The presence of a company worth a few tens of billions whose founder talks about colonizing Mars (amongst many other bold claims) and has concrete plans in the subset of Mars colonization problems that involve actually getting there feels very compatible with the original suggestion that the plausible near term consequence is a small number of astronauts hanging out in a dome and some cracking TV footage, not an epoch-defining social transformation
Looked from another angle, fifty years ago the colonization of space wasn’t driven by half of one billionaire’s fortune,[1] it was driven by a significant fraction of the GDP of both the world’s superpowers locked in a race, and the last 20 years’ transition was from nothing in space to lunar landings, space stations, deep space probes, not from expensive launches and big satellites to cheaper launches and a lot more small satellites. So you had better arguments for imminent space cities half a century ago.
The presence of a company worth a few tens of billions whose founder talks about colonizing Mars (amongst many other bold claims) and has concrete plans in the subset of Mars colonization problems that involve actually getting there feels very compatible with the original suggestion that the plausible near term consequence is a small number of astronauts hanging out in a dome and some cracking TV footage, not an epoch-defining social transformation
Looked from another angle, fifty years ago the colonization of space wasn’t driven by half of one billionaire’s fortune,[1] it was driven by a significant fraction of the GDP of both the world’s superpowers locked in a race, and the last 20 years’ transition was from nothing in space to lunar landings, space stations, deep space probes, not from expensive launches and big satellites to cheaper launches and a lot more small satellites. So you had better arguments for imminent space cities half a century ago.
the part he isn’t spending on his social media habit, anyway...