Living in an enclosed biodome with no outside air and everyone living off beans…no thank you.
Agree overall. Well said.
I’ll point out that the reason to develop self-sustaining capability in a colony anywhere is that it’d be cheaper to be self-sustaining than to be resupplied from home. For Mars that really makes sense. For the Moon that probably makes sense. For Antarctica it surely doesn’t. So the absence there is explained without resorting to technological infeasibility.
But …
I do think if anyone was seriously approaching the idea of building a self-sustaining colony on Mars or the Moon they ought to start with building a self-sustaining colony in Antarctica that’s also a version of Biosphere, so walled off from Earth’s water and air. That’d be a decent dress rehearsal.
It’d probably be against Antarctic treaties, so that’s an issue. Novaya Zemlya would be another decent location, or maybe aways east or west of Point Barrow AK.
With or without Pauly Shore?
Never mind an enclosed biosphere, let’s see someone establish a settlement in the high Arctic where all their food has to be grown in greenhouses, without imported fossil fuels.
To bad that he actually qualifies for Senator Mortimer Hobart…Mort the Wart
And no Jeff Goldblum, thank you very much.
In the anime Planetes one of the characters is a twelve-year old girl, one of three children born and raised on the moon. She is over six-feet tall and longs to swim on Earth – there are no bodies of water large enough on Luna – but cannot because the gravity would kill her.
That’s actually one of the major unknowns we have now.
We know prolonged exposure to micro-gravity causes all sorts of health issues at micro- and macro-scopic scales, but we don’t really know to what extent that’s also true at merely lower gravity, at least for people born and raised on Earth.
I’d be more worried about radiation. They’re going to have to construct habitats reasonably deep underground whether on the Moon or Mars and limit surface exposure (a significant issue if they want to develop a self-supporting colony) or else accept they’ll all die of one form of cancer or another in relatively short order.
Maybe this is one of those cases where giant magnets are actually the solution. No magnetic field? Elon will create his own!
Giant Magnets are always the solution, if the problem has not been fixed you need bigger magnets!
If he could crank it up to 1 Tesla for the lols, I’d be genuinely impressed
I’ve never realized the misuse of “grok” until now, but that’s because I just didn’t think about it too much (and I’ve also not read Heinlein). But yeah, come to think of it, to the degree that “grok” can be differentiated from “know”, AI is about the farthest from grokking things as you can get.
That tracks. It is a reflection of its master.
Elon clearly groks little, possibly none, of the SF he’s read, whether Heinlein or the Culture novels or anything else.
Grok groks about as well as musk’s cars’ FSD aka “full-self-driving” feature fully self drives. Or “autopilot” automatically pilots his cars.
musk is all about wildly exaggerated naming. The first couple of times it sounds both aspirational and inspirational. Pretty quickly it just sounds delusional.
Just ask his children.
Elon says the Moon city will have a factory with a railgun catapult to launch “AI satellites” into orbit.
I’ve read that book, but it was launching grain silos until it was launching rocks.
Why would you give Elmo credit to mean “self-sustaining” when he said “self-growing?” Him thinking that a colony on the moon will be able to not only sustain itself without any outside help, but to continually grow in size while relying only on its own resources is not only exactly what he said, but is fully in line with his other delusional thinking, like the idea that SpaceX’s impossibly ambitious plans to put a million satellites to power AI datacenters into orbit is actually a step towards harnessing 100% of the suns energy output.
Self-sustaining is self-growing. You’re splitting a hari that doesn’t need to be split.
Poor Hari.