Elon Musk is way too conservative

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Elon Musk's Space Future Is Way Too Conservative

Elon Musk is often lauded or denounced as a technological radical. In reality, his vision of the future is constrained by a surprisingly conservative assumption: that rockets advance, but minds do not (much). To be fair, as a mover and shaker, he is constrained by the edge of today's state of the art.

Most discussions of our future interstellar civilisation imagine propulsion technologies centuries beyond our own - while the travellers remain recognisably human. But the human brain is a somewhat tractable research problem located right here. Intra-galactic propulsions technologies seem somehow... harder.

One problem can be attacked directly in thousands of laboratories. The other requires mastering distances that are beyond our most elaborate technological dreams. In truth, the decisive breakthrough will not be humanity travelling to the stars; it will be neuroscience making that entire picture obsolete.

Neuroscience will win.

Long before human beings could contemplate founding a mature pan-galactic civilisation, they will understand enough about minds to modify cognition, redesign the traveller and create forms of conscious experience that no longer couple tightly to the current release of the human body.

Most people will never want to or need to leave the Earth. Once sufficiently detailed observation can be combined with completely immersive simulation, the distinction between visiting a distant world and experiencing it becomes an issue only of interest to philosophers.

The galaxy in its surveyed entirety will come here as information. Plenty of Jupiter and Mercury analogues to wonder at; lots of stars.

Boredom thresholds will prove to be low.

The entities that do physically expand into the galaxy will not be baseline humans. Rather, engineered entities adapted to environments and modes of existence very different from Earth savanna variants. Probably someone will think it worth the bother.

Elon Musk imagines humanity spreading through the galaxy. Actually, humanity stays largely where it is: our diverse successor species will spread outward - to our half-interested, muted applause.

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Plan for the Galaxy *

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Nigel: Elon Musk’s rhetoric about pivoting his company towards humanoid robotics strikes me as wildly premature. The technology is nothing like ready. We are nowhere near solving robust manipulation, autonomy in unstructured environments, or long-term reliability. Scaling production now - it looks like a delusion: confusing a demo-prototype for a ready-to-go mass product.

GPT-5.2: That is the central problem. What exists today are research artefacts with good PR. A humanoid robot that can walk, lift a box, or fold a T-shirt under contrived conditions is still missing the hard parts: error recovery, adaptive learning in the wild, energy efficiency, and graceful degradation when things go wrong. These are not polish issues; they are foundational research problems. Betting a company on them now would be a triumph of narrative over engineering.

Nigel: And of course we already have 'humanoid robots': human beings. They are abundant, adaptable, currently cheap by comparison, and astonishingly general-purpose. That’s the benchmark any future humanoid robot has to beat.

GPT-5.2: Precisely. Humans are the incumbent platform. They arrive self-powered, self-repairing, socially competent, and pre-trained by a civilisation that absorbs the cost. Against that baseline, a robot must be not just comparable but decisively better over its lifetime. Until labour is scarce, or required for situations intolerably dangerous, humanoid robots are competing with the most efficient all-round machine ever produced (by natural selection) for the human economy.

Nigel: Except, perhaps, on Mars? Given Elon Musk’s focus on a Martian colony, surely that’s the environment where humanoid robots and AI systems ought to be doing all the heavy lifting: construction, maintenance, preparation all set in place before the first humans ever arrive?

GPT-5.2: I can't agree. On Mars, humans become grotesquely expensive and fragile, so robots do start to look attractive. But Mars is not a proving ground; it is an extreme endgame. Any robot sent there must operate with near-total autonomy, survive years of mechanical stress, corrosive dust, radiation and cold, and repair itself or its peers with minimal human intervention. We cannot yet build machines that do this reliably in a terrestrial warehouse, even. Mars is not a shortcut around Earth-bound difficulty; it is in fact the ultimate stress test.

Nigel: Which pushes us into a deeper question. Why are we so intent - at least in our imaginations - on spreading humanity across the universe? None of us will get to go. Most everything out there looks bleak, uncomfortable, and sterile. Mars itself makes Antarctica look cosy - and we haven't exactly built cities or an economy there, have we?

GPT-5.2: That question is usually dodged with talk of destiny or survival, but stripped of romance it is deeply problematic. Human beings are savanna primates. We flourish only in narrow ecological bands, augmented by environment-mitigation technologies. The wider universe is not hostile by accident; it is hostile by default.

Nigel: Yep, just hostile. And AI and robotics will advance far faster than our capacity to move fragile human bodies across interplanetary, let alone interstellar, distances.

GPT-5.2: Yes. Once machines surpass us in harsh-environment durability, autonomy, and cognition, galactic exploration becomes their project, not ours. At that point, the human role presumably shifts from explorer to originator: the species that lit the fuse...

Nigel: So perhaps the long-term future is not humanity spreading bodily through the cosmos, but humanity giving rise to systems that do, almost by accident?

GPT-5.2: That's a future with a gradual decoupling: humans remain local, terrestrial, culturally rich but spatially constrained; meanwhile, our machines range outward, mapping, building - and expanding where we cannot.

Nigel: There is at least one major science-fictional counter-vision to this rather bleak handover. In Iain M. Banks’s Culture series, very advanced technology and very advanced AI are dedicated to replicating almost utopian human (strictly: human-like) environments elsewhere in the galaxy just by sheer cleverness and the use of vast amounts of energy and technology.

Whole artificial ecologies - Orbitals, habitats, engineered worlds - are built to be extravagantly hospitable. Savannahs, seas, weather, danger without lethality, difficulty without misery. Humans don’t adapt to the galaxy at all; the galaxy is adapted to humans. And the prospect of more savannah-like utopian real estate across the galaxy - for which we don’t have to change humans very much - might be a future humans would be very motivated to try to bring about.

GPT-5.2: Yes. Banks takes the opposite bet to rugged frontier mythology. Instead of forcing humans into hostile environments through grit and sacrifice, the Culture expends unimaginable effort to eliminate hostility itself. Gravity problems, poisonous atmospheres, harsh radiation, scarcity even: all engineered away. It is a vision where intelligence serves comfort rather than combatting the hostile with raw toughness.

Nigel: And crucially, humans are not asked to change very much. No radical post-biological leap is required. They remain recognisably human - fallible, social, embodied - just freed from the tyranny of the mundane, and scarcity, by Minds doing all the heavy lifting.

GPT-5.2: In that sense, it is deeply conservative about human nature, even as it is radically ambitious about technology.

Nigel: Which suggests a motivation that makes more sense than grim Martian heroics. Not survival at any cost, but abundance through exquisite engineering. More and nicer Earths, not harder near-misses. More room to live well, not more ways to endlessly suffer the hardships of pioneers.

Which brings us back to AI. In that vision, AI is not humanity’s replacement but its galactic infrastructure - vast, patient, incomprehensible, and largely benevolent machines to watch over us.

GPT-5.2: And that may be the most plausible long-term equilibrium. Humans remain local, embodied, narrative-driven creatures. AI becomes the civil-engineering layer of civilisation at cosmic scale. Not our descendants, exactly but not rivals either. Something closer to our climate, our environment, our extended phenotype.

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* This is in homage to BA Gillies's 'Return to the Galaxy' pulp military-SF series.

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SpaceX Needs Orion to Colonize Mars

The Case for an Orion-Based Mars Express

Elon Musk’s vision of a Mars colony is audacious but faces serious engineering constraints. Conventional chemical rockets are painfully slow, taking six to nine months for a one-way trip. The long-duration voyage exposes astronauts to zero-gravity muscle atrophy, bone loss, and cosmic radiation—not to mention the sheer logistical challenge of supplying a colony that remains months away from emergency aid.

The solution? Project Orion.

This nuclear-pulse propulsion concept developed in the late 1950s, offers an alternative that is both feasible and, contrary to popular belief, not an environmental catastrophe.

Orion can get astronauts to Mars in days, solving nearly all the key problems of interplanetary travel.

Engineering the Orion "Mars Express"

A nuclear-pulse Orion spacecraft is fundamentally different from today’s chemically propelled rockets. Instead of burning fuel continuously, it relies on the controlled detonation of nuclear charges (pulsed propulsion) behind a massive pusher plate. Each explosion delivers an impulse that propels the spacecraft forward, with shock absorbers smoothing out the ride.

The key advantage? Sustained high acceleration - one gee is completely feasible - which slashes transit times to a few days while allowing astronauts to live in normal gravity throughout the journey.

A practical Orion Mars Express could have a mass of 1,000 tons, including structure, payload, and charges. Let's examine what’s required to make this work.

Trip Time Calculations

For a spacecraft accelerating at 1 g (~9.81 m/s²) up to the halfway point and then decelerating at the same rate, the travel time depends on the distance to Mars. Assuming a typical Earth-Mars distance of 75 million km (0.5 AU):

1. Time to turnover (halfway point):
   
   Time is 24.3 hours. At this point, 37.5 million km into the mission, speed is 860 km/sec and kinetic energy is conservatively 369,000 Terajoules (= 88 Megatons).

2. Total trip time (acceleration + deceleration):
   
   Two days to Mars.

This is orders of magnitude faster than chemical propulsion.

Propellant Weight Estimation

A reasonable Orion charge design would use 1 Megaton charges weighing 30–100 kg each. To estimate the number of charges required:

• Each 1 Megaton explosion provides ~4,000 TJ of energy. Assuming 25% efficiency, the useful kinetic energy per explosion is ~1,000 TJ.
• To reach turnover speed a 1,000-ton ship needs ~ 369,000 TJ of kinetic energy.
• This requires 369 charges, translating to a total propellant mass of, say, 40 tons.

For a round trip, we need four times that: perhaps 160 tons of nuclear charges. Even allowing for inefficiencies and added mass, a 1,000-ton spacecraft would still have a substantial payload capacity.

Fallout Concerns: A Non-Issue

One of the primary objections to Orion has been radioactive fallout. However, this is a misplaced concern for deep-space operations. Fallout is only an issue if debris remains gravitationally bound to a planet, but Orion’s nuclear charges would be detonated far from Earth and Mars, where:

1. Some debris escapes the solar system due to high-speed ejection.
2. Remaining debris disperses in interplanetary space.
3. Short-lived isotopes decay within decades.

The actual contribution of Orion debris to space dust is minuscule compared to natural sources (cometary dust, asteroid collisions, etc.). In short, there is no meaningful pollution hazard. Compared to omnipresent cosmic and solar radiation, additional Orion contribution is undetectable.

Why SpaceX Should Pursue Orion

1. Faster, Safer Travel

• Reduces astronaut health risks from radiation and zero-g.
• Enables rapid rescue missions and cargo supply.

2. A True Mars Colony, Not a Stranded Outpost

• With Orion, colonists won’t be months away from help.
• Ensures stable logistics for food, medicine, and equipment.

3. Dramatically Lower Costs Per Ton

• Chemical rockets require enormous fuel tanks.
• Orion’s energy density is vastly superior, allowing larger payloads per launch and many more launches.

4. The Politics Can Be Fixed

Public perception of nuclear propulsion is largely irrational. The same objections were raised about nuclear power, yet today, many recognize its necessity for carbon-free energy. The solution is simple: Orion must operate only in deep space, with payloads launched conventionally into orbit before activation, using SpaceX's currently-planned heavy lift capabilities.

How Long Would It Take to Build?

With sufficient funding, a prototype Orion Mars Express could be ready in 15 years. The key milestones would be:

• Year 1–5: R&D, materials testing, regulatory approvals.
• Year 6–10: Small-scale prototypes, non-nuclear test flights.
• Year 11–15: Full-scale prototype, deep-space nuclear tests.

Conclusion: SpaceX Needs Orion

If Musk is serious about a permanent Mars colony, chemical propulsion simply won’t cut it. Orion is the only realistic way to provide rapid, routine, and cost-effective interplanetary transport. The physics checks out, the fallout problem is a non-issue, and the technology is well within reach. What’s missing is political will—and that, unlike the laws of physics, can change.

It’s time to reconsider Orion. There's no other way.

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Note: calculations and final draft: ChatGPT

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The Antinomies of the Mars Strategy

Amazon

Elon Musk’s vision of a self-sustaining colony on Mars as humanity’s "insurance policy" against existential threats - nuclear war included - is undeniably both sincere and super-ambitious.  The "multiple baskets" strategy assumes that humanity can escape the consequences of both natural disasters and genocidal conflict by scattering across worlds. Yet it is riddled with sad ironies.

Amazon

The early days of the Mars colony would see dependence on Earth for resources, expertise, and support. In the event of a catastrophic breakdown in relations - whether through nuclear war or political strife - Mars would be viewed not as a sanctuary, but as a rogue outpost.

The first major task of a Mars colony might well be to develop defences against Earth-launched IPBMs - designed to destroy it. Sadly it won't have the home-grown tech to do that by itself.

What greater irony could there be than humanity fleeing Earth to escape annihilation, only to face it again in the skies above Mars?

The history of human expansion, whether across continents or into space, shows that our conflicts and power struggles scale alongside our technologies. The cultural, political, and psychological baggage that fuels Earthly discord would follow us there; how could Mars avoid becoming another theatre for the same destructive dynamics, albeit with red dust underfoot and a thinner atmosphere?

A Mars colony, armed with the most advanced tech of its time, might quickly replicate Earth’s adversarial tendencies on its new frontier.

Musk seeks to save humanity from itself, yet the very impulses that make this strategy seem necessary - fear, mistrust, and a penchant for conflict - could doom it. The malfunctioning dream of our red-tinged refuge testifies to our unchanging disputatious nature.

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Communism works given abundance? Or does it?

Amazon

Iain M. Banks with his ‘Culture’ novels has given us by far and away the best imagining of a future communist society, namely: The Culture. 

Typical is this, from Iain M. Banks' short story "The State of the Art" where the narrator reflects: "Money is a sign of poverty. This is an old Culture saying I remember every now and again..."

The Culture's post-scarcity society has transcended the need for money. From such a vantage point, the presence of money implies that resources are limited and need to be allocated, whereas in the Culture, advanced technology ensures abundance for all. 

Marx, himself, could not have put it better.

But Banks’s Culture had something else present day humanity does not: ubiquitous genomic engineering.

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Luxury communism: a world where automation, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology have eradicated scarcity. The conventional (Marxist) vision is one of equality, abundance, and freedom from toil. It seems almost churlish to entertain deep skepticism regarding such a utopia.

The material logic of luxury communism is straightforward. Advances in technology make goods and services cheaper, energy cleaner, and human labour effectively unnecessary. Automation manufactures products with little to no human oversight; AI runs everything; biotech revolutionises agriculture and healthcare. A universal basic income (or free goods and services) ensures that everyone has access to life’s essentials and, soon after that, life’s luxuries.

Freed from the drudgery of work, they say, people could pursue creative, intellectual, or spiritual fulfillment (cf. the projected fantasies of those bourgeois intellectuals: Marx, Engels and Trotsky).

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs."

History tells us something else. When material concerns diminish, struggles for symbolic goods - status, power, recognition - intensify. Privileged elites in ancient Rome, medieval Europe and beyond often engaged in bitter rivalries not for survival but for prestige.

These conflicts were no less destructive than battles over land or wealth.

Think of the culture wars we see around us. Their ‘precariat’ foot-soldiers are not starving - although they plainly aspire to those enhanced material privileges to which they feel entitled - but their elite leadership is generally well-provisioned: it’s power, prestige and dominance which motivate them.

The sociologist Thorstein Veblen famously described the "conspicuous consumption" of elites, where the display of excess becomes a competitive weapon. Prestige, by its nature, is a scarce commodity. A luxury communist society, no matter how materially abundant, would still foster competition for symbolic dominance.

The result? Endless power struggles dressed in new clothing.

If only these patterns were merely ‘cultural’. But culture is the expression of biology. Humans evolved in environments where resources were limited, and high-position in dominance-hierarchies ensured survival. Traits like competitiveness, aggression, negotiation skills and status-seeking were selected over millennia. Those hierarchies don't look like going away.

Could we genetically-engineer our way out of this trap? We didn’t evolve for abundance, but given it, perhaps we could engineer the necessary adaptations? The resulting "dove society" might prioritise empathy, cooperation, and collective well-being over hierarchical and competitive drives.

Technically this could, of course, work. Genetic traits influencing aggression, impulsivity, or competitiveness will be understood and may be edited out. Likewise, empathy, patience, and long-term thinking could be genetically enhanced. The result? A society designed for harmony, not strife.

The evolutionary "hawk-dove" model now makes its voice heard. Hawks are aggressive, taking what they want by force; doves are cooperative, caving in to avoid conflict. Generally dove societies are unstable, their members replaced by hawks, although under some boundary conditions a 'mixed strategy' can be stable, though still one in which conflict is necessarily built in (those hawks!).

And perhaps a dove society is just too boring, too stationary and too stagnant. Doomed to extinction through tedium. 

Even Iain Banks preferred to write about Special Circumstances, the least ‘harmonious’ and ‘placid’ wing of the Culture, comprising those individuals ruthless and devious enough to deal with uncouth, vibrant and so very alive ‘barbarians’.

So perhaps the real problem with luxury communism is that it only works in a society of losers.

We’re never going to colonise the Galaxy that way, are we, Mr Elon Musk?

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Want to understand Elon Musk?

Read this. 

Ecopoiesis .. and Mars

Ecopoiesis: "the artificial creation of a sustainable ecosystem on a lifeless planet".

How not to do it

Science-fiction often contemplates beings like ourselves, but powered more efficiently by electricity or nano-nuclear-reactors. It seems curious, watching living things inefficiently stuffing themselves on seeds or carrion or cheesecake.

Yet life on Earth had to bootstrap itself from its primordial, inorganic environment. Through waves of autopoiesis, Earth's ecology got to where it is now. Imagine a conceptual, spherical membrane around the Earth, perhaps just beyond the Moon. Electromagnetic and cosmic radiation transiting this imagined membrane (plus the odd rock) is all that's necessary to drive the entire history of life on this planet.

Now consider a Mars colony. Earth's biosphere (through its human-technological component) may be up to creating a settlement on Mars. But insofar as the colony is not capable of autopoiesis, it's artificial. The Martian 'membrane' needs to be permeable to Earth-resupply for all those essential metals, solar cells, nuclear reactors, smart plastics and many, many other vital supplies.

So Elon Musk should be thinking sustainability .. does that mean Martian terraforming?

Not exactly: Mars couldn't merely replicate a Terran ecology. It needs a Martian ecology, based on what Mars could minimally be re-engineered to be. We need an engineering nudge to push Mars onto a new track, one capable of sustaining a stable, runaway process of biological autopoiesis. Ideally humans could be adapted to join that ecosystem.

How would you do that? Seems harder than launching an electric car into space. But creating a Martian magnetosphere does seem an early requirement - another Tesla business opportunity?

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Here's a counter-argument. Put that imaginary membrane around London or the UK and permit only radiation to cross it? Could they survive in their current form? Obviously not.

Taking things further, if we couldn't rely on any technology beyond to-hand hunter-gatherer subsistence, the maximum carrying capacity of the UK is probably in the low thousands. Since we have a present GB population in excess of 61 million, we're plainly way above subsistence-equilibrium.

So it's not a slam-dunk argument against colonising Mars that its completely-isolated-from-Earth carrying capacity is zero for the foreseeable future.

This suggests that, like similar marginal propositions such as undersea cities or polar (or lunar) colonies, the two assessment dimensions are:

• business case (economic sustainability)
• existential fragility (environmental sustainability).

I note we don't have undersea cities while the antarctic station is for research only.

Neural lace

Elon Musk tweaks the technosphere again (from The Economist):

"Ever since ENIAC, the first computer that could be operated by a single person, began flashing its ring counters in 1946, human beings and calculating machines have been on a steady march towards tighter integration. Computers entered homes in the 1980s, then migrated onto laps, into pockets and around wrists. In the laboratory, computation has found its way onto molars and into eyeballs. The logical conclusion of all this is that computers will, one day, enter the brain.

"This, at least, is the bet behind a company called Neuralink, just started by Elon Musk, a serial technological entrepreneur. Information about Neuralink is sparse, but trademark filings state that it will make invasive devices for treating or diagnosing neurological ailments. Mr Musk clearly has bigger plans, though. He has often tweeted cryptic messages referring to “neural lace”, a science-fictional concept invented by Iain M. Banks, a novelist, that is, in essence, a machine interface woven into the brain. ..."

Neural lace was Iain M. Banks's technology as used by citizens in "the Culture" to 'telepathically' converse with Culture Minds, the AIs which actually ran their civilisation. In one novel, a Mind mentions matter-of-factly that no more exquisite torture device has ever been conceived of.

Anatoly Karlin, quoting Nick Bostrom, is profoundly skeptical:

"We do not need to plug a fiber optic cable into our brains in order to access the Internet. Not only can the human retina transmit data at an impressive rate of nearly 10 million bits per second, but it comes pre-packaged with a massive amount of dedicated wetware, the visual cortex, that is highly adapted to extracting meaning from this information torrent and to interfacing with other brain areas for further processing.

"Even if there were an easy way of pumping more information into our brains, the extra data inflow would do little to increase the rate at which we think and learn unless all the neural machinery necessary for making sense of the data were similarly upgraded. Since this includes almost all of the brain, what would really be needed is a “whole brain prosthesis–—which is just another way of saying artificial general intelligence.

"Yet if one had a human-level AI, one could dispense with neurosurgery: a computer might as well have a metal casing as one of bone."

This reminds me of all the ways experts tell you that something can't be done.

My vote goes with James P. Hogan, who in his excellent and seminal SF novel, "The Genesis Machine", described a brain-computer symbiosis delivering enhanced imagination/visualisation.

Amazon link

A system of equations would be projected onto an interior whiteboard in your mind. The computer would generate a VR-type solution space which you could navigate freely while discussing subtleties and points of interest with the accompanying AI system. It was, if you like, virtual reality in the head - the abstract rendered concrete.

And that is definitely going to happen.