Colonization of Mars

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Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

On these floating utopian micro-states, wealthy tech innovators would be free to go about their business without interference from democratic governments. (Thiel was an early investor in, and advocate of, the seasteading movement, though his interest has waned in recent years.) Then you mined the moon for its ore and other resources, before moving on to colonize Mars. This last level of the game reflected the current preferred futurist fantasy, most famously advanced by Thiel’s former PayPal colleague Elon Musk, with his dream of fleeing a dying planet Earth for privately owned colonies on Mars. The influence of The Sovereign Individual was all over the show.

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Together they ascend the elevator up the launch tower to where the space shuttles once began their trajectory into space, and he explains to the boy that in years past this was exactly how the astronauts themselves would have ascended before launching. As Musk and his son look out over the Kennedy Space Center, the green swampland, the Atlantic Ocean beyond, the billionaire speaks in voice-over of his company’s mission to colonize Mars, and of how it had always seemed to him that we should have gone there by now, that we somehow lost our way. “And now,” he says, “we’re going to get back there.” The series ends with a scene of the first successful launch of SpaceX’s reusable rocket, a crucial aspect of the company’s plan for establishing a colony on Mars.

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There was a talk by a Lutheran bishop entitled “Is Mars Exploration Virtuous?” (Given that the Lutheran bishop was also a founding member of the Mars Society, I felt confident in predicting that the answer would be yes.) All these questions were in themselves interesting, but what I really wanted to know was where this fixation on colonizing Mars arose from, what it revealed about our relationship with the future of our own planet. I had long been of the opinion that there was no more lurid symptom of our current cultural malaise than the notion that we needed a “backup planet” for humanity. Although its advocates spoke of it as a manifestation of an indomitable spirit of exploration and adventure, it seemed to me to represent something like the opposite: an absolute surrender to an exhaustion in the bones of civilization.

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

All the best, Robert Let's hope he listens. COLONIZING MARS We hold it in our power to begin the world anew. —Thomas Paine, 1776 The question of colonizing Mars is not fundamentally one of transportation. If we were to use the Starship or a comparable vehicle to launch habitats carrying settlers to Mars on one-way trips, firing them off at the same rate we launched the space shuttle when it was in its prime, we could populate Mars at a rate comparable to that which the British colonized North America in the 1600s—and at much lower expense relative to our resources. No, the problem of colonizing Mars is not moving large numbers to the Red Planet, but the ability to transform Martian materials into resources to support an expanding population once they are there.

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Noah Robischon and Elizabeth Segran, “Elon Musk's Mars Mission Revealed: SpaceX's Interplanetary Transport System,” Fast Company, September 27, 2016, https://www.fastcompany.com/3064139/elon-musks-mars-mission-revealed-spacexs-interplanetary-transport-system (accessed October 14, 2018). 7. Robert Zubrin, “Colonizing Mars: A Critique of the SpaceX Interplanetary Transport System,” New Atlantis, October 21, 2016, https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/colonizing-mars (accessed October 14, 2018). 8. Adam Baidawi and Kenneth Chang, “Elon Musk's Mars Vision: A One-Size-Fits-All Rocket. A Very Big One,” New York Times, September 27, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/science/elon-musk-mars.html (accessed October 14, 2018). 9.

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But Falcon Heavy is by no means the limit to SpaceX's ambitions. In remarks at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC) in Guadalajara, Mexico, on September 29, 2016, SpaceX president Elon Musk revealed to great fanfare his company's plans for an Interplanetary Transport System (ITS).6 According to Musk, the ITS would enable the colonization of Mars by the rapid delivery of a million people in groups of a hundred passengers per flight, as well as large-scale human exploration missions to other bodies, such as Jupiter's moon Europa. Figure 4.1. Mission sequence chart for the “Dragon Direct” plan. Every two years, three Falcon Heavies are launched, sending an ascent vehicle, an Earth Return Vehicle, and a piloted habitat.

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, private spaceflight, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tech billionaire, TED Talk, traumatic brain injury, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, zero-sum game

NASA officials knew not too many people were in the market to lease a fixer-upper launchpad, but they had their eye on one possible tenant: an eccentric billionaire who had started a space company from scratch with absolutely no experience with rockets, but talked about colonizing Mars—a wild card named Elon Musk, who was now on an improbable, but epic, roll. THE FALCON 9 had flown successfully. And SpaceX was moving ahead with developing a more robust version of its Dragon spacecraft that would carry astronauts, not just cargo. It was talking about building an even bigger rocket, called the Falcon Heavy, which would allow it to pursue Musk’s original goal of colonizing Mars. Musk even put a price tag on it, telling the BBC, “Land on Mars, a round-trip ticket—half a million dollars.

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MUSK BEGAN THINKING seriously about that question, and the probability of an “eventual extinction event,” as he called it. The solution: Find another planet to live on. Make humans a multiplanet species, and create a backup hard drive for the human race there, just in case Earth crashes like a faulty computer. The atmosphere on Venus is too acidic. Mercury is too close to the sun. The best bet, he thought, is to colonize Mars. One night he was driving home from a party on Long Island to New York City with his college friend Adeo Ressi. It was late, and people were asleep in the backseat. But the two friends were deep in an animated discussion. “We were both interested in space, but we dismissed it as soon as it came up.

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And its presence on the curb created a stark juxtaposition that was clear and calculated. Inside the museum was NASA’s grand past—the lunar lander, the Mercury capsule, the echoes of Apollo enshrined alongside the orphaned dreams it had spawned. Outside was the man who would create a new future—cheap, reliable spaceflight, all with the goal of one day colonizing Mars—a promise as improbable as the young eccentric making it. He wasn’t just selling his rocket, but what it represented—the crazy idea that a small startup could succeed in space. Beal had gotten further than many had thought, and he’d put a nice dent in the wall that kept untraditional players out of the space business.

Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

This was probably the wealthiest, most powerful group I had ever encountered. Yet here they were, asking a Marxist media theorist for advice on where and how to configure their doomsday bunkers. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonizing Mars , Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the aging process , or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether.

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As holders of The Mindset, they have been rejecting the collective polity all along, and embracing the hubristic notion that with enough money and technology, the world can be redesigned to one’s personal specifications. Their various self-sovereignty escape initiatives amount to the same techno-libertarian world-building fantasy exemplified by the ultra-billionaire’s competition to colonize Mars, but designed for implementation right here on Earth. Only trillionaires will actually make it into space to terraform planets, anyway. The cohort who solicited my doomsday advice readily admitted they were “low-level billionaires” who could at best hitch a ride with Elon Musk, Richard Branson, or Jeff Bezos—who are themselves still at least a few generations away from colonizing anything.

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If Jeff Bezos already controls Amazon Web Services—the infrastructure through which over a third of our networked interaction already takes place—why shouldn’t he be the one to build the space program through which humanity migrates to its next home? If Elon Musk could become the richest person in the world by transforming the automotive industry with his Tesla cars, shouldn’t he be entitled to realize his dream of colonizing Mars with giant domes? When the tech fetishist’s childlike hope for a digital womb combines with the billionaire’s faith in a winner-takes-all competitive marketplace, look out. It results in a brand of activist futurism that sees the present—our reality, including us—as an impediment to their vision of what could and what should be.

Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, gravity well, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, planetary scale, seminal paper, skunkworks, spice trade, telerobotics, three-masted sailing ship, uranium enrichment

As we will see, the government may do this, or perhaps it will be done by opening base cargo deliveries from Earth to private competition, but it will be done. It will become ever cheaper to go to Mars, and ever cheaper to maintain people once they are there. As more people steadily arrive and stay longer before they leave, the population of the base will come to resemble a town—and will actually grow into one. The colonization of Mars will then begin. 8: THE COLONIZATION OF MARS This proposition being made publike and coming to the scanning of all, it raised many variable opinions amongst men, and caused many fears & doubts amongst themselves. Some, from their reasons & hops conceived, laboured to stirr up & incourage the rest to undertake and prosecute the same; others, againe, out of their fears, objected against it, & sought to diverte from it, aledging many things, and those neither unreasonable nor unprobable; as that it was a great designe, and subjecte to many unconceivable perills & dangers...

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—Giordano Bruno “On the Infinite Universe and Worlds,” 1584 CONTENTS Foreword by Arthur C. Clarke Preface 1 Mars Direct 2 From Kepler to the Space Age 3 Finding a Plan 4 Getting There 5 Killing the Dragons, Avoiding the Sirens 6 Exploring Mars 7 Building the Base on Mars 8 The Colonization of Mars 9 Terrraforming Mars 10 The View from Earth Epilogue: The Significance of the Martian Frontier Special Addendum Glossary Notes References Index FOREWORD The planet Mars is where the action will be in the next century. It is the only world in the solar system on which there is a strong probability of finding Life Past, and perhaps even Life Present.

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While the initial exploration phase can be accomplished with small crews of just four members each operating out of Spartan base camps spread over vast areas of the Martian surface, building a base will require a division of labor entailing a larger number of people, perhaps on the order of fifty individuals, equipped with a wide variety of equipment and substantial sources of power. In short, the purpose of the base-building period is to develop a mastery of those techniques required on Mars to produce food, clothing, shelter, and everything else needed to make colonizing the Red Planet possible. FOUNDING THE BASE Under the Mars Direct plan, crews open new territories on Mars every other year to exploration and possible settlement. Eventually, one of these outposts will be considered the best location for the first permanent Mars base. Once that location is identified, all new crews will land their spacecraft at the designated site.

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race by Tim Fernholz

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K

Wells’s War of the Worlds that depicted a coalition of Belle Époque scientists led by Thomas Edison, Lord Kelvin, and Wilhelm Röntgen leading an international space invasion force. Red Mars imagined interplanetary adventurers departing in 2026. That seemed like a reasonable goal to Musk and Zubrin. If that sounds crazy now, think of how it would have sounded before Musk had ever launched a rocket. The first obstacle to colonizing Mars is paying for the trip. Immediately after the Apollo program, NASA envisioned putting humans on Mars, but the expense proved too daunting for Richard Nixon to sign off on that vision. By the turn of the century, fixed budgets and a calcified bureaucracy prevented the US space agency from expanding its human space programs beyond building the ISS, a task begun in 1998 and largely completed in 2011.

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A former girlfriend told reporters in the nineties that his business success was driven by his desire to go to the stars himself; according to Stone, Bezos’s high school valedictory address had proposed the idea of “saving humanity by creating permanent human colonies in orbiting space stations while turning the planet into an enormous nature preserve.” You get the idea. The vision that captivated Bezos still drives him now. It is a different strain of space economic utopianism than the one that drives those who propose colonizing Mars, and it holds itself out as the more pragmatic approach. In this narrative, kick-started by Gerard O’Neill’s 1976 book The High Frontier, the fragility of the human species on earth is intimately connected to industrialization—the way the massive use of fossil fuels to drive the economy has altered the ecosystem.

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Blue, on the other hand, seemed to love patents. One of the public signs of Blue’s reemergence after 2010 was a proliferation of patent filings on exactly the kind of components needed for reusable rockets—steerable engines, methods for lightweight construction, and guidance techniques. Just as lifting the heavy equipment needed to colonize Mars motivated SpaceX’s desire for reusable rockets, it was equally important to Bezos’s goal of shifting industrial capacity into orbit, followed by human civilization writ large. Bezos holds numerous patents related to Amazon’s marketplace and subscription services, but he has put his name on only one of Blue’s: “Sea landing of space launch vehicles and associated systems and methods.”

Space 2.0 by Rod Pyle

additive manufacturing, air freight, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, crewed spaceflight, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, overview effect, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, risk-adjusted returns, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, systems thinking, telerobotics, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize, Y Combinator

Financial realities will impact the choice, but there’s more to it than that for Musk and SpaceX. “There’s a business case for Mars at the projected cost for our new system,” Shotwell explains. “That said, even if there were no business benefit, I think we’d still do this. This has always been Elon’s drive; this is why he founded the company.” His vision is to colonize Mars, hopefully at a profit. “Like the East India Trading Company of the seventeenth century, if you build it, the money will come. [If ] you go and explore . . . you will find your wealth, you will find the business case,” Shotwell says. But clearly, if the US government will work in collaboration with SpaceX to send payloads and people to the moon as Musk continues Mars-related research and development, SpaceX will gladly oblige.

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“Why We Go to the Moon.” Air & Space/Smithsonian, October 17, 2017. 137Shukman, David. “Humans at risk of lethal ‘own goal.’” BBC News, January 19, 2016. 138Interview with the author, June 2017. 139For a full transcript of the speech, see: Mosher, Dave. “Here’s Elon Musk’s complete, sweeping vision on colonizing Mars to save humanity.” Business Insider, September 29, 2016. 140Ibid. 141Davenport, Christian. “Jeff Bezos on nuclear reactors in space, the lack of bacon on Mars and humanity’s destiny in the solar system.” Washington Post, September 15, 2016. 142Interview with the author, November 2016. 143“NASA’s Griffin: ‘Humans Will Colonize the Solar System.’ ” Washington Post, September 25, 2005. 144“Summary of H.R. 4752—Space Exploration, Development and Settlement Act of 2016.” www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/4752.

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., 179 medical research, 27–28, 72–76 Mercury program, 2, 18, 19, 43, 44, 53, 59, 137, 178 Mercury Redstone 3 (MR-3), 43, 44 Merlin engine, 126, 128, 131 metamaterials, 107 Meyerson, Rob, 137–141, 139 microgravity, 82, 292 Microsoft, 102, 107 militarization of space, 170, 170–171 Mir space station, 2, 44, 46–47, 48, 54, 73, 166, 166–167, 184–185 Mitchell, Edgar, 32, 33 Mojave, California, 94 Mojave Airport, 94 Mojave Desert, 98, 111 Mojave Spaceport, 94–95 MOM (Mars Orbiter Mission), 177, 177, 178 moon (Earth’s), 20, 158, 161 bases on, 247 as candidate for human spaceflight, 62 capsules orbiting near, 55 collecting resources from, 205, 206, 218 as destination, 60 exposure to radiation on, 83 first humans on the, xiii–xiv galactic radiation on, 84 and Gateway, 242 landing on, 247 manufacturing on, 247 mining on, 88, 89, 247 north pole of, 62 as objective for SpaceX, 125 orbiting of, 59, 59, 60 orbit of, during SELENE mission, 175 and Orion capsules, 52 outpost on, 237 as short-term goal for space travel, 172 space settlements on, 242–245 storage depots on, 221 surface of, 60 travel to, 66 water ice on, 206 Moon Express, 211, 218, 220 Moon First advocates, 62 moons (in general) of Mars, 60, 175 Saturn’s moon Titan, 170 “Moon Village,” 65, 173, 242, 243 Moscow, Russia, 28, 79 MOXIE (Mars OXygen In-situ utilization Experiment), 239, 239 Mueller, Rob, 251 Multi-Purpose Logistics Module, 2 Murray, Bruce, 265 muscle mass, reduction in, 73 Musk, Elon “billionaires’ club” and, 151, 154 Charles Bolden and, 116 on colonizing Mars, 34–35 and creation of SpaceX, 115–119 on doing something that is important, 1 Falcon rockets and, 255–257, 259–261 and international space agencies, 181 Steve Jurvetson and, 158, 159 lunar base supported by, 244 on moving humans to space, 236 prediction of launch prices by, 148 and reusability, 39 and SpaceX, 7, 118, 123–126 Tesla roadster, 260–261 mutual funds, for private investors, 154 Myhrvold, Nathan, 107 N N1 booster, 43 N1 moon rocket, 185 NAFCOM (NASA Air Force Costing Methodology), 215 NanoRacks, 105, 105–106, 154, 157, 198 nanosats, 103 NASA. see National Aeronautics and Space Administration NASA Air Force Costing Methodology (NAFCOM), 215 NASA Ames Research Park, 106 NASDA (National Space Development Agency), 174 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 290. see also Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) asteroid detection systems, 224 and Bigelow Aerospace, 54 budget of, 26–27, 178 Bill Clinton’s changes to, 167 Commercial Crew Program, 135 and cost of launching water into orbit, 88, 89 and crewed landings, 247 and Dream Chaser, 52, 52 and European Space Agency, 170 and Falcon Heavy launch, 257 history of, 1–13 and human spaceflight missions, 61, 65 legal constraints around, 168–170 Lunar Orbiting Platform-Gateway, 60 mapping of asteroids by, 224, 226, 227 medical professionals from, 73–74 MR-3 flight timeline from, 44 National Space Council and, 213, 214 partnerships with, 9, 129–130, 140–141, 153, 158, 174, 175, 177, 178, 179, 247 and permanent space settlement, 237–239 psychologists/psychiatrists working at, 77–78 and public-private partnerships, 209–211 safety regulations at, 99–100, 107 simulations created by, 78 and SLS/Orion, 52, 53, 55 and spaceflight-capable nuclear reactors, 90 space infrastructure and, 209–217 Space Portal, 199 and space race, 42–44 and space settlements, 237–239, 241–244 and SpaceX Dragon, 50, 50 sponsored events for start-ups, 156 study of space colonies by, 236 study of space radiation by, 84 use of robotics by, 239 US workforce and spending by, 29–30 National Aeronautics and Space Council, 213, 214 National Defense Authorization Act (2016), 119 nationalism, 163–164 National Laboratory, 216 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 235 National Space Council defined, 290 NASA and, 65, 213, 214 Scott Pace and, 171, 198, 237 reactivation of, 10, 10 rules of the new, 218, 220 National Space Development Agency (NASDA), 174 National Space Society, 266 defined, 291 founding of, 264–265 International Space Development Conference, 35, 36 Bruce Pittman and, 199 Space Settlement Summit, 204 George Whitesides and, 97 National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), 99 Navy, 76, 77 near Earth objects (NEO), 290 New Armstrong, 51 New Glenn, 51, 136, 136–139, 244, 245, 290–291 New Horizons Pluto mission, 132 New Line 1 vehicle, 194 New Shepard, 51, 51, 136–139, 137, 139, 290–291 NewSpace, 137, 152, 291 new space race, 135–148 Blue Origin and, 135–141 United Launch Alliance and, 141–148 New Zealand, 104 normal bone density, 72 North Korea, 180 Northrop Grumman Corporation, 102, 121, 152, 154 Northrop Grumman Innovation Systems, 12, 102, 152, 174 Northwestern University, 125 Norway, 153 NSS (National Space Society), 291 NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board), 99 nuclear reactors, for spaceflight, 90 O Obama, Barack, 6, 9, 56–57, 219, 226 “offshoring,” 178 OffWorld, 250 O’Neill, Gerard, 240–241, 250, 265, 269 O’Neill space cylinders, 240–241, 241 One Space, 194 OneWeb, 131 Orbital ATK, 12, 102, 103, 152, 153, 154 orbital refueling depot, 205 Orbital Sciences, 152, 158 orbiting stations, 63–64, 71–72 ore, from asteroids, 64 organizations, space-related, 266–271 Orion, 291 Altair and, 8 capsule, 78 for deep-space exploration, 53 as government spaceflight, 246 rendezvous with asteroid, 56–57 Soyuz and, 186 and Space Launch System, 9, 10, 52, 55, 246, 249 Outer Space Treaty (1967), 165, 165, 218, 219 outposts, 237–238 overview effect, 32, 32 Oxford University, 235 ozone layer, 228 P Pace, Scott, 171–172, 196, 198, 214, 237 Paleogene era, 223 partial-gravity environments, 22, 81 Passengers (movie), 81 passive radiation shielding, 90 payloads, 119, 126, 194, 259, 261, 291.

Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist by Michael Shermer

Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, anti-communist, anti-fragile, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Chelsea Manning, clean water, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, creative destruction, dark matter, deplatforming, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, gun show loophole, Hans Rosling, heat death of the universe, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Higgs boson, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, income inequality, intentional community, invisible hand, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Laplace demon, luminiferous ether, Mars Society, McMansion, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, moral panic, More Guns, Less Crime, Multics, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, positional goods, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yogi Berra

Chapter 14 Governing Mars Lessons for the Red Planet from Experiments in Governing the Blue Planet Preamble I originally penned this essay in the summer of 2018, stimulated by a Twitter exchange I had with Elon Musk, itself triggered by the SpaceX CEO’s previously announced decision to colonize Mars. This led me to wonder if this visionary had given any thought to what sort of government he would set up on the Red Planet, and if he already had a team of social scientists working on the problem or whether he was just going to wing it when they got there. Surely not, but what source for research would a team of social engineers (let’s call them) working at SpaceX (or NASA, since it too plans to send people to Mars in the coming decades) access?

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As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1804, “No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth.”5 * * * A number of scientists and science fiction writers have made the analogy of Europeans colonizing the Americas in discussions of establishing colonies on other worlds, but this only goes so far given the fact that those incipient settlers at least had air to breath, water to drink, and plenty of potential food on the hoof, in the ground, and in oceans, lakes, and rivers. The lack of these basic commodities generates additional problems for the political governance of Mars – there’s no air, food, or (that we know of yet) water there! As well, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that the USA signed prohibits anyone from “owning” Mars. What would be the incentive to colonize Mars if there’s no guarantee that the work you do to live there would result in any type of ownership? Although working the land and air to produce resources is not directly proscribed by the treaty, doing so in a manner that doesn’t lead to tyranny is another matter entirely. These and related problems were addressed by the University of Edinburgh astrophysicist Charles S.

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Cockell in a series of meetings with scientists and scholars from varied fields in two conference proceedings titled Human Governance Beyond Earth and The Meaning of Liberty Beyond Earth. To learn more about what to do when the most basic necessities of life – oxygen, water, and food – are under the control of one company (SpaceX?) or one government (the US of Mars?), I spoke with Dr. Cockell by Skype, starting with the observation that Earthlings colonizing Mars will be nothing like Europeans colonizing North America.6 “Space is an inherently tyranny-prone environment,” Cockell told me. “You are living in an environment where the oxygen you breathe is being produced by a machine.” On Earth, he notes, governments can rob their people of food and water, “but they can’t take away your air, so you can run off into a forest and plan revolution, and you can get your friends together and you can try to overthrow a government.”

How We'll Live on Mars (TED Books) by Stephen Petranek

Apollo 11, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, Elon Musk, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, Richard Feynman, TED Talk, trade route

The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration by Donald Goldsmith, Martin Rees

Apollo 11, Biosphere 2, blockchain, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crewed spaceflight, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, place-making, Planet Labs, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, self-driving car, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, UNCLOS, V2 rocket, Virgin Galactic, Yogi Berra

The arguments against the desirability of mass emigration to Mars emphasize that creating a million-­person habitat t­ here would prove more difficult than establishing a million ­people at the South Pole or on the bed of the Pacific Ocean. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin corporation also concentrates on improving systems to launch astronauts far beyond the Earth. In contrast to Musk’s determination to colonize Mars, Bezos centers his immediate goals on creating lunar colonies, declaring in 2019 that “it’s time to go back to the moon, this time to stay.” In 2020, NASA’s Artemis program awarded a contract worth $579 million to a Blue Origin consortium that includes the aerospace g­ iants Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman for the development of an integrated system to land astronauts on the moon and bring them back to Earth.

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We might eventually find ways to make Martian soil amenable to terrestrial organisms, a task that could vary from location to location, but as the geochemist Laura Fackrell has summarized the situation, “It’s not quite as easy as it looks in The Martian.”16 To enthusiasts of ­human exploration and colonization on Mars, tasks such as improving Martian soil could well fall to hardworking robots, fundamentally ­there to support a continuing ­human presence on Mars. ­Future colonists would explore the red planet in detail; they would provide a key base for exploration of the worlds much farther from the sun and the Earth; and, in some visions, their M a rs · 87 population could eventually increase to a society of millions of ­people on a neighbor planet.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

“We sleep easy knowing that next year’s software will be better than this year’s,” Musk explains, but “rockets’ [cost] actually gets progressively worse every year.”2 Musk wasn’t the first to spot this trend. But he was among the first to do something about it. He launched SpaceX—short for Space Exploration Technologies—with the audacious goal of colonizing Mars and making humanity a multiplanetary species. But Musk’s deep pockets weren’t enough to buy rockets on the American or the Russian market. He pitched venture capitalists, but they were a hard bunch to convince. “Space is pretty far out of the comfort zone of just about every VC on Earth,” Musk explained.

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If the company’s aim were to simply put satellites into Earth orbit, there would have been no reason to do things differently. The company would have relied on the same technology that NASA had been using since the 1960s. There’s little reason to reduce the cost of rocket launches by a factor of ten, as SpaceX is on its way to doing, unless you’re aiming for a moonshot. The bold ambition of colonizing Mars forced SpaceX to employ first-principles thinking and transform the status quo. The political strategists James Carville and Paul Begala tell a story about the choice a lion faces in deciding to hunt for a mouse or an antelope. “A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse,” they explain.

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Now, more than three decades later, Shotwell is at the top of the engineering game, responsible for the day-to-day operations of SpaceX. Among other things, she serves as “the bridge between Elon and the staff,” SpaceX’s Hans Koenigsmann says.75 “Elon says let’s go to Mars and she says, ‘OK, what do we need to actually get to Mars?’” To finance the company’s unconventional dream of colonizing Mars, Shotwell travels the globe, pursuing conventional opportunities for taking commercial payloads into orbit. While SpaceX was still in its infancy, she managed to win contracts worth billions of dollars from satellite operators. These contracts continue to pay the bills as SpaceX works toward its moonshot of taking humans to Mars.

When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach by Ashlee Vance

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, fake it until you make it, Google Earth, hacker house, Hyperloop, intentional community, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, lockdown, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off-the-grid, overview effect, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, Rainbow Mansion, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, TikTok, Virgin Galactic

In the popular press, the increase in private space activity has tended to focus on Musk and his peers, such as Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and the late Paul Allen of Microsoft. Those men have all funded ventures varying from rocket companies to space planes. The fascination largely revolves around billionaires who are hoping to fire up space tourism businesses or, like Musk, setting off to colonize the moon or Mars. What the public has paid less attention to is the frenetic amount of activity taking place among hundreds of other companies scattered all around the world who are building new types of rockets and satellites. These companies are locked in a race that feels more immediate and tangible than humans taking laps around the moon or doing their laundry on Mars.

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As perhaps the highest-ranking space tech nerd in the military, Worden had encountered every “out there” pitch and wacko inventor imaginable, ranging from guys building ray guns in their garage to folks convinced that their flying saucer would be the next great military vehicle. But Worden identified Musk as legit and something of a kindred spirit. They both hoped that humans would one day colonize Mars and expand even farther into the universe, and they enjoyed batting theories back and forth on how to accomplish such things. “Elon was a visionary, and there were a lot of visionaries around at the time,” Worden said. “But there was something about him where I thought, ‘This is not a boloney artist.

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Beck had purchased the fastest machines available and nearly broke me in two as he raced off with me sitting behind him.* During our day together, I tried my best to engage in small talk and then to get Beck to tell me what he really wanted out of being a space magnate. Musk’s life ambition is to colonize Mars. Did Beck have a secret, equally lofty goal? What was the point of all his work? But I never seemed to make any progress. Beck wanted to discuss the minutiae of the rocket business and the travails of his competitors. He made no mention of wanting to colonize anything or hunting for life in the outer reaches of space.

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger by Matthew Yglesias

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, assortative mating, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, classic study, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, congestion charging, congestion pricing, coronavirus, COVID-19, cross-subsidies, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, gentrification, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Induced demand, industrial cluster, Kowloon Walled City, low interest rates, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, Mercator projection, minimum wage unemployment, moral panic, New Urbanism, open borders, open immigration, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, secular stagnation, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, superstar cities, tech worker, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, transit-oriented development, white flight, working-age population, Yogi Berra

Los Angeles alone has invested billions of dollars in recent years in constructing the Los Angeles Metro Rail system, which has less than a third of the ridership of smaller mass transit systems in much smaller cities like Budapest, Milan, Busan, Montreal, or Stockholm. Concurrently, major political stakeholders in American mass transit are relentlessly focused on the concept of innovation, with New York governor Andrew Cuomo announcing a flashy “genius” contest to improve transit. Elon Musk, when not colonizing Mars or trying to revolutionize the car industry, muses publicly about totally reworking American urban transportation. There’s something natural about this. The United States is bad at mass transit but good at innovation, so the idea that we need to apply some innovation to our transit problem has some appeal.

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We can’t build a colony on Mars not because we “can’t pay for it” but because we literally lack the ability to do it. The government could, by spending huge sums of money, induce a large number of talented scientists and engineers to spend their time working on the problem. But that would be an enormous waste, not so much of money but of talented scientists and engineers. Colonizing Mars would be fun, but it’s not clear that it’s possible and it doesn’t seem to be important. We’re better off with technical experts working on building better smartphones, better batteries, better solar panels, better treatments for diseases, and solving other pressing social and commercial problems.

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

* * * Musk has characterized his companies as moral missions as much as businesses. He didn’t start Tesla or SpaceX to make money, he has said, but because he believed the world needed them. The future for humans on Earth would be terrible if we didn’t switch to sustainable energy, and without electric cars, the peril from climate change would be unimaginable. His goal to colonize Mars is also motivated in part by a moral impulse. In the case of an extinction event, which could be brought on by anything from runaway climate change to rogue artificial intelligence, we’d all be homeless. “I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multiplanetary,” he has said, “in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen.”

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Not only is he calling the shots at Tesla, but he’s also running SpaceX, a $20 billion enterprise with more than a few ambitions of its own, which include sending astronauts to the International Space Station, a space Internet subdivision, driving the development of cheap reusable rockets, and, ultimately, colonizing Mars. As if he were somehow bored by this trifling workload, Musk has also taken on a host of other side projects, such as Neuralink, a brain-computer interface start-up he cofounded, the Boring Company, which plans to make tunnels for cars, and the Hyperloop, another of his pet interests. Can he do it all?

Exoplanets by Donald Goldsmith

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, dark matter, Dava Sobel, en.wikipedia.org, Great Leap Forward, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, Magellanic Cloud, Mars Rover, megastructure, Pluto: dwarf planet, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, time dilation

By that time we should have spread out into space, and to other stars, so a disaster on Earth would not mean the end of the h ­ uman race.”17 Looking t­oward the comparatively near ­future, Hawking stated that if humanity hopes to avoid extinction, we must plan to become a multiplanet species within the next ­century, presumably by colonizing Mars.18 To this apocalyptic vision, the physicist Freeman Dyson offers a single word of judgment: “rubbish!”19 The author concurs in the view that if we cannot solve our prob­lems ­here on Earth, outer space offers no likelier ave­nues to long-­term success. Exoplanets’ hypothesized benefit as ­future abodes for humanity brings a more immediate boon: They allow us to plunge enjoyably into the deep end of the pool of speculation.

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Peter Holley, “Stephen Hawking Just Gave Humanity a Due Date for Finding Another Planet,” Washington Post, November 17, 2016. 18. Sara Fecht, “Stephen Hawking Says We Have 100 Years to Colonize a New Planet—­Or Die. Can We Do It?,” Popu­lar Science, May 4, 2017, available at http://­www​.­popsci​.­com​/­stephen​-­hawking​-­human​ -­extinction​-­colonize​-­mars. 19. Freeman Dyson interview, May 8, 2017. 242 FURTHER R EADING Batygin, Konstantin, Gregory Laughlin, and Alessandro Morbidelli. “Born of Chaos: New Evidence Suggests the Solar System’s Early Eras ­Were Defined by Wandering Worlds and Staggering Displays of Interplanetary Destruction.” Scientific American 314, no. 5 (May 2016): 28–37.

The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work by Vishen Lakhiani

Abraham Maslow, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, data science, deliberate practice, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, performance metric, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social bookmarking, social contagion, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, web application, white picket fence, work culture

Your MTP is the massive change you want to bring to the world to make it better off. In some business books this is referred to as the BHAG (pronounced B-HAG), or “Big Hairy Audacious Goal.” I consider these the same thing. Your MTP is an overriding, empowering goal that your organization is pushing for. Elon Musk’s MTP is to colonize Mars. Bill Gates’s MTP back when Microsoft started was to put a computer on every desk in the world. Google’s MTP is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Mindvalley’s MTP is to create the greatest rise in human consciousness our species has ever experienced.

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But by thinking bold and speaking of the future as if it’s inevitable you move faster than if you choose to play small and be stuck in the present. The takeaway? Speak not of what you’re doing now, but what you plan to do. Remember, when explaining SpaceX Elon Musk spoke about his future plans of colonizing Mars even though they were a decade or more ahead. This ability to speak boldly and envision the future helped him attract the best minds on the planet to figure out the how for him. To effectively articulate your ten-years-ahead vision, you need to play a little mental game and ask yourself: “If I magnify my company a thousand times, what would it look like?”

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

He went to the Palo Alto public library to read about rocket engineering and started calling experts, asking to borrow their old engine manuals. At a gathering of PayPal alumni in Las Vegas, he sat in a cabana by the pool reading a tattered manual for a Russian rocket engine. When one of the alums, Mark Woolway, asked him what he planned to do next, Musk answered, “I’m going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization.” Woolway’s reaction was unsurprising. “Dude, you’re bananas.” Reid Hoffman, another PayPal veteran, had a similar reaction. After listening to Musk describe his plan to send rockets to Mars, Hoffman was puzzled. “How is this a business?”

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It came from his heritage in a family of adventurers and his decision as a teenager to move to a country that had bred into its essence the spirit of pioneers. “The United States is literally a distillation of the human spirit of exploration,” he says. “This is a land of adventurers.” That spirit needed to be rekindled in America, he felt, and the best way to do that would be to embark on a mission to colonize Mars. “To have a base on Mars would be incredibly difficult, and people will probably die along the way, just as happened in the settling of the United States. But it will be incredibly inspiring, and we must have inspiring things in the world.” Life cannot be merely about solving problems, he felt.

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Mueller picked “Merlin” for the engines on the first stage and “Kestrel” for those on the second stage. 18 Musk’s Rules for Rocket-Building SpaceX, 2002–2003 Test stand in McGregor, Texas Question every cost Musk was laser-focused on keeping down costs. It was not simply because his own money was on the line, though that was a factor. It was also because cost-effectiveness was critical for his ultimate goal, which was to colonize Mars. He challenged the prices that aerospace suppliers charged for components, which were usually ten times higher than similar parts in the auto industry. His focus on cost, as well as his natural controlling instincts, led him to want to manufacture as many components as possible in-house, rather than buy them from suppliers, which was then the standard practice in the rocket and car industries.

Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut by Nicholas Schmidle

Apollo 11, bitcoin, Boeing 737 MAX, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, crew resource management, crewed spaceflight, D. B. Cooper, Dennis Tito, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, game design, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, overview effect, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, time dilation, trade route, twin studies, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

By comparison, what is called “low Earth orbit” starts at 100 miles above sea level; the International Space Station orbits at an average of 150 miles above that; GPS satellites, which operate in “medium” Earth orbit, are about 13,000 miles away. Blue Origin shared Virgin’s suborbital altitude goal for its initial crewed flights but was intent on exploring deep space, too. SpaceX was arguably the most ambitious: Musk wanted to colonize Mars, a minimum of thirty-four million miles away. But perhaps the most striking distinction boiled down to their belief in the human mind. Blue Origin and SpaceX were run by tech wizards, algorithmic geniuses who trusted in mathematical power to eliminate human error, to one day render fallibility obsolete.

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Soon after, a prospective buyer came around to the test site. The buyer was fond of wearing a black leather trench coat, displaying the fashion sense of what his biographer called a “high-paid assassin”; had a lot of money from recently selling his online payments company, PayPal; and was now forming a rocket company so he could colonize Mars. His name was Elon Musk. Musk’s early efforts were also fraught. Rockets failed to light. He once burned down a test stand. The noise from tests sent cow herds around Waco into frenzied stampedes. Later he nearly burned down an island in the South Pacific when a SpaceX rocket lifted off, caught fire, turned, and came screaming back to earth.

The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, disinformation, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, false flag, gentrification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, intentional community, Jeffrey Epstein, lockdown, Occupy movement, operation paperclip, Parler "social media", prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, sensible shoes, social distancing, Upton Sinclair, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, white flight, white picket fence, young professional

I suggested a few notable items. James dismissed each as derivative, wan commentary on an age of American genius a hundred years gone. Except, he said, for Elon Musk. I didn’t argue. I never do, with the well-armed. “He wants to colonize Mars,” said James, pulling from within himself a skein of hope for his nine children’s seven children. A mission to colonize Mars, James let himself hope, would make us great again. It’d be like the Old West, like our forefathers. A chance to be men with guns again—as, despite the fact that he and most he knew were armed, he thought “we” no longer are. “What has destroyed every great civilization?”

Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World by Anna Crowley Redding

Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Burning Man, California high-speed rail, Colonization of Mars, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, energy security, Ford Model T, gigafactory, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, Large Hadron Collider, low earth orbit, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Wayback Machine

A problem that has weighed on his mind for years. In 2001, as he began contemplating what to do with his time, he kept thinking about this problem in particular. The more Elon thought about it and studied it, the more convinced he became that there was only one solution: Humans needed to colonize other planets. And they should start with Mars. Image of Mars taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on June 6, 2001. (Photo by NASA and the Hubble Heritage Team [STScI/AURA].) “If we were a multi-planetary species, that would reduce the possibility of some single event, man-made or natural, taking out civilization as we know it, as it did the dinosaurs,” Elon said in an interview with Rolling Stone.

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Writing a check for five grand, Elon attended a fund-raiser for the Mars Society, where he met other space fans and sought out as much information as he could. He broke down the humans-stuck-on-Earth issue into smaller problems to solve. At the top of the list: getting the public’s support. As his reading, research, and connections began to coalesce, he formed a plan. MARS SOCIETY: This nonprofit organization is committed to exploring and colonizing Mars. It was founded in 1998 by Dr. Robert Zubrin, who has a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics and a doctorate in nuclear engineering. “I came up with this idea to do so-called Mars oasis, which was to send a small greenhouse with seeds in dehydrated gel that upon landing, you hydrate the gel.

This Is Not a Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook by Extinction Rebellion

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, banks create money, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, Colonization of Mars, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, drug harm reduction, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, feminist movement, full employment, Gail Bradbrook, gig economy, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, mass immigration, negative emissions, Peter Thiel, place-making, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, rewilding, Sam Altman, smart grid, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, the scientific method, union organizing, urban sprawl, wealth creators

Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed in time. That’s when it hit me: at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology. Taking their cue from Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had a whole lot less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether and insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion.

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Humans are the only species that moves systematically and purposefully over very large distances, in multigenerational migrations, for reasons not tied to the availability of resources. The itch that led our ancestors to risk everything to travel in small boats across large bodies of water like the Pacific Ocean is related to the drive that will one day lead us to colonize Mars. Its origins lie in a mixture of culture and genetics. Behavioral psychologist Alison Gopnik has observed that humans are unique in the way they connect play and imagination. Mammal species can be playful when they’re young, but the play is quickly channeled into practicing skills such as hunting and fighting, which are needed as an adult.

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The people who leave Earth won’t be taking land from anyone.16 Eventually, they’ll have to make everything they need to survive and prosper. They will create their own wealth. It will be hard to hold them to any Earth-centric legal framework if they want to be independent. Colonization implies replacement and growth. A Mars colony can be augmented by new arrivals, but a healthy, normal culture centers on the family unit. There will be sex and there will be babies. Sex in space hasn’t progressed beyond snickering and titillation. It’s the stuff of urban, orbital legend. Every couple of years, NASA and its Russian counterpart wearily deny that astronauts have had sex.

Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand

Albert Einstein, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Eratosthenes, Extropian, fault tolerance, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, nuclear winter, pensions crisis, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

It is the job of slow-but-steady governance and culture to set the goals of solving these problems and to maintain the constancy and patience required to see them through (that is not our current model of governance). Restorative goals such as these are the most important, but they do have a negative cast. Could their accomplishment be aided by also engaging some positive goals that operate at the same pace? Colonizing Mars has this quality. Building a 10,000-Year Clock/Library might. Assembling a universal virtual-reality world on the Net feels like an achievable great work. Success in mapping the human genome should encourage the related ambition of inventorying all the species on Earth and mapping their genomes.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

The alphabet was one of humanity’s greatest innovations, the sort of everlasting achievement that the company intends to foment again and again. Bluster pours forth from the tech elite, and much of the world tends to look at their lengthy inventory of grandiose projects as vanity. If Jeff Bezos wants to launch rockets into space, then Elon Musk will do him one better and colonize Mars. But Silicon Valley is hardly distinguished by the hegemonic egos of its leaders, especially relative to finance or media. What makes Big Tech different is that it pursues these projects with a theological sense of conviction—which makes its efforts both wondrous and dangerous. At the epicenter of Google’s bulging portfolio is one master project: The company wants to create machines that replicate the human brain, and then advance beyond.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Colonization of Mars, Copley Medal, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Lao Tzu, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

The inhabitants of a Mars colony will need water to drink and wash, to grow crops, and to convert into rocket fuel, which can be made by splitting water into its component elements, hydrogen and oxygen. This, together with the search for extraterrestrial life (which is also assumed to depend on water), explains why so much effort is being put into locating and understanding the distribution of water on other bodies in the solar system. Some scientists even believe that colonizing Mars is necessary to ensure the continued survival of humanity. Only by becoming a "multiplanetary species," they argue, can we truly guard against the possibility of being wiped out by war, disease, or a mass extinction caused by an asteroid or comet crashing into the Earth. But that will depend on finding supplies of water on other worlds.

Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 by Michio Kaku

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asilomar, augmented reality, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, blue-collar work, British Empire, Brownian motion, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, delayed gratification, digital divide, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Ford Model T, friendly AI, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hydrogen economy, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mass immigration, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, telepresence, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Turing machine, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Review, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize

Solar satellites by themselves might be able to heat the Martian surface above freezing. Once this happens and the permafrost begins to melt, the planet would naturally continue to warm on its own. ECONOMIC BENEFIT? One should have no illusions that we will benefit immediately from an economic bonanza by colonizing the moon and Mars. When Columbus sailed to the New World in 1492, he opened the door to a historic economic windfall. Soon, the conquistadors were sending back huge quantities of gold that they plundered from Native Americans, and settlers were sending valuable raw materials and crops back to the Old World.

…

However, once we make the transition to a Type I civilization, we will have many centuries to settle our differences. As we saw in earlier chapters, space colonies will continue to be extremely expensive into the future, so it is unlikely that a significant fraction of the world’s population will leave to colonize Mars or the asteroid belt. Until radically new rocket designs bring down the cost or until the space elevator is built, space travel will continue to be the province of governments and the wealthy. For the majority of the earth’s population, this means that they will remain on the planet as we attain Type I status.

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

“The Earth is the gem”: Loren Grush, “Jeff Bezos: ‘I Don’t Want a Plan B for Earth,’ ” Verge, June 1, 2016. See: https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/1/11830206/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-save-earth-code-conference-interview. Elon Musk doesn’t disagree: Dave Mosher, “Here’s Elon Musk’s Complete, Sweeping Vision on Colonizing Mars to Save Humanity,” Business Insider, September 29, 2016. See: https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musk-mars-speech-transcript-2016-9. “Mars Oasis”: Chris Anderson, “Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars,” Wired, September 21, 2012. See: https://www.wired.com/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/. Musk founded SpaceX in 2002: Michael Sheetz, “The Rise of Spacex and the Future Of Elon Musk’s Mars Dream,” CNBC, March 20, 2019.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

But as someone writing about science at the time, and with a pretty high tolerance – to be honest, appetite – for the far out, I found that throughout the 1990s I was able to abuse the generosity of various editors to get to scientific meetings on subjects quite as far out as geoengineering: the threat which asteroids posed to the Earth, and techniques for reducing it; the challenge of interstellar, as opposed to merely interplanetary, space missions; the possibility of colonizing Mars. Indeed, there were even meetings on ways in which, subsequent to such colonization, the Martian climate might be engineered to human advantage, using tailored aerosols and greenhouse gases to warm and thicken the atmosphere to the point where water might flow. Such ‘terraforming’ owes an obvious debt to Lowell – except that where Lowell saw Martians solemnly trying to postpone their planet’s inevitable demise, the terraformers were imagining ways to bring a dead-already world to life.

…

Ideas about the terraforming of Mars made the cover of the prestigious journal Nature in 1992 – but from 1991 to 2001 it published not a single scientific article mentioning climate geoengineering. What distinguished geoengineering from those other ideas was that it had to do with something that actually mattered. There were no asteroids on impact courses that the Earth needed to worry about, and no planets around alien stars with a pressing need for probing. The colonization and terraforming of Mars could wait for another day, or decade, or century. But from the late 1980s on there was widespread agreement that the climate had already changed, and that the risks posed by further change needed addressing forthwith. This sense of urgency, rather than encouraging a debate on geoengineering, suppressed it.

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

Apple, a company that has been accused of cheating the US government out of $44 billion in tax revenue between 2009 and 2012,82 is building a Norman Foster–designed $5 billion Silicon Valley headquarters that will feature a 2.8-million-square-foot circular, four-story building containing a 1,000-seat auditorium, a 3,000-seat café, and office space for 13,000 employees.83 Before he died, Steve Jobs described Foster’s design for the new building as looking a “little like a spaceship.” Elon Musk should take note. After all, what’s the point of colonizing Mars when Martian architecture is already colonizing the Bay Area? And then there’s “the largest open office space in the world,”84 which Mark Zuckerberg has hired Frank Gehry to build for Facebook’s 3,400 employees. Zuckerberg’s new office resembles Facebook itself: an intensely opaque, secretive company that has built its multibillion-dollar brand upon the lies of transparency and openness.

Spin by Robert Charles Wilson

airport security, Colonization of Mars, Great Leap Forward, invention of writing, invisible hand, John von Neumann, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, oil shale / tar sands, rolodex, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology

Words that would have made only fairy-tale sense in their childhood ("two men walked on the moon tonight") were being offered as statements of fact. And they couldn't accept it. It confounded their sense of what was reasonable and what was absurd. Now it was my turn. We're going to terraform and colonize Mars, said my friend Jason, and he wasn't delusional… or at least no more delusional than the dozens of smart and powerful people who apparently shared his conviction. So the proposition was serious; it must already have been, at some bureaucratic level, a work in progress. I took a walk around the grounds after dinner while there was still a little daylight.

…

Tuckman left the office mollified, clutching the script in her hand like a sacred scroll. I felt useless and vaguely fraudulent. But Mrs. Tuckman's condition was far from unique. The whole world was reeling with anxiety. What had once looked like our best shot at a survivable future, the terraforming and colonization of Mars, had ended in impotence and uncertainty. Which left us no future but the Spin. The global economy had begun to oscillate, consumers and nations accumulating debt loads they expected never to have to repay, while creditors hoarded funds and interest rates spiked. Extreme religiosity and brutal criminality had increased in tandem, at home and abroad.

Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler, Jamie Wheal

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, delayed gratification, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Future Shock, Hacker News, high batting average, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, hype cycle, Hyperloop, impulse control, independent contractor, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microdosing, military-industrial complex, mirror neurons, music of the spheres, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, science of happiness, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, TED Talk, time dilation, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

Hsieh has taken ideas pioneered at Burning Man and is attempting to reinvent the culture of a Fortune 500 company and to reinvigorate (to the tune of $350 million) a blighted urban core. That’s structural change in the real world, with all the risks and complications it entails. Musk’s projects too, aren’t without their complications. But reinventing transportation and pioneering a new energy grid (to say nothing of his efforts to colonize Mars) are wicked enough problems that they’ve stymied all prior efforts to solve them. What these examples make clear is that the perspective provided by nonordinary consciousness and culture offers a different path forward—a way to reconsider intractable challenges with fresh eyes. All of these practical applications have, in turn, inspired the Burning Man organization itself.

Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Edward Niedermeyer

autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Google Earth, housing crisis, hype cycle, Hyperloop, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, OpenAI, Paul Graham, peak oil, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, short selling, short squeeze, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tail risk, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork, work culture , Zipcar

Yet after successfully selling two startups (Zip2, which created online listings for local businesses, and X.com, an “online bank” that eventually merged with Confinity to become PayPal) and walking away from the internet boom with tens of millions of dollars, Musk’s first major move was to start a rocket company called SpaceX, with which he hoped to someday colonize Mars. His only large automotive investment prior to Tesla was in purchasing a McLaren F1, a V12 hypercar that was among the fastest and most expensive cars in the world. “It’s a million-dollar car,” his first wife, Justine, told a CNN documentary crew on hand to film the delivery in 1999. “It’s decadent . . . my fear is that we lose a sense of appreciation and perspective.”

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

With much of the world stuck at home, online shopping was booming, and Amazon brought on more than 100,000 workers to meet the surging demand. Amazon’s stock price practically doubled in 2020, and founder Jeff Bezos became the first person in history to be worth $200 billion, using his money, in part, to pursue his dream of colonizing Mars via a base on the moon. On a single day, his net worth increased by $13 billion. But Amazon, one of the world’s most valuable companies, would not be sharing much of its record profits with its new “team members.” The starting salary for most of those entry-level jobs was $15 an hour, a figure that, while higher than the federal minimum wage, was not enough to live comfortably on in most American cities.

Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

, a planet where everything from drinking water to seeds and soil will have to be carted from home, a planet we can send people to, but can’t bring them back from. Christy tells me about her motivations. First off, is, of course, the chance to go into space. Ever since Christy met Canadian astronaut Roberta Bondar in grade school, she’s dreamed of being an astronaut. “In my elementary school year book, I said I wanted to colonize the moon. That’s not going to happen, but Mars will be just fine.” But beyond the personal fulfillment of her dreams, what good will the trip do for the world at large? Christy talks about the insurance policy element of the plan. If things don’t work out on Earth, at least there will be people off planet to carry on the species.

…

And that’s to believe in bringing our quest for future to its conclusion by actually reaching the promised end-of-future. Call it the Trees-on-Mars option. Mars is just one of many symbolic stand-ins. It’s a metaphor for the singular moment of arrival when we all will live happily (for)ever after—on colonized Mars, or downloaded into computers, or even on an Earth transformed by platoons of robot servants who do all the work, anticipate our every need and are powered by rechargeable solar batteries. Mars and its many incarnations are the pop/consumer spectacle merging with the forever promise of techno-science that now dominates how we think about the world around us.

Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce by Natalie Berg, Miya Knights

3D printing, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, asset light, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business intelligence, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, computer vision, connected car, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, driverless car, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), Elon Musk, fulfillment center, gig economy, independent contractor, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, market fragmentation, new economy, Ocado, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QR code, race to the bottom, random stow, recommendation engine, remote working, Salesforce, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, underbanked, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, white picket fence, work culture

And if Elon Musk has his way, his Tesla supercharger stations across the US will feature upmarket convenience stores alongside climbing walls, outdoor cinemas and 1950s-style drive-in restaurants with waiting staff on roller skates – giving customers something to do during the 30 minutes it takes to recharge their vehicles.18 It’s not quite colonizing Mars, but it’s certainly blurring the lines between retail and entertainment. Meanwhile, some retail companies are turning to virtual reality to create playful and immersive instore experiences. North Face ran a campaign allowing its shoppers to don a virtual headset and tour Yosemite National Park and the Moab desert alongside professional athletes and, in 2017, Topshop turned its store windows into an interactive pool scene and let shoppers ride a virtual water slide around Oxford Street.

WEconomy: You Can Find Meaning, Make a Living, and Change the World by Craig Kielburger, Holly Branson, Marc Kielburger, Sir Richard Branson, Sheryl Sandberg

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, blood diamond, Boeing 747, business intelligence, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, Colonization of Mars, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, energy transition, family office, food desert, future of work, global village, impact investing, inventory management, James Dyson, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, market design, meta-analysis, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, pre–internet, retail therapy, Salesforce, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Virgin Galactic, working poor, Y Combinator

CEOs today want to be seen as titans of business, but also as champions of social causes in their communities and among their peers. And increasingly, business people want to create companies that do good. Elon Musk could have sat on his PayPal fortune and never been heard from again. But he wanted to change the world for the better—and so we have Tesla and SolarCity and talks of colonizing Mars. Bill Gates could still be rolling out Windows updates, but instead we have the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Most Connected Time in History The past four decades have seen unprecedented leaps forward in the dissemination and availability of information. CNN, the first network to run a 24-hour news cycle, launched in 1980.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

There will be ultraprivileged elites who seek (and largely manage) to hoard the resources and benefits of scientific progress, in the form of greater protection from natural disasters, insulation from political upheavals and longer, healthier lives. The new generation of Napoleonic high-tech entrepreneurs may attain their dreams of living to 150 or 200 or longer. These ‘founders’ may build empires that outlive them. Some may manage to colonize Mars, as Elon Musk insists they must. If this is the future of progress, then it cannot be something that includes most people, and much of its impetus is to escape the fate that awaits the rest of us. Libertarian dreams ultimately mean divorcing scientific from social progress. What does hope look like, once divested of some constantly moving frontier of technological control over nature, and ever more personal vitality for a minority?

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

He’d met Nick Bostrom at a dinner in Oxford in 2008 and quickly chalked him up as a perhaps well-intentioned, head-in-the-clouds dreamer who lacked common sense. “These guys have gone haywire,” he told me. “They’re modeling, but what if the model is wrong? I doubt they’re very good at probability. Before colonizing Mars, make sure the Earth works.” Bankman-Fried, for his part, went a long way toward making Taleb’s case that cryptocurrencies are a cash-incinerating house of cards when his exchange, FTX, imploded in late 2022. Unnerved by rumors of a liquidity crunch at the exchange, its customers rushed to pull their cash out.

The Martian by Andy Weir

8-hour work day, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Colonization of Mars, digital map, disinformation, lateral thinking, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, side project

Of course, they relay e-mail from friends and family, but NASA also sends along choice messages from the public. I’ve gotten e-mail from rock stars, athletes, actors and actresses, and even the President. One of them was from my alma mater, the University of Chicago. They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially “colonized” it. So technically, I colonized Mars. In your face, Neil Armstrong! But my favorite e-mail was the one from my mother. It’s exactly what you’d expect. Thank God you’re alive, stay strong, don’t die, your father says hello, etc. I read it fifty times in a row. Hey, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a mama’s boy or anything. I’m a full-grown man who only occasionally wears diapers (you have to in an EVA suit).

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Thiel says he finds the general population’s acceptance of the prospect of death “pathological,” and, along with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Google’s Sergey Brin, has spent millions supporting “life extension” research dedicated to “ending aging forever.”9 This, I suppose, is only slightly more ambitious a goal than those of his PayPal partner Elon Musk, also the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, who envisions supersonic commuter travel and colonizing Mars in the not too distant future (though how he’ll fund it is anyone’s guess, since he keeps tanking the price of Tesla’s stock with his security-law-violating tweets, whiskey-and-cannabis-induced rants, and false claims about the company’s financial profile). You could argue that all of this is simply part of the “think different” mind-set, one that is necessary for entrepreneurship and radical change.

The Future of Fusion Energy by Jason Parisi, Justin Ball

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, heat death of the universe, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, performance metric, profit motive, random walk, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Stuxnet, the scientific method, time dilation, uranium enrichment

Moreover, interstellar travel is an extremely high bar that fusion thrusters don’t need to meet to be useful. Even a lightweight D–T tokamak, by virtue of its energy density, has the potential make travel within our Solar System much easier. It could be used to explore, mine resources, better defend against asteroids, or even to colonize Mars. Nevertheless, for some reason, interstellar travel seems like the goal to aim for. After all, a wise man once said “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” Wait a second … no, that’s not right at all. 1To achieve this speed, Juno supplemented its on-board propulsion with a “gravity-assist” slingshot maneuver around the Earth. 2We’d still recommend splurging for the emergency exit row seating.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

What is left is a progress that leaves us with a growing list of existential threats, while fooling us into thinking we are ever more capable of addressing them. And rather than mitigate these threats, it appears that the ideologies that are most supportive of the progress narrative are also the ones most likely to fail at doing so. The obsession of so many tech tycoons with colonizing Mars while actively prepping for apocalypse on Earth by buying abandoned nuclear bunkers or houses in remote parts of New Zealand is indicative of some very twisted priorities among our economic elites.55 This is particularly problematic given their increasing control over the technologies that will define our future, at a time of ever-greater reticence by liberal capitalist nation-states in harnessing them for the common good lest it violate market imperatives.

Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance by Ian Goldin, Chris Kutarna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Dava Sobel, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Doha Development Round, double helix, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental economics, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, full employment, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, global supply chain, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, Johannes Kepler, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, low cost airline, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahbub ul Haq, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Max Levchin, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, Occupy movement, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, open economy, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, post-Panamax, profit motive, public intellectual, quantum cryptography, rent-seeking, reshoring, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, Snapchat, special economic zone, spice trade, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, synthetic biology, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, uber lyft, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, zero day

Companies and entrepreneurs that are showing the way include: IBM, which in 2014 announced a five-year plan to bet 10 percent of its net income on post-silicon computer chips;30 Google (Alphabet), whose recent long-term bets include a new quantum artificial intelligence lab, self-driving cars and research into anti-aging drugs;31 and Elon Musk, a co-founder of PayPal whose moon shots include SpaceX (a space transport firm whose eventual goal is to colonize Mars) and Tesla (whose diverse aims include the mass-market adoption of electric cars, household battery packs to store renewable energy, and a 600-mile-per-hour hyperloop to transport people between Los Angeles and San Francisco). Dare citizens to fail Academic researchers and think tanks debate endlessly how to make public taxes, laws and regulations better.

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

Many experts take the opposite point of view, including Alan Bundy of the University of Edinburgh74 or Yann LeCun (“there would be no Ex Machina or Terminator scenarios, because robots would not be built with human drives—hunger, power, reproduction, self-preservation”).75 Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, LeCun’s employer, Mark Zuckerberg, isn’t worried either, writing on Facebook, “Some people fear-monger about how A.I. is a huge danger, but that seems far-fetched to me and much less likely than disasters due to widespread disease, violence, etc.”76 Some AI experts have even dramatically changed their views, like Stuart Russell of UC Berkeley.77 There’s no shortage of futurologists weighing in, one way or another, or even both ways, and even taking each other on.78 I especially got a kick out of the AI and Mars connection, setting up disparate views between Andrew Ng and Elon Musk. Ng said, “Fearing a rise of killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars before we populate it,”79 whereas Musk has said that the potential rise of killer robots was one reason we needed to colonize Mars—so that we’ll have a bolt-hole if AI goes rogue and turns on humanity.80 Musk’s deep concerns prompted him and Sam Altman to found a billion-dollar nonprofit institute called OpenAI with the aim of working for safer AI. In addition, he gave $10 million to the Future of Life Institute, in part to construct worst-case scenarios so that they can be anticipated and avoided.81 Max Tegmark, the MIT physicist who directs that institute, convened an international group of AI experts to forecast when we might see artificial general intelligence.

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, banking crisis, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buy and hold, capital controls, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, life extension, litecoin, lone genius, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, QR code, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Startup school, stealth mode startup, the payments system, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

Investors and entrepreneurs were cooking up ever more ambitious schemes involving virtual reality, drones, and artificial intelligence, alongside more quotidian projects, like remaking public transportation and the hotel industry. The PayPal founders were among the most ambitious, with Thiel advocating for floating structures where people could live outside the jurisdiction of any national government. Elon Musk, an early PayPal employee and founder of SpaceX, was aiming for the colonization of Mars. If there was ever a time that Silicon Valley believed it could revive the long-deferred dream of reinventing money, this was it. A virtual currency that rose above national borders fitted right in with an industry that saw itself destined to change the face of everyday life. CHAPTER 19 March 2013 At the same time that Bitcoin’s reputation was getting a makeover in Silicon Valley, the physical infrastructure of the Bitcoin network was also undergoing an extensive transformation.

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CHAPTER 18 186“PayPal will give citizens worldwide more”: Eric Jackson, PayPal Wars (Washington, DC: WND Books, 2004). 187Thiel advocating for floating structures: “Peter Thiel Offers $100,000 in Matching Donations to TSI, Makes Grant of $250,000,” Sea-steading Institute, February 10, 2010, http://www.seasteading. org/2010/02/peter-thiel-offers-100000-matching-donations-tsi-makes-grant-250000/. 187aiming for the colonization of Mars: Adam Mann, “Elon Musk Wants to Build 80,000-Person Mars Colony,” Wired, November 26, 2012, http://www.wired.com/2012/11/elon-musk-mars-colony/. CHAPTER 19 190In June 2012 the founders announced: BFL (Butterfly Labs) to BTCF, June 16, 2012. 190a young Chinese immigrant in New York, Yifu Guo, announced: ngzhang to BTCF, September 17, 2012. 191that power doubled again in just one month after Yifu’s machines: Historical data on the hashing power available at https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate. 195“This is a dark day for Bitcoin”: “Breaking: The Blockchain Has Forked,” Bitcoin Trader, March 11, 2013, http://www.thebitcointrader .com/2013/03/breaking-blockchain-has-forked.html. 196“clarify the applicability of the regulations implementing”: The FinCen guidance is available at http://fincen.gov/statutes_regs/guidance/html/FIN-2013-G001.html.

Prime Obsession:: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics by John Derbyshire

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Bletchley Park, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, four colour theorem, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Paul Erdős, Richard Feynman, Turing machine, Turing test

A thing that nonmathematical readers want to know, a question that is always asked when mathematicians address lay audiences, is, What use is it? Suppose the RH were proved true, or false. What prac- EITHER IT’S TRUE, OR ELSE IT ISN’T 359 tical consequences would follow? Would our health, our convenience, our safety be improved? Would new devices be invented? Would we travel faster? Have more devastating weapons? Colonize Mars? I had better unmask myself at this point as a pure mathematician sans mélange, having no interest in such questions at all. Most mathematicians—and most theoretical physicists, too—are motivated not by any thought of advancing the health or convenience of the human race, but by the sheer joy of discovery and the challenge of tackling difficult problems.

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Undoubtedly, many of the coming innovations in big data, the Internet of Things, machine intelligence, robotics, and more should be commended, yet they fail to impress, at least our technology-frustrated generation. Perhaps this is to rain on the parade, but for someone who grew up in the wake of Apollo’s moon landing, Stanley Kubrick’s movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the original Star Trek series, all that stuff seems a bit dull. What happened to the space race? Humans have yet to colonize Mars. Antigravity is still a dream. Teleportation of complex matters remains a theory. Doc Brown’s flying car in Back to the Future II took him and Marty McFly to October 21, 2015, but today’s world is far less exciting than the one imagined in the movie. We do not get around in flying cars. Nor do we have home fusion reactors or hoverboards.

Gusher of Lies: The Dangerous Delusions of Energy Independence by Robert Bryce

addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, Berlin Wall, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, congestion pricing, decarbonisation, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, financial independence, flex fuel, Ford Model T, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it's over 9,000, Jevons paradox, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, low earth orbit, low interest rates, Michael Shellenberger, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, price stability, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stewart Brand, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yom Kippur War

And as part of its continuing attacks on foreign oil in general, and the Saudis in particular, the group has gone out of its way to try to convince citizens that corn ethanol is a force for good. For instance, in a May 6, 2008, editorial in the Chicago Tribune, titled “Food vs. Fuel, a Global Myth,” Set America Free founder, Gal Luft, and his fellow traveler, Robert Zubrin, a vituperative ideologue who advocates colonizing Mars, declared that “farm commodity prices have almost no effect on retail prices.” The two went on to claim that if only more automobiles were manufactured as “flex fuel”—that is, able to burn fuel mixtures containing 85 percent ethanol—then oil would have to compete for its share of the motor fuel market against alcohol fuels made from food crops, weeds, crop residue, and other materials.

Building Habitats on the Moon: Engineering Approaches to Lunar Settlements by Haym Benaroya

3D printing, anti-fragile, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, biofilm, Black Swan, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, carbon-based life, centre right, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Gene Kranz, gravity well, inventory management, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, performance metric, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telerobotics, the scientific method, Two Sigma, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, zero-sum game

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

A part of the rawness is due to the fact that they are geeks, more comfortable staring at a computer screen than schmoozing, and too zealously impatient to waste time. Page is more reclusive, and odder. He was once asked at a dinner, according to a dinner guest, “What’s the most important thing the government should be doing?” “Colonize Mars!” Page said. Most of the dinner guests nodded as if he had said something profound. Page can be almost monklike. He ruthlessly guards his time, and can treat those who ask him to make a speech or meet reporters as if they were thieves trying to steal his time. A longtime Google employee describes Page this way: “Larry is like a wall.

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

He’d heard this type of criticism many times before. For a man who thinks decades and centuries ahead, Musk was never likely to be fazed by day-trader hysterics. In addition to plotting a transformation of the world’s energy systems, he has set his sights on building reusable launch vehicles and spacecraft to colonize Mars. What sets him apart from other dreamers is an intimate familiarity with the details of his various ventures—from personally leading the investigation into faulty tanks of supercooled propellant that caused a SpaceX rocket to explode in 2016 to insisting on the specifications of retractable door handles on Tesla EVs to minimize their aerodynamic drag.4 This approach has led to astounding results.

A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America by Tony Horwitz

airport security, Atahualpa, back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, out of africa, Ralph Waldo Emerson, trade route, urban renewal

But it’s even further removed from their forgotten English predecessors: a motley crew of slave traders, tourists, castaways, and Tudor knights more akin to conquistadors than to hungry Virginians or pious Pilgrims. In 1558, when Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne, the notion that England was to rule North America would have seem as farfetched as present-day New Zealand colonizing Mars. Elizabeth’s island realm of only three million people didn’t yet include Scotland, much less a global empire. England had just lost Calais, its last toehold on the European continent, and had no presence at all in North America, apart from cod-fishing boats off Canada. England also had a long record of futility when it came to exploring the New World.

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

Blue was consumed with New Shepard, but SpaceX had entirely skipped the intermediate stage of building suborbital rockets to take tourists to space, which Bezos felt was necessary in part to acclimate people to the idea of space travel, to achieve his ultimate goal of creating a future where millions of humans are living and working in space. While Bezos and Musk seemed like-minded in their respective space ambitions, they had philosophical differences driving their companies. Musk’s oft-stated goal was to colonize Mars and make humans a “multi-planetary species” as an insurance policy against calamity on Earth. Bezos believed “that of all the planets in the solar system, Earth is by far the best one,” and that lowering the cost of access to space was the path to putting large, vibrant populations onto space stations, where they could harvest solar energy and mine the abundant metals and other resources from the surface of the moon.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

Today, if we are to be honest, we must recognize that due to the vast costs associated with a viable Mars colony such as the one proposed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX (even if the cost of escaping Earth’s gravity is significantly reduced, for instance, through the use of reusable rockets), there still has to be a profitable commodity resulting from that colony that can be sold back on Earth. If there is one, bully for him. If not, his investors will quickly abandon him. So the colonization of Mars will be a public-sector endeavor or it will not happen. But for many progressives, the story of logistics and planning seems musty and old. Are there not fresh arguments required to convince that barricades must be mounted, forgotten stories of wretched oppression yet to be recounted? It is true that there is little drama or romance to the story of planning—few riveting tales of selfless heroism, brave suffering or righteous fury (although there are not a few episodes of heartbreaking defeat, failure and ruin).

The City and the Stars / The Sands of Mars by Arthur C. Clarke

AOL-Time Warner, British Empire, Colonization of Mars, hydroponic farming, Mercator projection, Stephen Hawking

You’ll often see articles pointing out that Mars will always be a drag on the home planet, because of the tremendous natural difficulties under which you’re laboring.” “What about the analogy between Mars and the American colonies?” “It can’t be pressed too far. After all, men could breathe the air and find food to eat when they got to America!” “That’s true, but though the problem of colonizing Mars is so much more difficult, we’ve got enormously greater powers at our control. Given time and material, we can make this a world as good to live on as Earth. Even now, you won’t find many of our people who want to go back. They know the importance of what they’re doing. Earth may not need Mars yet, but one day it will.”

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bernie Sanders, Colonization of Mars, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, Henri Poincaré, iterative process, Joan Didion, linear model of innovation, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, Nick Bostrom, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

He earned his bachelor’s degree in plant biology from Southern Illinois University and a doctorate in molecular biophysics at the University of Chicago, where he studied how light-activated proteins work. Instead of doing traditional postdoc studies, he wrote about using synthetic biology to help colonize Mars and found himself recruited to work for NASA. But he was not cut out for a hierarchical organization, so he quit to pursue the freedom of being a biohacker. Before getting into CRISPR, Zayner tried a variety of synthetic biology experiments, including on himself. To treat his gastrointestinal problems, he performed a fecal transplant (don’t ask) to transform his gut’s microbiome.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

“Elon did SpaceX and made Tesla great because he was fired from X.com.” Those new ventures began briskly; for Musk, there was little time to lick wounds or nurse grievances. Just months after the coup, Mark Woolway took Musk out for drinks. “I asked him what he was going to do next, and he said, ‘I’m going to colonize Mars,’ ” Woolway recalled. “We were at this little bar in Palo Alto called Fanny & Alexander, sitting outside. And he said, ‘My mission in life is to make mankind a multi-planetary civilization.’ And I’m like, ‘Dude, you’re bananas.’ ” Less than two years later, on May 6, 2002, Elon Musk filed paperwork to incorporate a new business, Space Exploration Technologies Corporation.

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value by John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen

Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Colonization of Mars, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, global supply chain, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Jony Ive, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megaproject, old-boy network, paper trading, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Virgin Galactic, young professional

Under Musk’s leadership, PayPal grew dramatically until it was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5 billion in stock. He then invested in the company that would become Tesla, a manufacturer of electronic vehicles. Musk is also the founder of SpaceX, an aerospace company pursuing innovations to pave the way for space tourism, as well as for exploration and colonization of Mars. Pierre Omidyar b. 1967, France eBay, Omidyar Network Born in France, Pierre Omidyar moved to the United States as a child. He attended Tufts University in Boston, and worked for Claris, a subsidiary of Apple, before starting Ink Development Corporation, a retail business that also engaged in Internet sales.

Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys: 50th Anniversary Edition by Michael Collins, Charles A. Lindbergh

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, the medium is the message

They seem to be able to do things faster and cheaper than the government, and a generation that never knew Apollo is awakening to the prospect of further space exploration. Musk is a billionaire, and Bezos is the richest person on the planet. Musk is specializing in reusable rockets, but ultimately wants to colonize Mars, starting as early as 2020 with the unmanned Blue Dragon, and then with an expedition crew of one hundred. (In my Mars book, I thought a crew of six might be more practical.) At any rate, it’s nice to know that exploration has some solid backing, and that private funds are now in the game alongside NASA’s annual $20 billion or so in taxpayers’ money.

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fear of failure, Gary Taubes, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global macro, Google Hangouts, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, helicopter parent, high net worth, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Mr. Money Mustache, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, sunk-cost fallacy, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

In this book, at its core, I want to convey the following: Success, however you define it, is achievable if you collect the right field-tested beliefs and habits. Someone else has done your version of “success” before, and often, many have done something similar. “But,” you might ask, “what about a first, like colonizing Mars?” There are still recipes. Look at empire building of other types, look at the biggest decisions in the life of Robert Moses (read The Power Broker), or simply find someone who stepped up to do great things that were deemed impossible at the time (e.g., Walt Disney). There is shared DNA you can borrow.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

Given that Thiel’s allies had ousted Musk from PayPal, relations between the two had not always been cordial. But Musk had picked himself up from that episode, investing his share of the PayPal proceeds in two new startups: Tesla, which made electric cars, and SpaceX, which boasted the modest ambition of cutting the cost of space transportation so radically that colonizing Mars might become possible. Now, at the wedding, Musk told Thiel that he was open to an investment in SpaceX. “Sure,” Thiel said. “Let’s bury the hatchet.”[57] Thiel emailed his partners, suggesting a relatively modest investment of $5 million. Sean Parker responded by washing his hands of the idea: space travel was too far out for him.

Voyage by Stephen Baxter

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Colonization of Mars, full employment, gravity well, horn antenna, hydroponic farming, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, place-making, Ronald Reagan

It’s a late-fall morning — we’re only about eighty days away from the winter solstice, here in the northern hemisphere of Mars. The sky is uniformly ocher. The dust suffuses everything with a pale, salmon hue. The red planet isn’t really so red: the dominant color is a moderate yellow-brown, reflected from the land. There’s no green, or blue, anywhere. If humans ever colonize Mars for good — no, make that when — we’ll have to invent a lot of new words for shades of brown. “I’m almost on the Martian equator. To give you some reference, the great Tharsis Bulge, with its three huge shield volcanoes, is a couple of thousand miles to the east of me; and Olympus Mons, the greatest volcano in the Solar System, is about the same distance to the north.

…

(President Nixon’s initiating memo was similar to that reproduced in the novel — but without the handwritten addendum…) Post-Apollo planning for space entered its most crucial months. And gradually, over this period, NASA lost the case for Mars. To space proponents in 1969, technical logic appeared to indicate a building from the achievements of Apollo to a progressive colonization of the Solar System, including missions to Mars. But the political logic differed. The Apollo era — when the efforts of half a million Americans had been devoted to spaceflight — had been born out of an extraordinary set of circumstances, which were not repeated in 1969. Just a week after Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering first spaceflight in April 1961, President Kennedy sent a memo to Vice President Johnson asking for options: “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the Moon, or by a rocket to land on the Moon, or by a rocket to go to the Moon and back with a man.

Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World by Oliver Morton

Apollo 11, Charles Babbage, classic study, Colonization of Mars, computer age, double entry bookkeeping, Dr. Strangelove, Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, planetary scale, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, sexual politics, the scientific method, trade route, undersea cable, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration

Meyer remembers overhearing the head of manned space flight lean over and whisper to a colleague, “I had no idea this was going on. We’ve got to look into this.” NASA did look into it. Paine wrote a much-discussed report, “Pioneering the Space Frontier,” that called for the exploration and colonization of Mars, among other things. It attracted the interest of the White House. In 1989, on the twentieth anniversary of the first Apollo landing, George Bush the Elder called for a return to the moon and an outpost on Mars. But the president’s enthusiasm got little further than Spiro Agnew’s had twenty years before.

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

In this book, at its core, I want to convey the following: Success, however you define it, is achievable if you collect the right field-tested beliefs and habits. Someone else has done your version of “success” before, and often, many have done something similar. “But,” you might ask, “what about a first, like colonizing Mars?” There are still recipes. Look at empire building of other types, look at the biggest decisions in the life of Robert Moses (read The Power Broker), or simply find someone who stepped up to do great things that were deemed impossible at the time (e.g., Walt Disney). There is shared DNA you can borrow.

Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military by Neil Degrasse Tyson, Avis Lang

active measures, Admiral Zheng, airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Carrington event, Charles Lindbergh, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, dual-use technology, Eddington experiment, Edward Snowden, energy security, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, global value chain, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, Great Leap Forward, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Karl Jansky, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Laura Poitras, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, Maui Hawaii, Mercator projection, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, operation paperclip, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precision agriculture, prediction markets, profit motive, Project Plowshare, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, skunkworks, South China Sea, space junk, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, the long tail, time dilation, trade route, War on Poverty, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game

And when spacefarers look at Earth, the separate countries of the schoolroom globe are nowhere to be found. All they see are blue seas, green and tan landmasses, and the white of cloud tops and glaciers: one world, indivisible, humanity’s only home thus far. Some of us may be waiting for the chance to colonize Mars. Not happening tomorrow. In the meantime, maybe we could try pretending we’re astronauts—because in fact, considered in terms of the galaxy, not to mention the universe, we are. 8 SPACE POWER Power is the capacity to achieve a specified outcome. Its sources, trappings, abuses, and allure can be detected everywhere.

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, better known as Space X, is an aerospace manufacturer that builds and launches space rockets, founded in 2002 by Peter Thiel’s cofounder at PayPal, Elon Musk, who is also CEO of Tesla Motors. Elon’s goal is to reduce space transportation costs to enable the colonization of Mars. “SpaceX is already 3-D printing essential elements of its rockets rather than purchasing machined parts from a contractor,” says Chris. “SpaceX launches cargo into space at a much lower launch cost than the incumbent players. How? Elon Musk reasons from first principles. Begin with what is known to be true and eliminate assumptions—especially those coming from long-established industries.

The Futurist: The Life and Films of James Cameron by Rebecca Winters Keegan

call centre, Colonization of Mars, company town, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, drop ship, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, the payments system

At the time he addressed the convention, he was planning a fictional 3-D IMAX film and a five-hour TV miniseries meant to depict as accurately as possible the first human journey to Mars. Earlier that year, NASA had launched two probes to Mars, stoking interest in and enthusiasm about the planet, and Cameron had begun to see the human colonization of Mars as our species’ best plan B should Earth become uninhabitable. He had read astronautical engineer Robert Zubrin’s 1996 pro-terraforming tract, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, and hired Zubrin as a consultant on his Mars movie. Cameron’s picture was about a group of explorers who travel to the red planet, establish a settlement there, get in a jam, and use their wits and grit to get out of it.

Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

anthropic principle, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, different worldview, epigenetics, gravity well, heat death of the universe, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, Kim Stanley Robinson, land tenure, new economy, phenotype, quantum entanglement, stem cell, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship

The longevity treatment only reinforced what they had already been doing.” “So Mars has less to fear from them than Jackie thinks.” “Well, they still want to send up emigrants, that’s part of the overall strategy. And resistance to the one-child rule has been stronger in some Catholic and Muslim countries, and several of those nations would like to colonize Mars as if it were empty. The threat shifts now, from India and China to the Philippines, Brazil, Pakistan.” “Hmm,” Zo said. Talk of immigration always made her feel oppressed. Threatened by lemmings. “What about the exmetas?” “The old Group of Eleven is rebanding in support of the strongest of the old metanats.

Moon Rush: The New Space Race by Leonard David

agricultural Revolution, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, dark pattern, data acquisition, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mars Society, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, Virgin Galactic

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

To survive, you’d need to go underground. But to what end? You can go underground on Earth if you want. And the multibillion-dollar attempts at building a “biosphere” here on our home planet (where building supplies arrived on a truck) ended in abject failure. Kim Stanley Robinson wrote the greatest novels about the colonization of Mars, a trilogy that dates back a quarter century. Now, says their author, he thinks the whole thing would be a mistake. “It creates a moral hazard,” he says. People imagine that if we mess up the Earth, we can “always go to Mars or the stars. It’s pernicious.”9 In fact, it’s worse than that. It distracts us from the almost unbearable beauty of the planet we already inhabit.

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cepheid variable, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Haber-Bosch Process, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, nuclear winter, Paris climate accords, planetary scale, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, Yogi Berra

Jan Zalasiewicz and Colin Waters, “The Anthropocene,” in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Environmental Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 4–5. Chapter 12. Where Is It All Going? 1. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy—Red Mars (1993), Green Mars (1994), Blue Mars (1996)—offers a rich and vivid science-fictional account of what the colonization of Mars might look like. 2. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 46. 3. J. S. Mill, “Of the ‘Stationary State,’ ” in The Principles of Political Economy, Google Books, http://www.efm.bris.ac.uk/het/mill/book4/bk4ch06. 4. Johan Rockström et al., “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature 461 (September 24, 2009): 472–75; updated in Will Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet,” Science (January 2015): 1–15. 5.

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

I would annex the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”i Today, capital’s ambition extends farther than Rhodes dared to hope: Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are leading the capitalist charge into space with their respective Blue Origin and SpaceX firms. Musk hopes to colonize Mars, and Bezos told a morning news show that “we can move all heavy industry and all polluting industry off of Earth and operate it in space.”7 There is always another frontier, if you know where to look. At every step, capital used up working people, churning through earth’s only truly inexhaustible resource.

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike by Eugene W. Holland

business cycle, capital controls, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, commons-based peer production, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, deskilling, Eben Moglen, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lewis Mumford, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-Fordism, price mechanism, Richard Stallman, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, slashdot, Stuart Kauffman, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wage slave, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Friedman, for example, depicts a plethora of distinct utopian societies scattered across the globe, each embodying its own unique set of ideals uncontaminated by contact with the others.20 Robinson’s sprawling novels, similarly, portray a wide range of different utopian experiments and communities in the course of his account of the colonization of Mars.21 The significance of this recent direction taken in utopian thought and fiction is the departure from singularity and total­ ity that had seemed inherent in, if not indeed definitive of, the genre: the plurality of utopian impulses and ideals defies the singular perfection of utopia. From here it is but one step—albeit a significant one—to the vo­ cation of affirmative nomadology to detect and reinforce utopian ideals in actually existing institutions of whatever scale, from neighborhoods to virtual Internet communities to production cooperatives to far-flung global trade arrangements.22 The utopian character of these institutions remains completely distinct from any singular utopia conceived as a total, self-contained community, for they are interwoven transversally with one another and constitute something like a meshwork rather than a unified whole.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

In 2003 Cocconi came into contact with two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs straight out of the dot-com boom. One of them, Elon Musk, was a cofounders of PayPal. After selling it to eBay, Musk launched SpaceX, a commercial space shuttle business, which Musk intended to be a way station to his larger ambition—enabling people to colonize Mars. The other entrepreneur, Martin Eberhard, offered Cocconi $150,000 in investment for him to experiment with a different kind of battery: a pack composed of lithium-ion batteries, lots and lots of lithium-ion batteries. Cocconi took the money, made the modification, and the car hit 60 miles per hour in only 3.6 seconds.13 Not long after, Eberhard and Musk joined forces and together licensed Cocconi’s technology.

Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis by Jeanna Smialek

Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Henri Poincaré, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, junk bonds, laissez-faire capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market clearing, meme stock, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, short squeeze, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, working-age population, yield curve

“There will inevitably be those whose plans are grand, and whose patience with democratic accountability low, who will begin to ask why the Fed can’t fund repairs of the country’s aging infrastructure, or finance the building of a border wall, or purchase trillions of dollars of green energy bonds, or underwrite the colonization of Mars,” Quarles warned in a speech he delivered just before leaving the Fed. While his concerns echoed the ones Toomey and Mnuchin had cited in ending the programs at the end of 2020, Quarles clearly did not think that shutting down those facilities rapidly had done enough to seal the Pandora’s box that the corporate bond market rescues, Main Street, the municipal loan program, and the broader crisis response had opened.

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! by Joseph N. Pelton

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, global pandemic, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, gravity well, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, life extension, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megastructure, new economy, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Planet Labs, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Ray Kurzweil, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tunguska event, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize

Technology and specifically space technology can help respond to these challenges. Yet without an agreed global pathway to a sustainable future and a solid plan for coping with the limits to growth the long-term prospects for Earthlings are bleak. It may take decades—maybe even centuries—to devise the technology to create space systems that can colonize the Moon or Mars and to protect us from major cosmic hazards , but the time to start is now. It could take humans millenniums to build capabilities to go to other star systems with any hope of long-term survival . Fortunately we do not have to solve all the challenges at once. Realizing the wealth of resources in the skies can and should help us to start to develop and execute some very long-term plans .

…

Likewise those that are fearful of technological advance, and wish to retain traditional or totalitarian forms of leadership and governance, will seek to forestall not only the technology but also the cultural, social and religious changes that are implied with this sweeping evolution of human history. But massive and revolutionary technological change will be hard to resist. In the space arena, the possibilities of rapid change to support space mining, solar power satellites, space colonization or even terraforming of the Moon and Mars may all accelerate rapidly. In short, the shift to a space-based economy of the future will be driven by Earth-based changes known most succinctly as the Singularity . What was uneconomic or unthinkable just decades ago, may suddenly become technologically and economically feasible at a very accelerated pace.

The Planets by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, Colonization of Mars, Dava Sobel, Edmond Halley, Eratosthenes, friendly fire, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, music of the spheres, Norman Mailer, Suez canal 1869, Thales of Miletus

Astrobiologists insist that life on Mars, like the once-plentiful water on Mars, could simply have gone underground to avoid these dangers, and may yet be discovered, extant or extinct, through diligent pursuit. Astronomers agree, asserting that even if Mars ultimately proves void of life, its unique environment will continue to lure robotic and human explorers to its frozen shores. Some visionaries see in Mars a potential homestead on a high frontier, awaiting colonization.* Scientifically feasible programs for “terraforming” Mars to enhance its Earthly likeness propose the fabrication of suitable habitats by, for example, heating the Martian south pole with huge space-based mirrors that would focus and magnify the Sun’s light, forcing the residual polar cap of carbon dioxide to sublime like a geyser of greenhouse gas.

Insight Guides South America (Travel Guide eBook) by Insight Guides

Airbnb, anti-communist, Atahualpa, bike sharing, call centre, centre right, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, digital nomad, Easter island, European colonialism, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, invention of writing, Kickstarter, land reform, urban planning, urban renewal

PRESERVING THE LAND The 1,240-km (769-mile) narrow, gravel Carretera Austral (Southern Highway) is the result of the Pinochet dictatorship’s effort to tighten links between central Chile and its far-flung Patagonian territory. The road winds through pretty villages, along mint-green rivers and past mountain-rimmed lakes. Sadly, environmental injuries stemming from the mindlessly burned forests during early 20th-century colonization still mar the landscape. The creation of the Red de Parques de Patagonia (National Parks’ Network) was the condition imposed by Kristine Tompkins, wife of the late environmentalist Douglas Tompkins, before she donated the Conservación Patagónica to the state of Chile in 2017. The largest private land donation ever has led to the creation of several national parks, including Pumalin, Melimoyu, and Patagonia.

Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders by Joshua Foer, Dylan Thuras, Ella Morton

anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, centre right, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, cosmic microwave background, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Day of the Dead, double helix, East Village, Easter island, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, Haight Ashbury, horn antenna, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, intentional community, Jacques de Vaucanson, Kowloon Walled City, Louis Pasteur, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, urban sprawl, Vesna Vulović, white picket fence, wikimedia commons, working poor

Working with NASA, Lee and a team of about 30 researchers make yearly summer visits to the spot, conducting field tests to help plan for Mars expeditions. Using a tent city as base camp, the scientists drive all-terrain vehicles to simulate rovers, operate automated drills to look for water, take walks in spacesuit prototypes, and conduct mapping tests using robots. Though human colonization of Mars is still but a distant dream, the Haughton crater experiments offer a practical look into how we might get there. New research projects take place every summer, and the eventual goal is for Red Planet–bound astronauts to use the crater as a training ground before blasting off to Mars for real.

Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration by Buzz Aldrin, Leonard David

Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, Elon Musk, gravity well, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Strategic Defense Initiative, systems thinking, telepresence, telerobotics, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century by Tim Higgins

air freight, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, call centre, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, family office, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global pandemic, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, paypal mafia, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact by Steven Kotler

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, Dennis Tito, epigenetics, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, interchangeable parts, Kevin Kelly, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, North Sea oil, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, theory of mind, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

But gold in ’dem hills isn’t the only thing fueling our space rock fire. In the past few years, for reasons ranging from “because it’s what’s next” to “because it’s the only way to guarantee the survival of the species,” NASA has firmly committed itself to establishing off-world colonies. While colonizing either the Moon or Mars seems the next logical step, most feel that we should learn to crawl before we walk. “Visiting an asteroid is a fantastic stepping stone to Mars,” says Derek Sears, professor of space and planetary science at the University of Arkansas. “You can test out the hardware and the human behavior.”

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ford Model T, full employment, Hans Moravec, hydraulic fracturing, index card, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, selection bias, Silicon Valley, space junk, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the scientific method, transcontinental railway

Mercury astronaut John Glenn, the first American to orbit the planet, predicted that within a century we would have linked atomic power plants to “anti-gravity devices,” fundamentally rewriting the laws of physics and revolutionizing life and transportation on Earth and in the heavens alike. Another Mercury astronaut, Scott Carpenter, expressed his hope that the anti-gravity “scheme” would help humans colonize the Moon, the Martian moon Phobos, and Mars. The prominent astronomer Fred Whipple suggested that Earth’s population would have stabilized at 100 billion, and that planetary-scale engineering of Mars would have altered the Red Planet’s climate to allow its 700,000 inhabitants to be self-sufficient. The director of NASA’s Office of Manned Space Flight, Dyer Brainerd Holmes, suggested that in 2063 crewed vehicles would be reaching “velocities approaching the speed of light,” and that society would be debating whether to send humans to nearby stars.

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

MARTIN FORD: What about the concern that a superintelligent system might someday break free of our control and pose a genuine threat to humanity? ANDREW NG: I’ve said before that worrying about AGI evil killer robots today is like worrying about overpopulation on the planet Mars. A century from now I hope that we will have colonized the planet Mars. By that time, it may well be overpopulated and polluted, and we might even have children dying on Mars from pollution. It’s not that I’m heartless and don’t care about those dying children—I would love to find a solution to that, but we haven’t even landed on the planet yet, so I find it difficult to productively work on that problem.

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

Apollo 13, Biosphere 2, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Danny Hillis, digital map, double helix, epigenetics, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filipino sailors, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, kremlinology, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, machine readable, microbiome, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, phenotype, Potemkin village, pre–internet, random walk, remote working, selection bias, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, statistical model, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tunguska event, VTOL, zero day, éminence grise

Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, inflight wifi, intermodal, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mercator projection, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, Virgin Galactic

See also Omelek site Rotary Rocket, 142 Roth, Ed, 184 Sales, 95–116 Scaled Composites, 39–40 Scorpius, 79–80 Sea Launch, 125, 126 Seal Beach, 53 Searles, Rachel, 21, 22 Sea salt spray and corrosion, 121–23, 233 Sensors, 124, 136 September 11 attacks (2001), 98–99 Sexism, 51, 62 Sheehan, Mike, 185, 190–91, 193, 195–96 Shotwell, Gwynne, 255–56 at Aerospace Corporation, 102 Air Force and, 61–62 background of, 99–101 at Chrysler, 101–2 Falcon 1’s Washington, D.C. debut, 105 Flight One failure, 120 Flight Four launch, 202–3 success, 210–11 hiring of, 95–98 Lockheed Martin and, 112–13 at Microcosm, 50, 95, 96, 102 Omelek site, 54–55 Quake parties, 17–18 sales, 17, 54–55, 96, 97–98, 103–4, 106–7, 112–14, 115, 116, 216, 220 222 Shotwell, Robert, 202–3, 210 Sloan, Chris, 262 Slosh baffles, 127–28, 138, 140 Society of Women Engineers, 100 Solar sails, 10, 164 Soyuz, 93 Space and Missile Defense Command, U.S. Army (USASMDC), 55–57 Space Angels, 113 Space colonization, 12, 217, 232, 244, 256. See also Mars mission Space ethos, 138–39, 236 Space Launch Complex 3 (SLC-3), 52–53, 65 Space policy, 64–65, 145, 169, 220, 229–30, 235 SpaceShipOne, 39–40 Space Shuttle Atlantis, 90 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, 65, 101 Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, 90, 107 Space Shuttle Discovery, 70–71, 102 SpaceX Dragon.

Icehenge by Kim Stanley Robinson

Buckminster Fuller, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, double helix, Easter island, gravity well, Kim Stanley Robinson

Martians by Kim Stanley Robinson

A Pattern Language, Colonization of Mars, double helix, epigenetics, Great Leap Forward, hydroponic farming, Kim Stanley Robinson, Live Aid, scientific worldview, Zeno's paradox

he cries. “What a Brit he is. You know climbers are the same everywhere. I come all the way to Mars and find just the people you'd expect to find on Ben Nevis. 'Course it stands to reason, doesn't it? That New Scotland school and all.” It is true; from the very start of the colonization, British climbers have been coming to Mars in search of new climbs, and many of them have stayed. “And I'll tell you,” Arthur continues, “those guys are never happier than when it's blowing force ten and dumping snow by the dump truck. Or not snow, actually. More like sleet, that's what they want. One degree rain, or wet snow.

The Diet Myth: The Real Science Behind What We Eat by Tim Spector

biofilm, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, David Strachan, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Great Leap Forward, hygiene hypothesis, Kickstarter, life extension, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microbiome, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, satellite internet, Steve Jobs, twin studies

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

Colonization of Mars, double helix, gravity well, Kim Stanley Robinson, Menlo Park, mutually assured destruction, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Tragedy of the Commons, warehouse robotics

” — Michael Bishop, Science Fiction Age “If Red Mars were a movie, it would feature a cast of charismatic stars . . . big special effects and set-pieces, and a literate script full of intrigue, romance, and high adventure . . . Fortunately, it is a novel, and as fully-imagined a science fiction novel as any I can think of.” — Locus “This epic tale of colonization, settlement, and revolution on Mars is a people story despite lots of technical detail: it is impossible to stop reading.” — The Philadelphia Press “Splendid characters in a brilliantly realized and utterly convincing setting . . . For power, scope, depth, and detail, no other Martian epic comes close. . . .

What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence by John Brockman

Adam Curtis, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, bread and circuses, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, constrained optimization, corporate personhood, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, discrete time, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, endowment effect, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial engineering, Flash crash, friendly AI, functional fixedness, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information trail, Internet of things, invention of writing, iterative process, James Webb Space Telescope, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, lolcat, loose coupling, machine translation, microbiome, mirror neurons, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, RFID, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, Satyajit Das, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing machine, Turing test, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Y2K

To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini

back-to-the-land, clean water, Colonization of Mars, cryptocurrency, dark matter, friendly fire, gravity well, heat death of the universe, hive mind, independent contractor, low earth orbit, mandelbrot fractal, megastructure, random walk, risk tolerance, time dilation, Vernor Vinge

Some of the cities/outposts are funded by corporations. Some by nations back on Earth. Either way, colonies are highly dependent on supplies from Sol to begin with, and most of the colonists end up deep in debt after buying the various pieces of equipment they need. 2154–2230: Weyland colonized. Numenism founded on Mars by Sal Horker II circa 2165–2179 (est.). As they grow, colonies begin to assert their independence from Earth and Sol. Clashes between local factions (e.g., the Unrest on Shin-Zar). Relations with Earth grow fractious. Venus tries and fails to win its independence in the Zahn Offensive.

Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World by Paul Stamets

clean water, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, Exxon Valdez, invention of gunpowder, Louis Pasteur, phenotype, precautionary principle

It is possible that proto-germplasm could travel throughout the galactic expanses riding upon comets or carried by stellar winds. This form of interstellar protobiological migration, known as panspermia, does not sound as farfetched today as it did when first proposed by Sir Fred Doyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe in the early 1970s. NASA considered the possibility of using fungi for interplanetary colonization. Now that we have landed rovers on Mars, NASA takes seriously the unknown consequences that our microbes will have on seeding other planets. Spores have no borders. FIGURE 10 Hurricane Isabella approaches North America in October 2003. FIGURE 11 Spiral galaxies conform to the same archetypal pattern as hurricanes and mycelium.

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, East Village, Future Shock, global village, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, information retrieval, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open immigration, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, RAND corporation, social intelligence, Teledyne, the market place, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

Daniele Petrucci in Bologna and other scientists in the United States and the Soviet Union, makes it possible for women to have babies without the discomfort of pregnancy. The potential applications of such discoveries raise memories of Brave New World and Astounding Science Fiction. Thus Dr. Hafez, in a sweep of his imagination, suggests that fertilized human eggs might be useful in the colonization of the planets. Instead of shipping adults to Mars, we could ship a shoebox full of such cells and grow them into an entire citysize population of humans. "When you consider how much it costs in fuel to lift every pound off the launch pad," Dr. Hafez observes, "why send full-grown men and women aboard space ships? Instead, why not ship tiny embryos, in the care of a competent biologist ...

The Rough Guide to South America on a Budget (Travel Guide eBook) by Rough Guides

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Atahualpa, banking crisis, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, centre right, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, company town, Day of the Dead, discovery of the americas, Easter island, Francisco Pizarro, garden city movement, gentrification, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, it's over 9,000, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, off grid, openstreetmap, place-making, restrictive zoning, side project, Skype, sustainable-tourism, the long tail, trade route, urban sprawl, walkable city

In the summer season (mid-Dec to March), millions of city-dwellers descend on the place, generating vibrant eating, drinking and entertainment scenes (or overcrowding and overpricing, depending on your point of view). Though Mar del Plata may have lost some of its lustre, glimpses of glamour still abound in the city’s restored early twentieth-century mansions – check out French-style Villa Ortiz Basualdo, now the Museo Municipal de Arte, at Av Colón 1189, the MAR Museo Municipal de Arte Contemporáneo, Avenida F.U. Camet and Dardo Rocha, and the Centro Cultural Victoria Ocampo, Matheu 1851. The renowned International Film Festival is held in Mar del Plata in November, showing new Argentine and international films. Nearby Cariló and Mar de los Pampas are both eco-resorts that provide a more laidback seaside experience, set within beautiful pine forests.

Lonely Planet Chile & Easter Island (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet, Carolyn McCarthy, Kevin Raub

California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, centre right, Colonization of Mars, company town, East Village, Easter island, gentrification, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, land reform, low cost airline, mass immigration, New Urbanism, off grid, off-the-grid, place-making, QR code, rewilding, satellite internet, Skype, sustainable-tourism, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, white picket fence

Spain by Lonely Planet Publications, Damien Simonis

Atahualpa, business process, call centre, centre right, Colonization of Mars, discovery of the americas, Francisco Pizarro, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, Guggenheim Bilbao, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, intermodal, Islamic Golden Age, land reform, large denomination, low cost airline, megaproject, place-making, Skype, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Winter of Discontent, young professional

The fifth- and sixth-floor rooms have large balconies at no extra cost. The family also runs Pensión and Restaurante del Mar, slightly cheaper and just down the road at Calle Pintor Lozano 5, where guests staying at the Los Ángeles eat. Hotel Colón (96 585 04 12; www.hotelcolon.net; Paseo de Colón 3; s €38-62, d €48-96; mid-Mar–Oct; ) Conveniently positioned where the old town meets Playa del Poniente, the Colón is great value outside high season. Half-board is only €4 more than B&B, though don’t expect fine cuisine. West-facing rooms have great views of Playa del Poniente. Hotel La Santa Faç (96 585 40 63; www.santafazhotel.com in Spanish; Calle Santa Faç 18; s/d/tr €50/85/125; Apr-Oct; ) This long-established hotel, sandwiched between two streets in the old quarter, is friendly and full of character.