Tesla in turmoil after Elon Musk smokes marijuana on live show and top executives resign

[hunter]

68. If we were truly concerned about the survival of the human species...

... we'd pay a lot more attention to the preservation of earth's natural environment and to halting our own increasing population, most especially the growth of fossil-fueled high energy industrial consumer society.

The people with the smallest environmental footprints live in cities, don't own cars, and don't eat meat. It's possible to build cities where people can live happily without consuming huge amounts of natural resources. All it takes is comfortable secure housing, healthy food, clean water, toilets that flush to sophisticated sewage treatment plants, and good public transportation. It's not "rocket science" so to speak.

If we humans screw up here on earth, a place with abundant resources of air and water and moderate temperatures from pole to pole, there's no way in hell we'll ever make it in space. Human beings are fragile creatures and space beyond low earth orbit is a very hostile environment for us.

The entire "humans colonizing space" fiction has the stench of Übermensch about it, that our "best and brightest" (as defined by themselves) will live in space, leaving the rest of us to wallow in the dirt.

I think sending humans to places like the moon or mars accomplishes little. I don't want my tax dollars spent on dangerous stunts.

My grandfather was an engineer on the Apollo project, it's the work he was most proud of, but it was a different world then. We didn't yet comprehend how hostile space was to human life, and we didn't have the sophisticated robots or communication systems we have now.

I'm an enthusiastic supporter of robotic space exploration and artificial intelligence research. I don't need a human on mars or the far side of the moon to tell me what it's like there.