[Engineer]

(12-03-2014 02:26 AM)dicknixon72 Wrote:  

Not to diverge the topic from SpaceX,

Not diverging at all, since the thread title is about the person who also runs Tesla as well. Excellent points about the auto industry and government support via tax subsidy.

[Kabal]

(12-02-2014 08:36 PM)VolandoVengoVolandoVoy Wrote:  

(12-02-2014 07:38 PM)Engineer Wrote:  

(12-02-2014 09:44 AM)Bad Hussar Wrote:  

(12-02-2014 09:04 AM)Sonsowey Wrote:  

If Musk is actually responsible for colonizing Mars, would it be an exagerration to say he is the most important man in our species' history?

As a fellow South African-Canadian for weird patriotic reasons I would like this to be true, but I think it's just talk. It would be phenomenally difficult to do this.

And maybe other forum members can explain to me why Musk, and others, always talk about Mars? What about the moon? It's closer and must be so much easier to get to and from. You know, crawl before you can walk.

Bad Hussar, you are so close to the truth it's unreal. Check back in 1-2 years and you will be amazed. People always talk Mars because there are some resources you could extract from the atmosphere or subsurface ices. The next Mars rover will have a small experiment on board that will reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere into CO and O2. But it is an order of magnitude more expensive to get there than the moon. Smart people have studied both options, with the result depending on the assumptions you make gong in. It's not a clear cut problem. For example, would we have access to reasonable amounts of water ice in the moon's south pole craters? Who knows.

My take is if you want to protect the species from global civilization-killing asteroids, go underwater. Much cheaper to establish a seafloor colony would be my educated guess. But that is retreating, not evolving.

The current SpaceX focus is commercial satellite launches, cargo to ISS and shortly humans to ISS via the Commercial Crew Program. Their reusable program, Falcon 9R, may lower costs by a factor of 10 or more (Next launch in 2 weeks 12/16/2014 with the first stage attempting a landing on a barge in the Atlantic, video coverage via quadcopter drone). Once Falcon Heavy gets online, they'll be doing air force and NRO launches as well. I've been inside their factory three times, and each time it seems twice as busy as before. If their stock was publicly traded, I'd be buying. They're a for-profit entity, so their focus must be on profit. Later once cheap access to space is established, and some personnel-protection issues are sorted out by NASA and others, then Mars/lunar colonization will make more sense. But never financial sense. I suspect in 20 years Musk will cash in his and others' personal fortunes on starting a Mars colony.

Most important man in our species' history? I would say potentially for the last 100 years; I'm not a historian so can't comment for all times. In our time of relative ennui, where current western civilization seems to be declining, here is a person who is saying "Let's go. Advance. Dream. Do better." on several fronts for the betterment of all humanity, attempting to dramatically lower costs of 1) access to space 2) solar power 3) electric transport and 4) global internet.

Ultra alpha playboy genius? Maybe not in the gaming chicks domain, but in more important areas, most fucking definitely.

I appreciate your post. I really think you have some eye opening knowledge about what's going on with space.
But I disagree with you on Musk being such a significant/important man in history.
To be truly significant, you have to be unique in my opinion.
I think Einstein wins easily.
I think Musk is on a lower tier, perhaps at the level of Bill Gates or Gandhi. Still amazing, just not a one in ten billion level of amazing.

Yeah, based on what Musk has accomplished thus far, I would say he's not even in Gates's tier (doesn't mean he won't eclipse Gates someday).

The past century includes the accomplishments and ideas of men such as:

Albert Einstein
John Von Neumann
Alan Turing
John Nash
Robert Oppenheimer
Luis Alvarez
Richard Feynman
Enrico Fermi
Francis Crick
Alexander Grothendieck
James Simons
Fischer Black
Milton Friedman
Friedrich Hayek
John Maynard Keynes

This is just off the top of my head. Even in the last decade, my intuition is that Musk may not even be "top tier."

Although I would certainly agree that "accomplishment" tiers have a degree of arbitrariness and have shades of alpha/beta debates.

It is actually in the girl domain that Musk has most/all of these guys beat--perhaps Feynman-excluded, as Feynman's the only guy of this list that has been clearly documented, to my knowledge, to have parlayed his smarts, indirectly or directly, into pulling (and I'm fairly certain Feynman is overrated in his purported girl-pulling abilities).

[natlex]

For those saying this is a hard industry(cars, space) blah blah, to me it seems obvious that is why he is there. He already has all the money he could ever want, what else is there to do? Better to give it your 100% and have an impact on humanity then spend those millions/billions over 50 years of repetitive and somewhat predictable partying, traveling, hookers/drugs whatever some other rich people do (especially kids of rich people who dint earn the money).


A lot of software/computer advances were made in the past 20 years but in other fields its been massively slow. And space travel has basically not changed or evolved since the moon landing, while we have more computing power in a cellphone than whatever they were using back then... He might not succeed, but he will definitely be happy on his deathbed if he gave it his 100% which is awesome and inspiring.

[RexImperator]

First public test of the Hyperloop propulsion system was just the other day:

Explanation of what the Hyperloop is:

[911]

(11-24-2014 09:29 AM)The Beast1 Wrote:  

I like Elon, but it pains me how myopic his newest ventures are.

He has BILLIONs upon billions of cash and yet he won't do anything to shake up the establishment.

What we get from him is a rich guy building toys. Tesla is nothing more than an oligarch battery playmobile car. Everytime I see a Tesla I think of this:



So you're into mechanically upsetting designs, alright cool! Why don't you make something for the poor debt ridden serf masses like an alternative fuel vehicle that's cheap. Say like a natural gas powered car for the masses (a la Model T au natural gas). Keep making those expensive super cars as a "dream" model for the poor people to aspire to. I betcha every Pontiac buyer looked at the Cadillac lot with envy!

Or if you want to keep it all electric, why not figure out a different type of fission energy that lowers the cost of electricity and also lowers dependence on coal fired plants. Tesla's are far from environmentally friendly when your electric power comes from mostly coal fired plants. That's also leaving out the question regarding the open pit mining for those lithium ion batteries powering that thing. Capacitors anyone?

SpaceX is great too, but again where are the provocative engineering endeavors? Why not build a space elevator or work something similar. Find a cheaper way of getting a payload into space that doesn't involve large amounts of fuel.

Basically, do more with less! Cut the legs of the entrenched status quo and eat their lunch. These dot com geniuses never make the jump from IT guru to industrialist very well.

Then again, what do i know?

Starting from the high end was the right way to go for Tesla, this is where the margins are huge and the scale more manageable, and consumers more malleable via marketing (luxury good and status symbol). Musk deserves huge props for having succeeded the auto market, which has some of the greatest barriers to entry due to R&D and scale efficiencies.

[911]

(12-03-2014 02:56 PM)Engineer Wrote:  

(12-03-2014 02:26 AM)dicknixon72 Wrote:  

Not to diverge the topic from SpaceX,

Not diverging at all, since the thread title is about the person who also runs Tesla as well. Excellent points about the auto industry and government support via tax subsidy.

State subsidies are often counterproductive, but there are many success stories where public funding has resulted in great success, like Airbus, Embraer and the Chrysler bailout (which was pretty much Obama's only good policy choice.)

The reason for this is that industries like the auto and aerospace have tremendous multiplier effects, so that an investment which creates or supports a viable firm is recouped several times over in jobs (tax base), local economies and trade balance.

Countries like Korea and Japan subsidized and protected their car industries initially, and their economies hugely benefited.

[911]

(12-03-2014 02:54 PM)Engineer Wrote:  

(12-02-2014 08:36 PM)VolandoVengoVolandoVoy Wrote:  

To be truly significant, you have to be unique in my opinion.
I think Einstein wins easily.
I think Musk is on a lower tier, perhaps at the level of Bill Gates or Gandhi. Still amazing, just not a one in ten billion level of amazing.

We agree on much here. I suppose it depends on what makes one "truly significant" as you put it. Similar to the What is Alpha debate we've seen so much of at RVF. I like your words, and their meaning to me personally means "who has helped the most people"

I would be curious about the results of an RVF poll of "who has directly benefitted the most people" with choices such as Einstein and others. Who were the top tier folks who would go in that poll? Jesus of Nazareth/Mohammed/Scientists like Einstein/etc.

Much of Einstein's work was accomplished by his predecessors Hendrick Lorentz, and especially Henri Poincaré (who originally coined E = mc^2 in 1904, years before Einstein). That's why Einstein never did get the Nobel prize for the general theory of relativity (he got it instead for his relatively pedestrian work on the photoelectric effect).

This is one of the biggest secrets in the history of science.


“Jules Henri Poincaré (1854-1912) was a great scientist who made a significant contribution to special relativity theory. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy website states that Poincaré: (1) "sketched a preliminary version of the special theory of relativity"; (2) "stated that the velocity of light is a limit velocity" (in his 1904 paper from the Bull. of Sci. Math. 28, Poincaré indicated "a whole new mechanics, where the inertia increasing with the velocity of light would become a limit and not be exceeded"); (3) suggested that "mass depends on speed"; (4) "formulated the principle of relativity, according to which no mechanical or electromagnetic experiment can discriminate between a state of uniform motion and a state of rest"; and (5) "derived the Lorentz transformation".

http://www.aulis.com/albert_einstein.htm

http://relativity.tripod.com/einstein-s-...arism.html

http://web.ihep.su/library/pubs/tconf05/ps/c5-1.pdf

[dicknixon72]

(05-12-2016 04:38 PM)911 Wrote:  

State subsidies are often counterproductive, but there are many success stories where public funding has resulted in great success, like Airbus, Embraer and the Chrysler bailout (which was pretty much Obama's only good policy choice.)

Chrysler? Fiat-Chrysler that was given away wholesale to a foreign controlling entity and is being bankrupted from within to flush endless amounts of money and resources earned off the hard work and success of a minimal amount of platforms (RAM Trucks and Jeep) to provide jerk-off fodder like Alfa-Romeos and Maseratis for Sergio Marchionne overpromise and under-deliver and to prop up his carpetbagging Italian overlords' wholesale mismanagement of Fiat in Europe?

General Motors is much more of a success story.

[The_e_man]

Wasn't there a thread only a few days ago stating that Elon Musk is a beta cuck that got used and abused by his ex-wife?
Hmmm.

Admittedly, I haven't read into his story so I don't know all the facts but which thread are we supposed to subscribe to here?

[Hypno]