"Earlier this year, Musk said that SpaceX was focused on building a 'self-growing city' on the moon..."

"... which could be achieved in less than 10 years. He said SpaceX planned to start building a city on Mars within five to seven years, 'but the overriding priority is securing the future of civilisation and the Moon is faster.'"

From "Elon Musk’s SpaceX prepares for world’s biggest stock market debut/The rocket, satellite and AI company has filed plans with the US Securities and Exchange Commission to float with a potential value exceeding $1.75 trillion" (London Times).

Joe Rogan talks to Donald Trump for 3 hours.

I'm one hour into it, and the 2 men have great rapport.

The NYT headline is designed to make people think that nothing worthwhile happened and it's all a stupid distraction for young guys: "6 Takeaways From Donald Trump’s 3-Hour Podcast With Joe Rogan/The former president repeated his debunked claims of election fraud and speculated that there could be life on Mars in an interview aimed at young male voters."

He courted the show’s young male audience by floating the idea of eliminating the income tax, talking about mixed martial arts fighters, praising the military skills of Gen. Robert E. Lee and speculating that there was “no reason not to think” there could be life on Mars and other planets....

Why not say he "courted" the old women (like me) by talking about the length of the bed in the Lincoln bedroom and how badly depressed Mary Todd Lincoln was after her son Tad died?

Mr. Rogan seemed to back Mr. Trump’s questioning of election processes, at one point likening those who raised concerns over elections to those who questioned coronavirus vaccines.

“You get labeled an election denier,” Mr. Rogan said. “It’s like being labeled an anti-vaxxer if you question some of the health consequences that people have from the Covid-19 shots.”...

What I thought was so interesting was the first topic: how Trump felt when he found himself suddenly President. If that's not a topic for women, I don't know what is, especially when Trump centered the description on his interest in seeing the Lincoln bedroom and imagining the feelings of Abe and Mary. I loved Trump's (seeming) openness, as he repeatedly described his subjective experience as "surreal."

"[Elon] Musk is so wedded to the idea of creating a civilization on Mars — he once said he plans to die there — that it has propelled nearly every business endeavor..."

"... he has undertaken on Earth. His vision for Mars underlies most of the six companies that he leads or owns.... The Boring Company, a private tunneling venture founded by Mr. Musk, was started in part to ready equipment to burrow under Mars’s surface, two of the people said. Mr. Musk has told people that he bought X, the social media platform, partly to help test how a citizen-led government that rules by consensus might work on Mars. He has also said that he envisions residents on the planet will drive a version of the steel-paneled Cybertrucks made by Tesla, his electric vehicle company...."

From "Thermonuclear Blasts and New Species: Inside Elon Musk’s Plan to Colonize Mars/SpaceX employees are working on plans for a Martian city, including dome habitats, spacesuits and researching whether humans can procreate off Earth. Mr. Musk has volunteered his sperm" (NYT)(free-access link).

"The habitat was constructed as future Mars dwellings will be constructed: by 3-D printer."

"For 'ink,' Martian colonies will use Martian regolith. Because NASA does not possess sufficient quantities of Martian rock, CHAPEA used a proprietary, airtight cement-based material called Lavacrete.... At one end of the rectangular habitat, four identical 6-by-11-foot cells serve as bedrooms. In the middle lies the 'lounge,' a small room with a television and four reclining chairs. The other end is occupied by several desks with computer monitors, a medical station and a crop garden. The vegetables are not intended for subsistence but for mental health: Growing plants... may 'provide psychological benefits for astronauts living in isolated, confined environments away from Earth.' Rooms have different ceiling heights, in order, according to its builder, to 'avoid spatial monotony and crew member fatigue.' A hatch opens to a Martian backyard: a tented sandbox of reddish sand and two treadmills, to be used for 'spacewalks' by virtual-reality-goggled crew members. The walls of the backyard are painted with a mural of Martian cliffs. There are no windows...."

From "Can Humans Endure the Psychological Torment of Mars? NASA is conducting tests on what might be the greatest challenge of a Mars mission: the trauma of isolation" (NYT)).

Is Elon Musk a screwup?

1. "Elon Musk’s ‘Hyperloop Prototype’ Was Always a Gimmick" (NY Magazine)("The so-called hyperloop is a theoretical pneumatic-tube transportation system that promises supersonic, emissions-free ground transportation, and people have been talking about it since the 19th century... [Musk] started tweeting about it... which led to many breathless profiles, which led to many people believing that Musk not only invented the concept of the hyperloop but was on the verge of building it").

2. "Elon Musk Is Bad at This/The Musk era of Twitter has so far been defined by unhinged tweets, fleeing advertisers, and botched layoffs" (The Atlantic)("Musk’s fans see the billionaire as a visionary, but it’s worth noting that many casual observers—people whose only real understanding of Musk is as the guy who put the fancy electric cars on their streets—have also internalized the heuristic that he is Good at Business and the type of man who spends his waking moments dreaming of how to save humanity from its existential problems. But what the past two weeks demonstrate is that Musk is, at best, a mediocre executive—and undoubtedly a terrible, distracted manager").

3. "Elon Musk has discussed putting all of Twitter behind a paywall/So far Twitter Blue is a mess and might even lose money" (The Verge)("Managers agonized over the [firing] decisions and jockeyed with their peers in an effort to preserve employment for the most vulnerable among them: pregnant women, employees who have cancer, and workers on visas among them").

4. Neuralink? "Elon Musk’s Neuralink is neuroscience theater/Elon Musk’s livestreamed brain implant event made promises that will be hard to keep" (MIT Technology)(“In a lot of ways,” Musk said, “It’s kind of like a Fitbit in your skull, with tiny wires").

5. There will never be colonies of human beings living on Mars! Some people just love this fantasy, but come on!

6. I saw a Tesla driving in my neighborhood yesterday and I said out loud: "I'll bet a lot of Tesla owners are mad that the thing they thought made them look cool now seems right wing."

"In all, with these women, [Elon Musk] had eight children: with Wilson his first child died of sudden infant death syndrome, then he had twins, then triplets."

"With Grimes he had a boy named X and a girl nicknamed Y.... [H]e had twins with Shivon Zilis, an executive at one of his companies. These secret twins were born weeks before the birth of Y. Even before this month was over The Wall Street Journal alleged that Musk had an affair with Nicole Shanahan, wife of the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, which Musk took to Twitter to strongly deny. 'I’ve only seen Nicole twice in three years, both times with many other people around. Nothing romantic,' he tweeted, noting that he’d been at a party with Brin the night before. Musk even responded on Twitter with this key data point: 'Haven’t even had sex in ages (sigh).'...  There was once a bestselling self-help book called Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, which posited the rather reductionist theory that men failed in love because their 'male trait' logical geek brains could not comprehend us soft-headed emotional women. Musk, who identified himself as having Asperger’s syndrome last year, famously wants to move to Mars...."

 
From "Elon Musk, Sergey Brin and the love lives of the tech elite/The Tesla boss has denied rumours of an affair with a friend’s wife. It’s just the latest twist in his colourful story" (London Times).

"She and Musk used a surrogate this time, which in combination with the pandemic enabled them to keep their daughter a secret, right up until Y shared the news just now" (by crying like the baby she is).

"That’s what they call her, by the way: Y. She’s got a full name, but this doesn’t seem like the moment to ask for it..."

I'm reading "'Infamy Is Kind Of Fun”' Grimes on Music, Mars, and Her Secret New Baby With Elon Musk/The visionary pop star holds nothing back, talking with Vanity Fair about everything under the sun, including her thrilling upcoming album, Book 1" (Vanity Fair).

[O]ne thing that really pisses [Grimes] off is how many people think that she surrendered her agency to [Elon Musk]. They took her silence for complicity, rather than how she viewed her silence, which was not submitting to their sexist horseshit....

Mars and masculinity.

Men will literally spend two decades trying to colonize mars instead of just going to therapy

— Daniel Tenreiro (@TenreiroDaniel) December 10, 2020

"There is a high level of degenerate behavior with Elon. There’s a paranoia: Are you with me or against me? I genuinely want to leave the room sometimes when he walks in."

"All of these guys, I’ve spent time with them, Musk, Zuck, all of them; they all exhibit tendencies of total and complete pathological sociopathy. They don’t at their core give a flying fuck about you or me as individuals."  

Said an unnamed person, quoted in "ELON MUSK’S TOTALLY AWFUL, BATSHIT-CRAZY, COMPLETELY BONKERS, MOST EXCELLENT YEAR/In 2020, the COVID-doubting, media-hating Twitterholic CEO became the third-richest man alive, SpaceX launched two astronauts into orbit, and Tesla became the most valuable car company on the planet. Inside the mind of Silicon Valley’s most vainglorious villain" by Nick Bilton (Vanity Fair). 

Musk has a plan to colonize Mars to "save humanity, given that we will likely destroy Earth through climate change, or artificial intelligence, or some other cataclysmically awful human-inspired event." He thinks he can get 1 million people living there by 2050. Bilton envisions disaster because "Musk will be there too, and he will bring his extremes with him.... If Twitter works on the red planet, Musk will still be blocking people who don’t agree with him."

4K Mars.

"The view from 'Vera Rubin Ridge' looks back over buttes, dunes and other features along the route...."

Rush Limbaugh on Mars, part 2.

Part 1, yesterday, ended: "I started out this post thinking I could defend and support Rush, who riffs and takes risks as he thinks out loud. But he couldn't work up the material he thought he was going to find in there and he wouldn't admit it. 'We're dealing here with desperate leftists who will do anything to advance their agenda here on earth' — he really does deserve to have that line turned against him."

That addressed Rush's Monday show, which drew mockery in the liberal media by those who take bait that he knows he's offering, and of course he came back the next day, Tuesday, to mock the mockers for taking things out of context and getting him wrong. I tried yesterday to anticipate what these explanations would be, but going over the Monday transcript, I saw that he got lost within his own riffs and covered up when he couldn't pull his ideas together. He was trying to talk about how left-wing media and corrupted scientists would use the idea of flowing water on Mars to push the climate change agenda on earth. But how could that work, when the focus on earth is man-made climate change and there are no men on Mars?

I saw traces of "the monologue that could have been — the one that could have worked — which would not have been about climate change on Earth but about NASA's interest in getting us to support sending people to Mars."

So let's check the Tuesday transcript, "What I Really Think About Mars":

I doubt that anybody reporting on what I said actually knows what I said.  I doubt that any of them actually went to my website to read the transcript of what I said and then report on it....

Well, I sure did! I went through the whole transcript, sympathetically, and I explained what went wrong.

Oh, those red orbs!

The water-on-Mars Google doodle. Nice, but I initially mistook it for the blood moon. The red orbs seem to be taking over. Free association: Donald Trump said that Megyn Kelly had blood coming out of her eyes.

Rush Limbaugh on Mars.

I'm seeing some mockery of what Rush Limbaugh said about Mars on yesterday's show. Of course, it's taken out of context, as Rush, of course, expects and invites. (I'm sure he'll talk about this on the show today.) Let's look at what was quoted and what's in the transcript and try to figure out if he's ridiculously stupid or comically apt.

First, there was a teaser in the opening monologue. The boldfaced part is what Politico quoted:

Okay, so there's flowing water on Mars.  Yip yip yip yip yahoo.  You know me, I'm science 101 big time guy, tech advance it, you know it, I'm all-in.  But NASA has been corrupted by the current Regime.  I want to find out what they're gonna tell us.  Okay, flowing water on Mars, if we’re even believe that, what are they gonna tell us that means?  That's what I'm gonna wait for.  Because I guarantee, let’s just wait and see.  This is September 28th.  Let's just wait and see, don't know how long it's gonna take, but this news that there is flowing water on Mars is somehow gonna find its way into a technique to advance the leftist agenda. I don't know what it is, I would assume it would be something to do with global warming and maybe there was once an advanced civilization. If they say they found flowing water, next they're gonna find a graveyard.  And then they're gonna be able to say in the graveyard is a dead advanced civilization.  What killed them?  Well, who knows.  This is a bit, of course, of an extreme exaggeration, but this is what happens.

Trump has pundits talking about politics as physics.

Yesterday on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos":

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: [Donald Trump is] just about everywhere right now. And it certainly seems to be working so far, leading, you know, the lead, which a lot of people thought would dissipate, solidifying across the summer.

NANCY GIBBS: When you talk about politics like physics, with immutable laws, with him, everything that was supposed to sink him has lifted him instead.

 Yesterday on "Meet the Press":

SUSAN PAGE: I think that we've been wrong from the start about Trump and the nature of his appeal and the ceiling that he's got....

AMY WALTER: ... I think Susan's right, that all of our assumptions have been sort of blown up in our face. But some of this, still, we still have to go back to political physics. There are laws of gravity that still kick in at some point....

CHUCK TODD: Apparently we're Mars, not Earth anymore. The atmosphere is just different.

AMY WALTER: We're just floating--

CHUCK TODD: Gravity is not quite as strong on this planet we're on....

And while we're up there with the planets, Joe Biden is bringing out the astronomy metaphor. This morning at Politico: "Potential Biden run divides Obama orbit."


(NASA pics.)

"But the problem with thinking of Mars as a fallback planet (besides the lack of oxygen and air pressure and food and liquid water) is that it overlooks the obvious."

"Wherever we go, we’ll take ourselves with us. Either we’re capable of dealing with the challenges posed by our own intelligence or we’re not. Perhaps the reason we haven’t met any alien beings is that those which survive aren’t the type to go zipping around the galaxy. Maybe they’ve stayed quietly at home, tending their own gardens."

From "Project Exodus/What’s behind the dream of colonizing Mars?" by Elizabeth Kolbert in The New Yorker (which I believe is available even to nonsubscribers).

I'm reading that because I read The New Yorker, but by coincidence, I'd just been rereading old Dan Quayle quotes. (Because yesterday, it became necessary to remind you: "What a waste it is to lose one's mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful, how true that is.") And I loved this one:

"Mars is essentially in the same orbit . . . Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe."

Remember the Mars canals?



Almost as entrancing at The Man in the Moon:



But to get back to the garden — and to The New Yorker — here's a March 2007 piece by Adam Gopnik titled "Voltaire's Garden":

Voltaire goes on to detail the hideous theatrics of the Inquisition: the yellow robes, the burnings and flogging set to Church music, the whole choreography of Christian cruelty. The point of “Candide” is that the rapes and disembowelments, the enslavement and the beatings are not part of some larger plan, not a fact of the fatality of life and the universe, but fiendish tortures thought up by fanatics....

By “garden” Voltaire meant... the better place we build by love. The force of that last great injunction, “We must cultivate our garden,” is that our responsibility is local, and concentrated on immediate action... The horror that Voltaire wanted crushed, cruelty in the name of God and civilization, was a specific and contingent thing... The villains are the villains: Jesuits and Inquisitors and English judges and Muslim clerics and fanatics of all kinds. If they went away, life would be much better. He knew that the flood would get your garden no matter what you did; but you could at least try to keep the priests and the policemen off the grass. It wasn’t enough, but it was something.

Whatever happened to Vox and FiveThirtyEight?

So Ezra Klein and Nate Silver took flight from The Washington Post and The New York Times, respectively, and announced that they were putting together these journalism-transforming websites that were unveiled soon enough to massive attention. But the success of a website has to do with the continual drawing of eyeballs, and there ought to be a constant flow of linkable material that is, in fact, getting linked. I'm not seeing it. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but are people reading and talking about articles at Vox and FiveThirtyEight?

At FiveThirtyEight right now, the front page is full of things I'm not going to click through to: "Only 11 States Have Ever Elected Both a Female Governor And Senator," "How Americans Like Their Steak," "This Man Has Worked For the NBA For the League’s Entire History," "Same-Sex Couples Settle Down More Often in States That Welcome Them," "Eat More Nuts," etc. Okay, I clicked on something, "The Power Bob," which I knew would be about hairstyles, coming from Mona Chalabi, and I got to: "Are Businesswomen With Short Hair a Cut Above the Rest?" Chalabi got out the old 70s style manual "Dress for Success," which showed 5 patterns of women's hairstyles and deemed 2 of them bad for success — "too long" and "too curly." She then classified the hairstyles of the 50 most-powerful women in business today, and found that 8 had "too long" and 1 had "too curly." Chalabi declared herself depressed about her own career prospects, since her hair is long and curly. FiveThirtyEight is oriented to analyzing statistics, and Chalabi generated a statistical study, but it's completely silly, based on a 36-year-old book telling younger people how to become successful and a lot of pictures of older women who already are successful, and ending up with bloggish emphasis on the writer's own emotional state.

At Vox, I'm so put off by the central design concept — yellow highlighter — and all the articles that begin with "Everything You Need to Know About" that I can hardly force myself to look for something to read, but I'll go with "Jill Abramson's ouster from the New York Times," because that's a story I've been following and because it's written by Matthew Yglesias and oh, yeah, they got Matt Yglesias slightly lit up my interest. The format surprises me. It's like I've hit the "Abramson" tag on a blog, and I'm looking at a vertical timeline of posts on the subject. I click on the second one down, titled "The NYT's great explanation of disruption," and I get to "Read the New York Times' insanely clear explanation of disruption," which is written not by Yglesias but by Ezra Klein. Insanely clear. Is that sarcasm or has "insanely" become a normal intensifier like "very"? Serendipitously, the topic of disruption relates to FiveThirtyEight and Vox. The Times text says: "Today a pack of news startups are hoping to 'disrupt' our industry by attacking the strongest incumbent — The New York Times." Ezra, restating the NYT text, reveals that "insanely" really did just mean "very." I am now as immunized to the word "insanely" as I am to the phrase "Everything You Need to Know About."

And that's everything I need to know for now about the insanely disruptive websites Vox and FiveThirtyEight.

ADDED: Proofreading, I got the bloggish, statistics-minded idea of seeing if this was the first time in 10 years of blogging that I had used the word "serendipitously." It turns out I'd used it once before, in this sentence: "Car sticker encountered in Madison, that I serendipitously only had to wait 3 days to find a use for. " The sticker in my then 3-day-old photograph said: "Get your ass to Mars."

Blue sunset.

On Mars.

Curiosity brushes off a rock.

On Mars.

"Curiosity Rover Could Spark Mars Space Race."

Really?

Everyone from President Obama to Bill Nye to scientists involved with the project lauded Monday's achievement, the most expensive, heaviest, and technically complex rover ever successfully landed on Mars. It may also give NASA, an agency that has recently come under fire for ending the space shuttle program and which has been pointed to as prime for budget cuts, a much-needed boost....

"The successful landing of Curiosity... marks an unprecedented feat of technology that will stand as a point of national pride far into the future," Obama said in a statement....

Is there that much interest in Curiosity? It seems to me people won't be seriously interested in a mission to Mars until we send human beings. But the space program shouldn't be about providing excitement and emotional gratification to people. It should be science, not theater.