Elon Musk is a twat

I can, if they are a massive twat.

Eeeewwwww.
He really is vile vile vile.
I wonder if given the rumours about Oonagh Heard he was merely offering his superior autist sperm and access to a surrogate network.

He is antifeminist on so many levels.

True.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/taylor-swift-elon-musk-child-kamala-harris-donald-trump-u-b1181379.html

Posting without comment

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/08/29/a-worldwide-lithium-shortage-could-come-as-soon-as-2025.html

If you want electric cars, you will have to accept you won't own one*. For a whole host of reasons that are a complex intersection of the technology, the infrastructure and the economics. Try getting an "AI" engine to understand that you are happy to put £50,000 on your drive or in your garage and then not use it for 85% of the time and see what it suggests you do with your money.

There will be local pressures as well. Some idiots in the UK appear to have taken a knock to the head and woken up thinking they can upend millennia of common law and just take ownership of the highway because of their special magic milk float. Which is never going to happen. If for no other reason than MN would simply collapse under the weight of parking threads. And that's before you start on the cable strewn pavements which will make them impossible to walk, let alone wheel along. Although I suspect that won't be a problem for long. If you want to leave 20Kg of copper in the street, that's your gift to the local unofficial recycling community. (Other jurisdictions may have different approaches to how the public highway is owned).

I will grant Lord Musk this: he has twigged that most of problems he faces are really social and cultural problems masquerading as "tech" problems. But that isn't really "genius", Or if it is, I wrote about it for my degree over 40 years ago in "social impacts of computing". Covered "AI" and personal computing. Completely missed any hint everyone would be packing a massive computing engine in their handbag by 2000 though.

*Are statistically unlikely to.

It’s not rare. China has loads for example. Better mining techniques, recycling and reusing batteries, job done.

Not sure what you’re covered in, but it’s sure not glory, or even facts. Smells a bit though.

OK then.
You aren't covering yourself in glory here. Maybe just stop and have a cursory Google of things like lithium scarcity before you insist you know best.

tl;dr

Yes Humans will be able to survive and thrive on Mars, as well as the moons of the larger gas giants.

No, humanity will not go extinct. If you want your particular bit to, go for it, the rest of us have something to say to the universe.

OK fine, but just because I quite enjoy arguing with techbros. I'll do it with sources and everything.

99.9% of all species that ever existed are extinct. https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/dinosaurs-ancient-fossils/extinction/mass-extinction

Humans are like all other animals. Eventually we will go extinct. Trying to avoid that on a population level is as fruitless as trying to avoid death on an individual level, and in my opinion (this is the non scientific bit) just as narcissistic.

So that's why the first para is pointless, before you even get to whether humans could viable survive on Mars.

Here's some info about Apollo (for readers, not you, you know this already)

https://www.quora.com/How-much-fuel-does-it-take-to-launch-a-rocket-into-orbit-How-long-would-that-fuel-last-if-the-rocket-remained-in-orbit?top_ans=1477743684300655

203,000 gallons of kerosene and 318,000 gallons of liquid oxygen. This is approx. 6, 896, 316, 116, 393.501 calories according to this (https://www.convertunits.com/from/gallon+[U.S.]+of+kerosene/to/calories#google_vignette)

1 gramme of wood contains 4 calories of energy. So this is approx 2,240,790,291 kg wood.

According to Quora the average weight of a tree is 1000 to 6000 kg (https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-a-tree-weigh#:~:text=The%20mass%20(not%20the%20weight,tons%2C%201000%E2%80%936000%20kg.) Let's take 3500kg for this.

The equivalent energy to the kerosene needed to launch apollo is 640,225 trees.

Assuming this as a guide you need 1100 to 2500 trees per hectare.
https://defrafarming.blog.gov.uk/sustainable-farming-incentive-pilot-guidance-plant-trees-to-extend-existing-woodland/

Taking the middle for the calculation again, the amount of trees needed to provide the energy would need 356 hectares, or 3.5km sq of trees.

For reference, the US have estimated the average person uses 640lb (290kg) of wood per year. America is a high user of resources so this is generous.

https://apps.fs.usda.gov/forest-atlas/benefits-wood-products.html#:~:text=With%20more%20than%20313%20million,each%20side%2C%20every%20single%20day.

The energy needed to launch apollo is equivalent to the wood needed for 7.7 million Americans.

3.5 km2 of trees/ wood for 7.7 million people seems quite resource intensive therefore I also think your second para is not accurate.

Having cheap space flight enables a staggering amount of human advancement that you just don't get any other way.
Having cheaper space flight might enable human advancement you don't get any other way is a more realistic way of putting it. Assuming we don't all die from climate change before those benefits are theoretically realised.

This para is your opinion. It's OK for people to disagree. Even if they are "low T"

Electric cars are going to be a dead end. I think he believes they will develop tech to overcome their limitations,

The only limitation is batteries. A real EV Evangelist would have concentrated their research and manufacturing on swappable batteries, not dodgy non-self driving features.

I know there is a breakthrough in battery technology due "in 5 years". Same as there was in 2010 when I was involved in strategy and the question "what's with EVs came up". We managed to get that right, Bitcoin right, 3D printing right, driverless cars right and generation rent right. All of which were (and still are) of very keen interest to insurers.

It's a pretty serious limitation. If we switch over entirely to electric cars in the next few years as some would like, we will have to do so much mining for rare metals that we'll just have destroyed the environment in a different way.

And huge numbers of cars are resource heavy no matter how you slice it, electric ones even more so.

I find the whole "the tech will improv" thing a bit funny. I don't really see how it's fundamentally differernt than "we'll figure out with tech how to scrub pollution from the atmosphere". It's really just a faith statement.

Ok, I have questions.

Did he basically just say 'interesting observation' and the meme/ the actual statement wasn't something he himself said or further commented on?

Is he publicly known to be using an illegal drug called ketamine, (and isn't that the one that can cause severe incontinence issues)? Do you not get in trouble with the law about being public with that (you clearly have connections with a drug supplier)?

My T is low but also I have some brain fog, possibly as a symptom of peri menopause.