Latest news with #multiplanetary
Reuters
2 days ago
- General
- Reuters
SpaceX Starship: after two explosions, a partial success
Starship, the futuristic SpaceX rocket vehicle on which Elon Musk's ambitions for multiplanetary travel are riding, roared into space from Texas on Tuesday (May 27) on its ninth uncrewed test launch, flying farther than the last two attempts that ended in explosive failure. Julian Satterthwaite reports.
The Independent
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Independent
Elon Musk says his Mars 2026 presentation will take place Friday
For years, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has touted his ambitions to send people to Mars as a way to preserve the human race. On Friday, he'll give an update on his plans. Musk announced the SpaceX Mars 2026 presentation in an X post on Thursday. The announcement will mark Musk's return to his businesses after nearly 130 days enacting dramatic government cuts with his Department of Government Efficiency. He said this week that he was stepping back from his government duties after being Donald Trump's right-hand man for the first four months of his presidency. The news comes days after Musk addressed SpaceX employees about 'making life multiplanetary.' The company just completed its ninth Starship flight mission on Tuesday. SpaceX employees reached space but then lost control of the vessel. Musk has frequently discussed his intentions to send an unmanned spacecraft to Mars by the end of 2026 and have humans 'likely' land on the planet by 2031. His interest in the project reportedly stems from the long-term survival of humans. In at least six billion years, our solar system's expanding sun is set to destroy Earth, according to NASA. In a Fox News interview earlier this month, Musk said: 'That's one of the benefits of Mars, is life insurance for life collectively.' He added: "We do at some point need to be a multi-planet civilization, because Earth will be incinerated." Musk envisions creating a self-sustaining colony on Mars. Scientists believe it could be possible for humans to live on Mars in the future. The climate is currently harsh. Icy temperatures and a lack of water are present throughout the planet. To combat this, Musk has suggested using Tesla-developed solar panels to provide electricity and heat homes. The CEO aims to have one million people living on Mars by the 2040s. The planet is supposedly ideal because it is Earth's closest neighbor, has similar levels of sunlight and length of days. In the meantime, he wants to make it possible for people to travel to Mars recreationally. Still, Musk has missed his own deadlines for planetary exploration. In 2016, he said he wanted to send humans to Mars by 2024. A year later, he said he would offer private citizens trips to the moon. Neither of the plans materialized.
New York Times
5 days ago
- Business
- New York Times
The Techno-Futuristic Philosophy Behind Elon Musk's Mania
As Elon Musk prepared to make a less than triumphant exit from Washington, he told the Fox News host Jesse Watters earlier this month that his rampage through the bureaucracy had made 'significant progress' in cutting waste and fraud. But there was no hiding that the man whose rockets can gracefully return to earth standing tall on their launchpads had made a bit of a crash landing. His projected cut of $2 trillion from the federal budget had shrunk on paper, at that point, to $165 billion. Tesla stock took a nosedive along with his personal wealth and popularity. And, as he rewrote Silicon Valley's mantra into 'move fast, break things and get out of town,' no one was urging him to stay. Prompted by Watters, Musk shifted the interview seamlessly from eradicating waste to another obsession: the looming eradication of life on earth. 'The sun is gradually expanding, so we do at some point need to be a multiplanetary civilization because earth will be incinerated,' Musk said. 'I'm hearing this for the first time,' Watters said, bemused. 'We have several hundred million years, so don't hold your breath,' Musk assured him. Say what you will about Elon Musk, the man thinks ahead. Over the past couple of decades, Musk has devoted himself to three grand engineering projects, all with the long-term mission of sustaining humanity far into the future. The goal of his rocket company SpaceX is to establish a city on Mars. Tesla is accelerating the transition to sustainable energy, autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots. Neuralink aims to eventually wire artificial intelligence into human brains so people can keep pace with machines. 'The guy is our Einstein,' Jamie Dimon, the JPMorgan Chase chief executive, said two days after President Trump's inauguration. That was before Musk etched a new image for himself — a hyped-up man all in black with dark sunglasses, strutting before a roaring crowd, punching the air with a chain saw, declaring it 'the chain saw for bureaucracy.' Musk embraced Trump after a MAGA conversion, motivated by his fear that regulation was choking innovation and his vow to 'destroy the woke mind virus' after one his children underwent a gender transition. But Musk split with the president on tariffs and the budget bill and the billionaire buddies formally fissured on Wednesday night. Musk took to X to thank the president for allowing him to serve and indicated that he was permanently moving on. Musk's tumultuous four-month adventure shifted his gaze from the long term to the ultimate short-term arena — politics. The wild ride through the halls of official power perhaps fed his taste for drama, celebrity and the adolescent heroism of comic-books and sci-fi. But there is another strand that runs strong in Musk, a techno-futuristic philosophy that might help explain how the man who has fancied himself Batman on a mission to save humanity could also play the dark jokester — the world's richest man who gleefully proclaimed the demise of aid for the world's poorest with a callous quip about how he and his DOGE troops had 'spent the weekend feeding U.S.A.I.D. into the wood chipper.' That philosophy emerged from the world Musk now returns to full time, a world of engineers and utilitarian thinkers and tech billionaires, who seem to have designs on everything — past, present and, especially, future. Existential Threats, Technological Solutions In 2022, Musk reposted a link to a 2003 paper by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher who was then at Oxford, with the line, 'Likely the most important paper ever written.' In the paper, titled 'Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development,' Bostrom took a stab at calculating the potential lives lost by delaying the development of technology needed to survive 'in the accessible region of the universe' for millions of years. 'The potential for over 10 trillion potential human beings is lost for every second of postponement of colonization of our supercluster,' he wrote. Such pie in the sky calculations urging the colonizing of space might seem like unusual territory for a philosophy professor — even one with advanced degrees in physics and computational neuroscience. But Bostrom is among a group of philosophers and technologists that promotes a strain of thinking clunkily labeled longtermism. It's a worldview that aligns with — and supports — Musk's futurist, sometimes fantastical, vision. Longtermism is deeply entwined with effective altruism, a more widely known movement. Effective altruism, which developed from ideas put forth by the philosopher Peter Singer in the early 1970s, argues that well-off people and societies are morally obligated to combat poverty, even far from home. It encourages a strict, utilitarian process for calculating how philanthropy can do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Insecticide-treated bed nets that protect against mosquito-borne malaria in remote regions on the other side of the world, for example, are far more 'effective' when it comes saving lives than donations to a local food bank. The longtermists radically changed the equation by asserting that we have a similar moral obligation to the well-being of our brethren yet to come, those thousands or even millions of years in the future. Of course, there are potentially many, many, many more future people than there are current ones, particularly when you throw in the possibility of nonhuman sentient beings, which some longtermists do. So, simply by the numbers, the case can be made that ensuring the existence of future human civilization by preparing for species-ending risks like a massive asteroid strike or global nuclear annihilation outweighs addressing poverty or starvation for a few hundred million current people. For longtermists, the most pressing threats are often existential, and technology is almost always the cure. This is Musk's sweet spot. The focus of so much of his technology — rocketry, humanoid robotics, even his tunneling company — is intended to converge on making 'human consciousness' multiplanetary, an urgent mission he complains is frustrated by rules and regulators. He calls colonizing Mars 'life insurance of life collectively.' Like an insurance salesman, he has his pitch down. 'For the first time in the four-and-a-half-billion-year history of earth, it is possible to extend consciousness beyond our home planet,' he said on Joe Rogan's podcast in February. 'We have to see this as a race against time,' he said. 'Can we make Mars self-sufficient before civilization has some sort of future fork in the road where there is either like a nuclear war or something, or we get hit by a meteor or simply civilization might just die with a whimper in adult diapers instead of with a bang?' Musk took his first step toward Mars in 2001 when he donated $5,000 to the Mars Society, which was started by Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer who had written the book 'The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must.' The next year, Musk started SpaceX. Coincidently or not, this was around the same time Bostrom published a paper titled 'Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards.' It looked at a range of threats: a meteor strike; global disease; runaway artificial intelligence; even the admittedly slim possibility that a future society created a simulated reality that we were now unknowingly living in and which could be turned off. Musk has occasionally invoked this 'simulation theory,' which hearkens back to 'The Matrix,' one of his favorite movies. 'The balance of evidence is such that it would appear unreasonable not to assign a substantial probability to the hypothesis that an existential disaster will do us in,' Bostrom wrote, adding later in the paper, 'With technology, we have some chance, although the greatest risks now turn out to be those generated by technology itself.' Whether or not Musk read the paper, he has echoed Bostrom and other proponents of longtermism, including the philosopher William MacAskill. MacAskill became something of a celebrity intellectual among technologists and financiers, to whom he preached an 'earning-to-give' approach to philanthropy. Sam Bankman-Fried, the now disgraced crypto magnate, was one of his biggest acolytes. Musk touted MacAskill's 2022 book, 'What We Owe the Future,' saying on X — the social media network that he owns — that the explication of longtermist thinking is 'a close match to my philosophy.' Not surprisingly, Musk, who did not respond to a request for comment, does not explicitly identify himself with any movement defined by anyone else — or didn't before falling in with MAGA. Bostrom takes no credit for Musk's long view, saying in an email, 'My impression is that Musk is not a follower of any one particular school of thought but is rather inclined to do his own thinking and to reach his own conclusions.' But it is unmistakable how frequently Musk warns of existential threats, usually arrived at via a 'fork in the road.' In 2023, he said artificial intelligence becoming 'far smarter than the smartest human' was 'one of the existential risks that we face, and it's potentially the most pressing one.' In February, referring 'the woke mind virus,' he said in a post on X 'the biggest existential danger to humanity is having it programmed into the A.I.' He claimed that some A.I. platforms (although not the one he owns) will answer that misgendering someone is worse than thermonuclear war. 'The existential problem with that extrapolation is that a super powerful A.I. could decide that the only 100 percent certain way to stop misgendering is to kill all humans,' he said. In 2022, he posted that 'population collapse due to low birthrates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.' Earlier this year, wielding his celebrity and money unsuccessfully to swing a Wisconsin Supreme Court election, he told a crowd of supporters: 'I feel like this is one of those things that may not seem that it's going to affect the entire destiny of humanity, but I think it will.' And last August, in a conversation with Trump on X, he said he was endorsing him for president because 'I think we are at the fork in the road of destiny of civilization.' 'Civilizational Suicidal Empathy' There appears to be a tautology to Musk's longtermism: If Musk is battling a threat, it is, by definition, existential. 'Musk is a hero in the Homeric sense, in his mind and in his action,' said Zubrin, of the Mars Society. 'He is someone who is striving to do great deeds to earn eternal glory. He has done some. Just as in Homer, this sort of motivation also has a pathological side.' For Musk, countering existential risks gives him broad license. Fathering 13 children by several women is Musk combating the societal risk of falling birthrates worldwide. 'If you don't make new humans, there's no humanity,' he said in a live interview last fall with Peter Diamandis, an entrepreneur and a Musk associate. 'I do have a lot of kids, and I encourage others to have lots of kids.' In a long-running legal battle between Musk and Tesla shareholders over his projected $55.8 billion compensation package, an email emerged that he wrote to a company lawyer in 2017, explaining that: 'The added comp is just so I can put as much as possible toward minimizing existential risk by putting the money toward Mars if I am successful in leading Tesla to be one of the world's most valuable companies. This is kinda crazy, but it is true.' From that perspective, one can see why it makes sense for Musk to feed tens of billions worth of government programs for the global poor into the 'wood chipper' while, two months later, $5.9 billion in government contracts was fed into Musk's space company. Like many donors to Trump, Musk has gotten a return on his investment in the election. Trump promoted a Mars mission in his inaugural address. A close Musk associate is now the head of NASA. Before the election Musk complained that because of the profusion of regulations, it would 'eventually become illegal to do very large projects, and we won't be able to get to Mars.' Now many of Musk's governmental annoyances are melting away. Critics of longtermism say it appeals to wealthy tech moguls precisely because it adds a sheen of morality to their masters-of-the-universe projects. They also say that the moguls' ultimate goal is a utopian civilization of humans, biological and robotic, all A.I. enhanced. Mollie Gleiberman, an anthropologist at the University of Antwerp who has studied the rise of effective altruism, highlights a paradox of the futuristic tech moguls: Some of the same people warning of the dangers of superintelligent A.I. are also developing A.I., like Musk himself. It's another tautology — technological risk necessitates a technological response. 'The vivid articulation of a fear conjures the thing to be feared into existence,' she wrote in a 2023 paper. Take humanoid robots, for example. During an interview with Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, earlier this year, Musk was asked how real the prospect was of killer robots annihilating humanity. 'Twenty percent likely,' he shot back. But given his belief that robots will unleash never-before-seen levels of productivity, Musk reassured Cruz that, barring human annihilation, it is '80 percent likely we will have extreme prosperity for all.' At a Tesla promotional event last year captured on video, Musk's robots were on the move, serving drinks, posing for pictures and dancing. 'It can do anything you want, so it can be a teacher, babysit your kids, walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, just be your friend, serve drinks,' Musk told guests. 'I think this will be the biggest product ever of any kind.' Max Tegmark, an M.I.T. physicist and A.I. researcher, said he bonded with Musk a decade ago over a shared belief that 'A.I. was going to hit us like a tsunami.' Tegmark said Musk distinguishes himself among business leaders by his devotion to not just thinking long term, but acting on it. 'He makes money now and spends it on making the long-term future good,' Tegmark said. Regardless of whether his ultimate goal is reached, the ambition births breakthrough creations along the way for the here and now — reusable rockets, electric cars, a satellite-based internet service, a human-computer link aiding people with neurological damage. Tegmark is president of the Future of Life Institute, which is devoted to the safety of technology, bioengineering and nuclear weapons. Musk, an adviser to the group, donated about $10 million to the institute, which used some of the money to help fund a now-shuttered center at Oxford founded by Bostrom called Future of Humanity Institute. 'People can quibble about his methods and politics,' Tegmark said. But he said Musk's focus on the long-term future and protecting against threats has remained longtermists aren't convinced that Musk has it right, though. 'Longtermism isn't about ignoring present-day suffering in favor of speculative futures,' MacAskill, the philosopher, wrote in an email, adding that the best way to safeguard the future is by 'maintaining the international cooperation needed to address global risks — not dismantling the very institutions that make such cooperation possible.' Singer, the retired Princeton professor whose 1972 essay 'Famine, Affluence and Morality' was the initial spur for the effective altruism movement, is similarly skeptical. 'If you were altruistic at all, you would have paid more attention to the impact that you are having on hundreds of millions of people by the cutback in U.S.A.I.D., or the freeze in U.S.A.I.D., plus the many other things that are happening as well,' he said. Musk is now headed back to the future. Days ago, SpaceX launched another test flight of its supersize Starship. The spacecraft spun out of control and wound up as a debris field in the Indian Ocean. But Musk claims he still plans to shoot for Mars next year. Even Zubrin, the Mars Society president, thinks Musk's Mars colonization plan is 'nuts.' He wants the United States to pursue Mars for the challenge and for science. And he worries that Musk's short-term dive into politics has hurt the long-term goal, since the Mars mission might now be seen as a Musk project and become prone to political turbulence. In February, still deep in the turbulence of Washington, Musk regaled Rogan, the podcast host, with tales of waste from the federal budget. Like the U.S. Agency for International Development, the care and feeding of migrants was a particular DOGE target. It's plausible a tough, careful audit could find money poorly spent, but Musk also came to a more ominous and more predictable conclusion: He had found a new existential threat. 'We've got civilizational suicidal empathy going on,' he told Rogan. 'The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy. The empathy exploit. They are exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response. And I think empathy is good, but you need to think it through and not just be programmed like a robot.'
Al Arabiya
6 days ago
- Politics
- Al Arabiya
SpaceX Starship launched on ninth test flight after last two blew up
Starship, the futuristic SpaceX rocket vehicle on which Elon Musk 's ambitions for multiplanetary travel are riding, roared into the sky from Texas on Tuesday on its ninth uncrewed test launch, aiming for a clean flight after the last two attempts ended in explosive failure. The two-stage spacecraft, consisting of the Starship vessel mounted atop a towering SpaceX Super Heavy rocket booster, blasted off at about 7:36 p.m. EDT (2330 GMT) from the company's Starbase launch site on the Gulf Coast of Texas near Brownsville. A live SpaceX webcast of the liftoff showed the rocketship rising from the launch tower into the early evening sky as the Super Heavy's cluster of powerful Raptor engines thundered to life in a ball of flame and billowing clouds of exhaust and water vapor. SpaceX launched the Starship system with a previously flown Super Heavy booster for the first time, aiming to achieve a key demonstration of its reusability. The 232-foot (71-m) first-stage booster will not attempt a return to its launch pad but target the Gulf of Mexico for a controlled splashdown. Federal regulators granted SpaceX a license for Starship's latest flight attempt just four days ago, capping a mishap investigation that had grounded Starship for nearly two months. Its last two test flights - in January and March - were cut short moments after liftoff as the vehicle blew to pieces on its ascent, raining debris over parts of the Caribbean and disrupting scores of commercial airline flights in the region. The Federal Aviation Administration expanded debris hazard zones around the ascent path for Tuesday's launch, the ninth full test flight of the Starship campaign. The previous back-to-back failures occurred in early test-flight phases that SpaceX had easily achieved before, dealing a striking setback to a program that Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who founded the rocket company in 2002, had sought to accelerate this year. Musk, the world's wealthiest individual and a key supporter of US President Donald Trump, was especially eager for a success after vowing in recent days to refocus his attention on his various business ventures, including SpaceX, following a tumultuous foray into national politics and his attempts at cutting government bureaucracy. Musk is counting on Starship to fulfill his goal of producing a large, multipurpose next-generation spacecraft capable of sending people and cargo to the moon later this decade and ultimately flying to Mars. Closer to home, Musk also sees Starship as eventually replacing the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as the workhorse in the company's commercial launch business, which already lofts most of the world's satellites and other payloads to low-Earth orbit. Musk was scheduled to deliver an update on his space exploration ambitions in a speech from Starbase following the test flight, to be livestreamed under the banner slogan 'The Road to Making Life Multiplanetary.' He was expected to offer new timelines and development plans for sending cargo and potentially astronauts aboard Starship on voyages to Mars, a tantalizing but still-distant future destination for human spaceflight that poses major technical hurdles for SpaceX and NASA. The speech could also offer clues about the trajectory of NASA's human spaceflight strategy. While Musk has been known to make overly ambitious projections about SpaceX's development timelines, he has since amassed significantly more sway over the Trump administration's space agenda. The 400-foot-tall (122 m) Starship rocket system is the centerpiece of Musk's vision to ferry humans to Mars and expand SpaceX's global dominance in the satellite launch market, a foothold the company gained with its reusable Falcon 9. Picked by NASA in 2021 as the vehicle to return humans to the moon's surface this decade for the first time in more than 50 years, Starship is expected to play an even bigger role in the US space program. Trump attended a Starship test launch in November and has publicly promoted Musk's Mars vision. Musk and SpaceX remain influential over US space policy despite his recent shift away from government and signals to cut political spending. Trump's choice to lead NASA, Jared Isaacman, a billionaire private astronaut and SpaceX customer for whom Musk advocated, testified before a US Senate committee in April but has not advanced through the full confirmation process, while significant changes loom at the US space agency. A White House budget blueprint released earlier this month proposed $6 billion in cuts at NASA, bolstering the agency's Mars focus and threatening programs that Musk and Isaacman have criticized. During a tense May 22 White House event with Trump and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, South African-born Musk stood among Trump's cabinet officials in the room and was pointed out by the US president. 'He actually came here on a different subject: sending rockets to Mars,' Trump said. 'He likes that subject better.'
South China Morning Post
6 days ago
- General
- South China Morning Post
SpaceX Starship launches on ninth test flight after last 2 blew up
Starship, the futuristic SpaceX rocket vehicle on which Elon Musk's ambitions for multiplanetary travel are riding, roared into the sky from Texas on Tuesday on its ninth uncrewed test launch, aiming for a clean flight after the last two attempts ended in explosive failure. Advertisement The two-stage spacecraft, consisting of the Starship vessel mounted atop a towering SpaceX Super Heavy rocket booster, blasted off at about 7.36pm from the company's Starbase launch site on the Gulf coast of Texas near Brownsville. A live SpaceX webcast of the lift-off showed the rocket ship rising from the launch tower into the early evening sky as the Super Heavy's cluster of powerful Raptor engines thundered to life in a ball of flame and billowing clouds of exhaust and water vapour. SpaceX launched the Starship system with a previously flown Super Heavy booster for the first time, aiming to achieve a key demonstration of its reusability. The 71-metre (232-foot) first-stage booster will not attempt a return to its launch pad but target the Gulf of Mexico for a controlled splashdown. Federal regulators granted SpaceX a licence for Starship's latest flight attempt just four days ago, capping a mishap investigation that had grounded Starship for nearly two months. Advertisement Its last two test flights – in January and March – were cut short moments after lift-off as the vehicle blew to pieces on its ascent, raining debris over parts of the Caribbean and disrupting scores of commercial airline flights in the region.
