Should we take the spacey rights and wrongs to the space thread? Just keep this one for crowd funding a bunch of flowers for Elon.
Pratchett is better the wider you’ve read. Tolkien certainly a huge influence. Pick up Going Postal, one of his best and you don’t need 18 books of lore to get the gags.
Musk has just sold 4 billion dollars of Tesla stock. Rumour on Wall Street is that he is using the bid for Twitter as an excuse to reduce his holding in Tesla as he wants out to focus on the Space X stuff.
The question of improving/saving earth v opening up a new planetary frontier is a false choice.
Surely the answer is both/and. And while we are on it, it is easy to shit on both sides of it, just as it is easy to praise both sides of it.
I don’t think Musk will get us to Mars within his lifetime, with a permanent population established there. I’m sure there will be trip/s and so on, and that he will make and is making a significant contribution in that direction. But the issues to overcome in establishing a permanent population there are several levels of complexity beyond creating the vehicle to fly there. Still, there is reason to be hopeful. In terms of time, we are only just scratching the surface and getting started with the technology and so on. And if Mars does end up with a colony established, I’m sure there’s no reason to see that as the last stop. At some point we would be looking to go beyond our solar system.
With regard to richer people getting first dibs on making the move to Mars, consider current life on earth. Who is most affected by the climate crisis? It is the poor! Where they tend to live, globally, is in the most vulnerable places. Not to mention food security and so on and so forth. Rich people have advantages all over the place, in the current earth bound set up we have.
Ideally we would live in a fairer society, and we should be working towards that in our own situations, but to dismiss the possibility of space travel and colonizing Mars, because rich people tend to get first dibs in… pretty much everything, seems unnecessarily defeatist to me.
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Amen brother 
Apart from Tolkien, whom I adored, and read to my own children, I didn’t read the authors you are referring to. They seem to be a typical English product, so they passed me by when I was young, as I’m not of English culture.
However, I’d still recommend Harari if you didn’t read him. I’m a passionate reader and try to read wide btw, no need to be condescending.
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It’s not a false choice. It’s the fundamental problem of economics. Allocating scarce resources.
Spending more money on frivolous wet dreams means less money on solving the very real problems we have on this planet.
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It was a joke mate 
Should we spend money on art, music, drama, film, dance or enjoyment in general?
The benefits of those accrue much more to the common man than your wet dreams…
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Here is the thing though. There is nothing about human nature that is inherently selfish and individualistic. In fact, most likely the opposite is true. The cult of individuality and competition with your fellow man is an invention/by-product of capitalism.
If you compress the entire history of the species down to a single day, capitalism only gets going at a couple of seconds to midnight. Everything before that is cooperative societies working together collectively.
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Disagree.
We have the ability to work on more than one thing at a time.
Moreover, becoming an interplanetary species and solving the climate crisis on earth are most definitely not the only two problems we need to solve!
We just had a reminder of the power of pandemic. After a slow start, the problem was solved… ish. Vaccines were created and rolled out and so on, but still we had a lot of misinformation and missteps, so there’s definitely a sense that the problem of COVID-19 is not fully solved, though of course it is ameliorated.
Another pressing global problem, and it is the hottest thread on here, is the Russian invasion of Ukraine. If the nuclear threshold is crossed - and while I don’t think that will happen, it has been talked about a lot, and Russia has threatened it more than I’ve ever seen before - but if the nuclear threshold is crossed, the climate crisis will seem like a quaint problem by comparison. I won’t be worried about my children and their children, or the need for coastal communities in future years to relocate inland due to rising sea temperatures and flooding, for example. If the nuclear threshold is crossed, the worry will be if we, as an entire species, will be seeing another Christmas.
There are many other problems we continually try to solve. One that is close to my heart is clean drinking water. Communities can be transformed with relatively small amounts of money by the addition of a deep bore well to provide clean and safe water. Even now, hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths occur because of the lack of clean water in many of the poorest global communities.
Anyway, we have within us the ability to focus on multiple problems.
If Musk is trying to solve a problem you don’t think is the top priority, or close to the top priority, you should do everything in your power, while also persuading as many people as you can, to solve the most urgent problem you think we are facing.
We do. But we don’t have unlimited resources. Maybe we could be alleviating food poverty, or finding a way to wean the world off fossil fuels faster with all those billions?
Yes, and this is one of my many things, to convince random strangers on the Internet.
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While I’m thinking about it, who is responsible for solving the climate crisis? Or coming climate crisis?
Individual citizens? Governments? The government I vote for? Or other governments around the world, that I have no sway over?
I can recycle and consume less, and do as many of the reasonable things I know I can, and should do. But if I think it is doing much to solve the climate crisis, well… that’s a frivolous wet dream.
The issue here, when I read your post, is you are talking “we” when referring to the billions belonging to Elon Musk.
So first things first there, if you are a US citizen, you should be lobbying your local politician, and as far up as you can go, to advocate policies that see billionaires pay more tax.
This sort of thing has, of course, been talked about for many years, but to date, it is not policy… and business thinking people tend to say that there will always be ways and means for wealthy people to avoid paying taxes.
I’m not saying that is right, but it does appear to be how it is.
So if I want more of the cash that belongs to billionaires to be added to the tax pool of money, and then to be spent on priorities more in keeping with the things I would like to see enacted, I’ve first got to change government policy and get them to pay.
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Worth mentioning that three of Musks companies generally have a positive impact upon the Environment/emissions. Tesla, Solar City and The Boring company. These are all good things.
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Spending on money on exploration is always worth it. Spending money and resources on exploring as a solution to our environmental issues is a false economy as any technological solution to colonizing an uninhabitable planet are orders of magnitude more than the cost of the solutions needed to fix the problem on earth.
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Telsa’s recent turn to profitability has in significant part been due to bitcoin speculation rather than because of their core business. No idea how that balances out, but there is a big difference between starting initiatives designed to produce societal good (which undeniably Musk did) and actually achieving that good, especially when the person at the heart of them has since become corrupted by this degree of wealth.
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Trading carbon credits too.
Is it not self evident that he has achieved that good ?
Irrespective of if his company is profitable or not. Tesla has sold over 2M electric vehicles, established thousands of charging stations, and clearly disrupted the market forcing others to change. The CO2 captured in 2020 is the equivalent to the emissions of numerous smaller nations.
Sure we can point to bitcoin or trading carbon credits and say profit is in part obtained by thing that have a negative impact. But given that money has primarily funnelled back in R&D and more market disruption the impact is overwhelming positive.
EV sales are doubling, in this area Tesla are dominating. They are now profitable. (Even excluding bitcoin and tax credits).
Dislike of the man appears to me to cloud peoples perceptions of his actual contributions.
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