Ok sure. Let's try tackling immediate issues that have huge implications on our survival like climate change, before we make plans to send thousands of people to a place more inhospitable than Antarctica.
Colonization is a pipe-dream in our immediate future.
He's probably doing more to tackle climate change than anyone else on this planet (Tesla). There is no 'we' making plans to colonize Mars, there is Elon Musk making plans.
No, he's not doing more to tackle climate change than anyone on this planet. Let's say 25,000 sales in 2013 and 35,000 sales in 2014 [1]. That's 60,000 cars. Now let's take the numbers for electric GHG emissions vs. conventional emissions from this 2006 paper[2]. This is more of a reference, I'm not trying to say this paper is the unassailable truth. Also a disclaimer, these numbers will obviously be rough, again, just trying to paint a picture.
These numbers have 3 scenarios, all fairly optimistic:
Conventional (gasoline) emissions are 19.9 kg GHG emissions per 100 km.
1. Electricity is produced from renewables and nuclear
1a. Electric emissions are 0.343 kg/100km
2. 50% electricity from renewables, and 50% from natural gas with a 40% efficiency
2a. Electric emissions are 5.21 kg/100km
3. All electricity from natural gas with a 40% efficiency
3a. Electric emissions are 10.1kg/100km
At this point, I should note that burning natural gas has roughly half the emissions associated with burning coal in terms of CO2 equivalency.
Let's run with the middle scenario, which is still totally not representative of the country as a whole[3]. And we need some mileage, thankfully there are statistics on that. I'll use the 35-54 age group, which I'm guessing are the most likely to own Teslas, so 15,291 miles a year[4], which becomes 24,608km.
Aright, so we have 60,000 electric cars that we're gonna assume are straight-up replacing 60,000 conventional cars. Each car would replace 14.69(24608/100) = 3614.9152kg/year(60,000 cars) = 216,894,912kg. This is the annual grossly simplified reduction in emissions of replacing 60k conventional cars (using numbers from that paper for what a conventional car means) based on that idealized generation mix.
In 2012, our emissions were 6,526 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent[5]. Scaled down to our kilograms, it becomes 6,526,000,000,000kg. That amount displaced up above would account for 0.00332% of total emissions in 2012 based on those numbers.
For some other perspective, Ford F-series sales have been up significantly the past two years[6] post-ish recession, and 16 mpg seems like a reasonable average for that line of vehicles[7].
More perspective, the MIT study "The Future of Coal"[8] pegged an average 500MW coal plant as producing 3 million tons of CO2 a year (although it ranged up to 4.5 or so million tons in other literature). That presents a range of 2,722,000,000 - 4,082,000,000 kg. Although not all of that is necessarily emitted in every case. So, displacing one 500MW coal plant with say, a large wind farm, would displace 12.5x what those 60k cars would do annually.
Basically, what I'm getting at is that researchers and policy makers involved with utilities, DOE initiatives, and state governments (via RPS, no overarching federal clean energy policy[although the PTC obviously has a huge effect]) are probably all doing more to tackle climate change than Elon Musk. Not to crap on him, I would love to own a Tesla, I just like energy topics.
Tesla is greenwashing. It's not sustainable to habitually move 300 pound Americans around in 2000 pound steel cars regardless of how they're propelled.
Sorry, you are very uninformed. Tesla is by no means making a greener planet. Batteries as of today take more energy to produce than gas. And yes most of these energy is not from non-renewable resources.
If you really want a greener planet, do something in terms of public transport. Silicon valley is gas guzzling society and nobody is doing anything about it (tesla's home)
If we don't do it now, we may never do it. In the past 20 or 30 years or so, at least until the advent of SpaceX and competitors, we had lost or stagnated in human spaceflight capability.
Besides, climate change won't kill humanity. We'll adapt, even as climate change makes life on Earth difficult.
To stick with your analogy, maybe we're at the Scott of the Antarctic stage of things?
It's time to go have a poke around and see what we can find, there's a fair chance people might die along the way, but someone has to take that first step.
I'm just guessing, but fixing climate change on Earth seems a whole lot easier/more feasible than colonizing an entirely new planet which, by the way isn't very friendly to our flavor of life.
Climate change is more political, getting to Mars is more technological. If you can get the money and technology to go to Mars together faster than getting the money and political consensus to fix climate change, then going to Mars is more feasible.
What makes you think if any nation or human has the capability to colonize Mars, it wouldn't get downright messy here on Earth ... or on Mars for that matter? If you say that cooperation on climate change is impossible, how will we be able to cooperate on colonizing another planet? Even if the entity that has the capability is relatively small and focused, I'm sure there would be others making it equally difficult.
For some I guess. If your house were on fire, would you risk your life to stay and save the kids, or just jump out the window, go hide in the garage or chill at the neighbors? There's a moral dimension to the issue that can't be dodged.
If I were made of billions of independently movable conscious entities, I would send some of them to the garage and some of them to the neighbors while the mass stayed to save the kids.
Yeah but you are one person. Each of us has to make the decision. That's the root of all sorts of effects, like mob psychology or flash mobs or civilization.
So as a billionaire, do you spend your legacy on abandoning the kids and chilling at the neighbors, or staying and tending to the problems here?
Fixing climate change required people to cooperate together on a huge scale.
Space colonization don't required that much cooperation. All it needs is an environment conductive to launching rockets and currently that is the United States.
"All it needs is an environment conductive to launching rockets and currently that is the United States."
So we just launch a rocket to Mars ... wipe our hands and be done with it? Considering the efforts just to build/launch the ISS, I can't imagine rocket launching capability is high on the list of worries re:colonizing Mars.
So we just launch a rocket to Mars ... wipe our hands and be done with it? Considering the efforts just to build/launch the ISS, I can't imagine rocket launching capability is high on the list of worries re:colonizing Mars.
Colonizing Mars is going to be difficult, but it's going to involved a whole lot less people willing to cooperate and pay for it.
The issue is more technological. The rockets need to be cheaper and carry more payload to allow the feasibility of people paying for their own ticket to Mars.
If we end up with a runaway greenhouse effect, it's possible that Earth could become Venus-like, with surface temperatures of hundreds of degrees. This would probably be less hospitable than Mars.
CO2 isn't the only greenhouse gas, or anywhere near the most powerful. There are immense reserves of methane gas frozen under the arctic. If that gas were suddenly released all at once due to the ice caps melting, it could be truly catastrophic.
Bear in mind that hundreds of millions of years ago, Venus used to have an atmosphere much more like Earth's, and there may have even been liquid water on the surface. But a runaway greenhouse effect caused all that to change dramatically. It took a very long time, but obviously Venus didn't have people there to help speed things along.
> CO2 isn't the only greenhouse gas, or anywhere near the most powerful. There are immense reserves of methane gas frozen under the arctic. If that gas were suddenly released all at once due to the ice caps melting, it could be truly catastrophic.
Yes, true, with one mitigating factor -- methane doesn't stay in the atmosphere very long. It breaks down fairly rapidly. It's a much more efficient greenhouse gas than CO2, but it's short-lived.
What? The landscape of Mars is actively hostile to human biology. Even the absolute worst case scenario of climate change on earth is infinitely better for human life than Mars.
...assuming the humans have a balloon and some plants, and as many solar panels as they can carry, I wouldn't rate their chances too low.
I wouldn't give good odds on earth remaining inhabitable for more than a couple of hundred years, at the rate we're going (assuming I'd live long enough to pay out.)
Terraforming your own planet to make it less habitable while trying to terraform a hostile planet to make it more habitable seems like an odd way to do things.
It doesn't have to be either/or. But politically, the odds of an unsuccessful Earth creating a viable Mars colony are somewhere very near zero.
That's a remarkably good suggestion. Only answer I can come up with: It'd be really really hard to declare independence from whatever nation's land the bubble was sat on. Float & anchor it in international waters? Problem solved!
Colonization is a pipe-dream in our immediate future.