"They Don't Want Me Talking About This!" Elon Musk

[OxQQme]

[patphil]

1. Musk wants us to travel among the stars when we haven't even got our shit together on one planet.

The thousands of trillions of dollars and immense consumption of resources needed to do that should first be used to resolve all the systemic problems of humanity here on Earth.
We haven't had peace on Earth in any one year for the past several thousand years, and, looking at the state of humanity, aren't going to for the foreseeable future.

Even if it were possible, and I don't believe it is, I wouldn't want humanity to spread its shit show out to the stars. As it stands now, humanity could be considered a virus that is in the process of destroying it's host...the Earth.
And, in his incredible hubris, Musk wants us to spread out to other planets...assuming they're not inhabited by intelligent species who might take offense at our attempt to colonize their world.
What a waste of human DNA and "intelligence" that guy is.

[sarchasm]

2. Humans will never have "our shit together" on this planet or any other.

It's what makes us, in large part, human in the first place. It is not hubris to want human life to expand and evolve outside of our planet's confines, it's survival, and perhaps from each other.

[roamer65]

5. Humanity is and always will be at war with itself.

For better or worse, I think that’s just how we are programmed.

[Srkdqltr]

4. If people waited for others to have their shit together to do bold things we would still be in caves

[ColinC]

6. Maybe traveling among the stars is what gets us to get our shit together

...worth a shot, anyways

[mac2766]

12. "his incredible hubris"

What? Just what? have you done to improve the condition on our planet?

Just saying.

[patphil]

13. Not having all those billions of dollars at my disposal, my impact is far less than his.

But, I do my best to be a kind, loving, generous person. I do what I can every day to elevate humanity in the things I do, or choose not to do.

My criticism of Musk is that he has so very much money and resources at his disposal, and all he wants to do if find a way off this planet.
We have so many problems here. It would be a far better thing for him to do, and a far greater achievement, to work to eradicate hunger, or provide people with good housing, or clean drinking water...the list is endless.
At the very end of that endless list is spending incredibly huge sums of money to fly away from all of humanities problems in hopes of some mythical better life on some new planet.
What has he done to improve the condition of humanity on this planet? Relatively speaking, probably less than me.

[Srkdqltr]

3. I hope he is right and runs all over the nay sayers and backwards thinkers who have a "Gunsmoke"

View Of what the world should be. Wish I could live long enough to see.

[NNadir]

7. At some point, one gets less interested in what an insufferable ass has to say. There's no "they."

No one has ever stopped him from sharing his drivel.

I have no use for this fool, and I am at a complete loss to understand why people worship him.

Then again, some people worshipped Ayn Rand too. There's no accounting for it.

[plimsoll]

8. Work out the energy expenditure.

Unless we have a new lift Technologie this will be a have/have not situation. Those who have will be able to consume the resources to “travel among the stars” while those who don’t have will be left on a depleted planet with runaway climate problems. Even if he’s right, most of us will be screwed.

[ancianita]

9. I highly recommend Stuart Russell's book,

Human Compatible -- Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control(2019).
Elon Musk says Russell "is great."

Judea Pearl, Turing Award winner, says, "Unlike outside alarmists and futurists, Russell is a leading authority on AI. His new book will educate the public about AI more than any I can think of, and is a delightful and uplifting read."

I just finished Max Tegmark's Life 3.0, written a couple of years earlier, and he calls Human Compatible a "must read."

I'm pitching this because I think Russell's is the most recent and thorough explanation on why it will be so hard to get to what Musk thinks will only take ten years.
Kai-Fu-Lee, former head of Google China, agrees.

[Mr.Bill]

10. I think Musk is an extraordinary human being

that no one has really figured out yet. Perhaps we never will, but that would be a shame.

[LiberalLovinLug]

11. He has his faults, his eccentricities, but the world would be at a more regressive place without him

Just because we are liberals, doesn't mean we HAVE to automatically hate all billionaires.

Recognizing of course that I would rather live in a system that would limit the top amount of income, and the power that goes with that. And limit how much they could bribe politicians with campaign donations.

But as long as they stay out of politics, for the most part, the world needs creative mavericks like Musk to move the needle. As did the original Tesla, who was obviously more of a scientist. But also Henry Ford, Albert Einstein, Madame Currie and others. Most progress is initially sparked by one man or one woman's brilliance. Combined with the resources to fulfill that vision.

Musk almost single handedly pushed the US to develop their own electric vehicle industry, as competitors didn't want to be left in his dust. When a genius like Musk has the money and drive to be able to not be cowed by the oil and gas industry, and a stubborn American car industry, which killed the electric car the first time, then its a positive in my books.

[NNadir]

14. I don't think for a New York minute that his car bothers the gas industry.

Unlike people who unthinkingly fetishize Musk's stupid cars for rich people, the gas companies know very well how electricity is generated in the US, just like coal suppliers know how it's generated in China.

The gas companies have on their staffs scientists who know very well the laws of thermodynamics.

I'm rather more interested in the extremely impoverished people who dig cobalt for low or nonexistent wages so that this idiot can prance around with his pseudoenvironmental snake oil and be thought a hero by a gullible public.

And let's be clear, none of those people digging cobalt will be traveling to Mars or alpha centuri with Musk in that particular orgy of obscene consumption.

[LiberalLovinLug]

15. You make a good point

If one strictly only supported progress for technology, for whatever discipline, food, transportation, education, communication where there was no exploitation, only after everyone got paid the same from top to bottom in the process, we would have not moved very far. And I have room for the argument for a more luddite society.

But I'm just looking at it through the eyes of reality of the US, and the world. It is set up as a Capitalist system. Not what I wish the world was like. And I still fight to change that system, where there are always those exploited at the bottom.

We can fight to make those workers lives better. But do progressives throw their smart phones away in protest? Which use the same mined lithium. Crippling our ability to fight the Right who have no similar scruples?

I think that is on the same level as other types of making excuses for paralysis.
Save the old growth!....What about the whales?
Save the whales??? what about the starving children in Africa?.....
Save the children in Africa?....what about the children in the US?

Everyone has an excuse to not do anything.

This is from the opposite end of the scale. But it is related in that it adheres to the same adage of "I can't support that kind of advancement until there is a world wide Socialist revolution and lithium miners make the same as the CEO."

And yes, I remember the hand wringing going on with the major auto makers at the time that Musk was developing his first electric car. He definitely pushed them to come up with their own versions much sooner than they would have.

[NNadir]

16. Whatever. You still seem to believe the myth that electric cars are.

...sustainable, desirable or "green."

This is of course a commonly marketed notion, and many people, most people actually, believe this thermodynamic nonsense uncritically.

Any "hand wringing" going on at the other car companies was about marketing and nothing else.

There are an enormous number of publications in the scientific literature about the benefits and risks of the case where electric cars were employed to attempt to make the unsustainable car CULTure sustainable. I read a lot of them, but it is possible for one person to read only a fraction of them, but the results of my effort are clear enough to me, if no one else.

Some of the information gleaned from the papers actually end up being quite terrifying because even the effort to chase the unrealizable will itself do great harm.

There is not enough cobalt or for that matter, copper, to make huge traffic jams of Teslas and knockoffs possible.

Fantasies to the contrary are pure bourgeois hand waving, simplistic, slick, and frankly quite dangerous as the climate shit hits the fan.

[LiberalLovinLug]

17. You may be right. You have obviously studied this a lot.

I can see the point that there isn't enough cobalt to simply replace all gas powered cars with cobalt dependent electric powered cars. And that is a fantasy.

There are two ways to view it. And I respect both ways. Its probably an extension of the age old argument about if a left wing person should even run for office. Some do, insisting they can help change the system from within. Which I guess AOC and Sanders share. And those that believe change cannot ever be had from within, and the only way things will change is a peoples violent revolution to forceably remove the elites.

I can see both arguments there too. The latter may be the most effective, or the only way. But I have to still have hope that some day, some way, the fighting from within will at least push people progress further in degrees. Because even though a one time violent revolution may be best for instant results, lets face it, the ruling classes would never relinquish power without defending their wealth viciously. And of course the biggest reason why that won't work...no one would show up for it. We are couch warriors now.

But as far as electric cars, that is still a good human advancement. Can you agree with that? That petroleum, which the internal combustion engine relies on, is a limited resource, whose extraction is hurting the planet?

And that electricity is a power source that can be generated from natural souces like the Sun or water, or wind. So doesn't it make sense to move to electric powered vehicles?

The argument is about how to make batteries that will hold all that electrical power sufficiently to use in a vehicle, without also ruining the planet, or workers rights of course.

I'm not a scientist, but I guess I have hope that humankind will eventually figure that out. Its still a progression to move to an endless power source from a depleted power source. How to make the process completely "green" will hopefully happen one day.