Starship Engineers

For the first time in 4.5 billion years, it is possible for life to become multiplanetary. LFG!!!

Long digression ahead. Please skip if not generally interested in interplanetary/interstellar issues. ----- We should hold a competition: who can figure out how to best make this argument and not sound crazy to the general public? If I were to try to steelman what I find odd about Musk's position, I would say that anyone this smart is tempted to use Mars and Rockets to make "Interplanetary" *not* sound like "Interstellar". Perhaps I have been uncharitable if this is the case. It seemed self-evident to my mind that anyone smart enough to be able to see the necessity of moving to interplaentary objectives would gamble mostly on post-Einsteinian physics and not rockets as the Moon and Mars are totally inadequate to diversify our risk and that rockets get us little else. But maybe the issue is that Musk truly understands people and that he has found the best argument to make interplanetary not sound insane. I admit, that I never considered that the point of SpaceX is a gateway to getting normal people to dream about what I have termed "restoring an indefinite human future" which was lost due to thermonuclear innovations of the 1950s. If humans were rational, a "go for broke" emphasis on finding the theory or theories beyond General Relativity would be our top priority. But somehow this apparently makes no sense to ordinary people who cannot contemplate that the speed of light may not be the last word in a larger theory that contains GR as an effective limit in the sense of field theory. I listened to this and wondered: is it simply so hard to imagine interplanetary human life as a top funding priority for ordinary people, that Musk has worked backwards from people and not forward from 'interstellar'? After all, his idea of making dorky electric cars cool by emphasizing speed was more about people's cognitive distortions around making EV not sound like golf carts or boring battery specifications. The thing I never understood was Musk's own zero allocation to post-Einsteinian physics. The best I can figure under this rubric is that someone could believe that the optimal research strategy is to first make make planetary diversification to avoid extinction sound as normal as possible. Mars already sounds crazy and he is clearly struggling here to make the world's most important point. Sorry to bother many of you with this digression. But I was just touched by how hard it was for him obviously struggling to find any way possible to make such an important point seem sensible. If I have gotten him wrong on this point, then I understand better why he avoids interstellar post-einsteinian physics. Said differently, perhaps he has figured out that man's first priority is convincing his fellow man that the only sane strategy for long term human survival through diversification is to make the sane goal of interstellar diversification not sound crazy to the people at scale. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe this is a difference in strategies and that "Occupy Mars" is syntatic sugar for ordinary humans who cannot contemplate interstellar diversification outside of a movie theater. If so, I understand where the difference in emphasis lies. I may still disagree given my perception of the urgency, but I never considered the idea before seeing this clip. Which, under any circumstance, was my mistake.