our wealth, out, versus, what do we get back, and yes money. I am something of a fan of both economists, John Maynard Keynes, and Milton Friedman. I lean with Keynes, but even here people need to make money, so we can distribute money. It comes down to what causes us to behave in specific ways. Shiny! Shiny! Or in the case of all of our ancestors, "How do we feed the kids?" Venus may work, but let us verify that it is a dead, hot, world first. Or, as one astronomer called its surface: searing, black, calm. Lifeless. For us, the greatest impact psychologically and economically, would be the moon and its minerals. Secondly, would be the mineral wealth floating around the inner solar system. The metallic asteroids (forget the Asteroid Belt) possess many, many, trillions of Ecu's in wealth flying above our heads (Be sure to duck!). Here is just one of two... (lots more!). Rare asteroids near Earth may contain precious metals worth $11.65 trillion - CNET
Planetary floating cities on Venus sound excellent, but I am thinking that Jupiter is a better option. One could think of continent-sized, balloon arrays, supporting (in the atmosphere), and carrying a hundred million citizens and robots. Downside? Radiation from Jupiter, cost-price for effort, and, let's face it; unless some brilliant AI comes up with breakthroughs on accomplishing all this, it's years away. Venus, 200 years, Mars, 100. For us, money making, lifestyle upgrades, I look to material science, organic & inorganic chemistry, tissue engineering, robotics. And, I could be absolutely incorrect, and things could happen differently! -----Original Message----- From: Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> To: 'Brent Meeker' via Everything List <[email protected]> Sent: Thu, Nov 24, 2022 3:08 am Subject: Re: Is Elon Musk as smart as we thought he was? #yiv3402399282 p.yiv3402399282MsoNormal, #yiv3402399282 p.yiv3402399282MsoNoSpacing{margin:0;}I once read the hypothesis that the real reason for him promoting hyperloop was to discourage public investment in conventional public transit, which he saw as competition to his electric car business. I also think that his idea of colonizing Mars is dumb. I often think the following about such projects: colonizing the Arctic is at least an order of magnitude easier. Why isn't there ever any serious effort to use some inhospitable place here on earth for practice, to test ideas, etc? Unfortunately, I think the answer to this question is this: it's because it is not sexy and these efforts are not serious to begin with. It might even be that we will be able to colonize Venus before Mars. Crazy as it might sound, I believe that there is a layer of the Venus atmosphere that is much closer to being hospitable to human beings than anywhere on Mars. Of course this also comes with incredible challenges, not the least of it the one of building floating structures. Telmo Am Mi, 23. Nov 2022, um 23:09, schrieb Brent Meeker: Elon makes a lot of dumb mistakes, like his tunnel under LA and his demo version in Las Vegas. His hyperloop LA to SF was dumb too although he passed it off to someone else. His idea of colonizing Mars is dumb too as well as what he's proposed for getting people there. Brent On 11/23/2022 5:57 AM, Terren Suydam wrote: But why would anyone sacrifice so much of their own money to do that? I think he is probably a genius, but everybody has blind spots, and anyone is capable of making dumb mistakes. This looks like a colossal failure to me. By the way, if there is a bright spot to inviting Trump back, it's that it seriously compromises the future of Truth Social. And, he's under contract with Truth Social to not use any other platforms. Not that something as silly as a legally binding contract would stop Trump from tweeting, but it would give his lawyers yet another expensive project. Terren On Wed, Nov 23, 2022 at 8:06 AM Lawrence Crowell <[email protected]> wrote: Musk has a BS degree from U-Penn (as I recall) which means he is probably smarter than most. However, all of his corporate successes have been built by others, from Paypal, SpaceX, Tesla etc. The engineering of these were done my other people, and Musk just had the money to become majority shareholder. With respect to Twitter, I somewhat suspect he is intentionally demolishing the company. LC On Wednesday, November 23, 2022 at 7:00:35 AM UTC-6 [email protected] wrote: Many had thought Elon Musk was some sort of transcendental genius and even I thought he must be a pretty smart cookie, but when I heard he was spending $44 billion to buy a company as silly as Twitter I felt it might be time to reconsider my judgment. Could Mr. Musk really not find a better use for that $44 billion in Tesla or SpaceX? Alternatively, with that much money he could've started a new company that would be a world leader in the field of AI or Quantum Computing, but instead he bought Twitter so people could continue to send tweets about Taylor Swift and Donald Trump could get his account back. As if that wasn't bad enough he completely bungled the purchase, after agreeing to buy the piece of crap he tried to back out of the deal but it was too late; and as soon as he took control he fired more than half the employees, an even greater percentage among the engineering staff, and then belatedly realized the company would fall apart without some of them and try to hire them back, but with company morale at an all time low few agreed to come back to a toxic workplace and would prefer unemployment. He seems like he doesn't have a clue what he's doing and is just flailing around doing things at random and hoping that something works. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis i6g -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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