Musk says first orbital flight for moon rocket scheduled for early 2022

"Long term it's essential for preserving the light of consciousness," because, he said, ultimately something will happen to Earth, either a natural or man-made disaster, to end civilization on the planet.

The guy is kind of nuts.

Surely it would be better to invest in trying to protect earth from those threats than it is to try and colonize Mars, a planet where humans cannot survive and where we have zero ability to make it survivable except perhaps in tiny little structures.

In his hour-long speech broadcast live on YouTube, the founder of SpaceX hammered home his ambitious vision: "In order for life to become multi-planetary, we'll need maybe 1,000 ships."

Using chemical rockets is a 80 year old technology though. A bootstrap technology but there is room for more vision than Musk's.

It's as if COP26 never happened.

If anyone spent a few minutes to research rather than spread fake .... The machine is running on methane-oxygen, its totally carbon netural. This is literally world-changing FOR THE GOOD OF THE PLANET yet all the normies can do is spread lies about it all.

The billionaire entrepreneur -- who also founded electric carmaker Tesla 

This isn't true.

rainyday, there are those who who only look down and all they see is their own mud caked feet, and those who raise their heads and see the stars, they are the ones who took us out of the trees and will advance us further yet. Some of the potential threats are not susceptible to human control regardless of the investment. Not to say we shouldn’t deal with the problems we create but doing so is not mutually exclusive to all else. We have ever had problems, and we have learned to deal with them without putting the brakes on; indeed the advancement of science and technology have been the very tools that have allowed us to overcome them and will in the future.

there are those who who only look down and all they see is their own mud caked feet, and those who raise their heads and see the stars, they are the ones who took us out of the trees

If you're climbing down out of a tree, it's safer to look down, surely. The ones gawping at the stars likely lost their footing and fell. And in the case of Mr. Musk, cracked his head. Time he started paying his share of taxes.

Invalid CSRF

The machine is running on methane-oxygen, its totally carbon netural.

Can you explain? Burning methane with oxygen usually produces CO2. I've read that there is a long term plan for creating methane on Mars from the CO2 and water there, and so the net result would be carbon neutral. But I've not read of any plan to produce methane on Earth in the same way.

The proud owner of the world’s best hair plugs speaks.

rainyday, there are those who who only look down and all they see is their own mud caked feet, and those who raise their heads and see the stars, they are the ones who took us out of the trees and will advance us further yet. Some of the potential threats are not susceptible to human control regardless of the investment.

Meh.

Yup, there are threats that are not succeptible to human control. Those in and of themselves do not provide a convincing argument for Musk's ideas right now. Those threats might not materialize for 10s of millions of years or more. Also, the main threat of the big ones (asteroid hitting us, gamma ray bursts, etc) is that they might make the planet uninhabitable but I fail to see the logic of trying to solve that problem by moving to another planet that is already....uninhabitable.

Also, the main threats we face right now are ones that come from ourselves and we can't escape those by flying off the planet - even if we were to succsefully colonize Mars (which I don't see happening) we'd just be brining the problem of poor human governance with us and setting it up somewhere else where it will inevitably lead us to the same place.