Elon Musk on making life multi-planetary

The journal Nature spoke to SpaceX founder Elon Musk about the privatization of space flight. On April 30, SpaceX plans to launch a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center to the International Space Station, making it the first commercial company to send a craft to the ISS. From Nature:

Do you see a space-faring civilization as a way of defending humanity against a catastrophe on Earth? Absolutely. We would be backing up the biosphere. We wouldn't just be preserving humanity, we would be preserving much of life. It is certainly possible for some calamity to come along — as we see in the several major extinction events in the fossil record. Humanity has obviously developed the means of destroying itself, so I think we need planetary redundancy to protect against the unlikely possibility of natural or man-made Armageddon.
It is important that we take action now to make life multi-planetary, because this is really the first point in the 4-billion-year history of Earth that it has been possible. That window of possibility will hopefully be open for a long time, but it may only be open for a short time. That's why I think urgent action is required on making life multi-planetary.

"Backing up the biosphere"

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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The Snowden Principle

http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher

It’s wonderful to me that I’d read this at a time when I’m currently rereading Rendezvous With Rama, which includes a detail about efforts to get Earth’s population under one billion.

What always catches my attention, though, is the possibility of living on Triton. Oh, if only I could…
TooGoodToCheck

If anyone’s interested, Elon Musk is going to be the guest on The Daily Show tonight.
Gypsy Jim

Some of the more believable sci-fi has already covered terra-forming, which would have to include all manner of flora & fauna, as well as either deliberately or not entirely, microbial involvement too. What would possibly be “wrong” with trying to preserve/conserve as many other earth-evolved DNA systems, besides just humans, as possible?

The sooner the better people, the sooner the better.
Roy Trumbull

Nice idea if there were another planet with a decent atmosphere and magnetic field. Those two things shelter us from high speed rocks and radiation. Soon as you get into outer space you’re just an egg on the frying pan.
- http://twitter.com/incarnedine_v Dan Hibiki
  
  that’s why we should be digging up tunnels on mars instead and live in nice happy Vault Tech communities.
  - Finnagain
    
    That sounds.. great.
    - http://pulse.yahoo.com/_BOOM27DBLMZQIJVK4BQLE7K5YA Nagurski
      
      …for Trolls.
  - Culturedropout
    
    In all seriousness, though, those caves they’ve been finding “skylights” into on Mars might be just the ticket. Seal off a few nice-sized caverns, cap the openings with a transparent dome, pressurize it, fill the space below with plants growing in Martian sand mixed with composted food scraps and human waste, maybe spray the walls with some kind of sealant to stop atmospheric loss, and have at it. Lots of solar energy, shielding from the rocks and radiation. Heck – I’d live there.
- taugust
  
  Planets? Where we’re going, we don’t need no stinkin’ planets!
  No, really. Read “The High Frontier” by Gerald K. O’Niell. A planetary surface isn’t necessarily the best place for an industrial civilization.
http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/RA4AVVHBDO7ZTD3ANU6CLVQZPI pierre

I think the idea that humankind needs to move into space to survive as a species to be so damned stupid that it’s laughable.

How about we stop destroying this planet, and keep it a nice place to live. Limit population growth (by force if necessary), stop raping the environment. Move back to a community model of food supply.

There is so many legitimate things to be spending money on for our future. Trying to live in space is not one of them.
- stillcantfightthedite
  
  The Earth will likely be struck by an meteorite before that happens.
- TooGoodToCheck
  
  Obligatory XKCD:
  
  “The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space–each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.”
  - http://twitter.com/incarnedine_v Dan Hibiki
    
    They’re a great find really. All that raw material that was dug up and assembled on the surface in the form of habitats and they even place all the rare materials in solid structures to protect them from decay.
    
    If you’re lucky you can even scrape up some fissible material that has yet to pass it’s half life… assuming that wasn’t used up to remove the natives to begin with.
  - spejic
    
    Hardly. The extra-planetary society would just be a greater drain on the Earth’s resources. It’s only benefit would be the entertainment it provides as its utopian society of true believers falls apart.
- miasm
  
  I think that the idea that gravity attracts to be so damned stupid that it’s laughable.
  I think that the idea that all men are created equal to be so damned stupid that it’s laughable.
  Brain assplode.
Travis Funk

Elon is a friend and fan of Total Ghost. Their song, Space Station is the official song for SpaceX. See the youtube video of the song here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MezkEiS-6jA Also see the tweet about the song from Elon: http://twitter.com/#!/elonmusk/statuses/164389972688908289 He’s a really cool guy, doing amazing stuff.
http://www.appliedesoterics.com bfarn

The problem with commercial space exploration is that it can only lead to to commercial space colonization, which can only lead to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5x9HXwlkBo
- stillcantfightthedite
  
  I think it will be more like Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. Large corporations will send people to develop Mars and other planetary bodies, but a significant percentage will declare independence once they’ve established themselves. You’ll be hard pressed to blame them, as the contractual terms will be horrible, given that the terms will create an environment of “taxation without representation”.
An Infinitude of Tortoises

Ambitious fellow, Musk. He does all this great stuff and still finds the time to attack Wikileaks http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/paypal-wikileaks/
- stillcantfightthedite
  
  Elon Musk hasn’t been a PayPal shareholder since 2002, troll.