An Elon Musk With Gravitas? Don't Be Too Sure.

I really have no comment to make on his recernt dire predictions about artificial intelligence -- either he doesn't understand it very well, or I don't, but this is a guy who has something like ten kids, all parented via surrogacy from what we can tell, along with an additional bunch of frozen embryos he made with Amber Heard. Allegedly. I'm going to trust my judgment over his in practically any matter, including what to do with Twitter.

On the other hand, he's unexpectedly said something smart:

Musk told Fox News host Tucker Carlson that “if anyone would know about aliens on Earth it would probably be me.”

“To the best of my knowledge, we see no evidence of conscious life anywhere in the universe,” Musk said. “So it might be there. You know, in physics they call it sort of the Fermi paradox after when Enrico Fermi, he’s an amazing physicist, asked the fundamental question, where are the aliens?”

“I’ve seen no evidence of aliens,” Musk said, adding that if he did he would instantly post about it on Twitter — a company that he purchased late last year and where he currently serves as CEO.

. . . He said the military, which is often suspected of hiding knowledge about aliens, would be acting in its own interest to disclose an extra-terrestrial threat. He paraphrased a defense official who once said the Pentagon would get carte blanche from taxpayers if it produced an alien.

Well, we got rare common sense from him on one issue, but then what about his fantasies of a Mars mission?

A crewed mission to Mars could happen in 2029, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk hints.

A tweet on Monday comparing the moon landing to a future Mars landing attached a photo of the moon landing dated 1969, on top of an image of an envisioned Mars landing, labeled "20 --." The tweet, from Space_Hub, an account that posts about space and astronomy, read "What's your guess" and tagged Musk.

Two days after the tweet, Musk replied "2029."

Musk has long seen a visit to Mars as a goal. In 2016, he said he wanted to build a rocket capable of taking people to Mars and supporting a permanent city on the planet.

"It's something we can do in our lifetimes," he told an audience of 100,000 watchers at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico. "You could go."

But Musk's older predictions don't necessarily match up with his latest. In 2016, he told the Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, that getting a "meaningful number of people" on Mars was possible "in about 10 years, maybe sooner, maybe nine years."

However, efforts to simulate Mars missions or a Mars colony have pretty uniformly ended in comical failure, a little like Musk's attempts to have a family. For instance,

For the past five years, small groups of people have made [a] drive [to the top of Mauna Loa in Hawaii] and moved into [a] dome, known as a habitat. Their job is to pretend that they really are on Mars, and then spend months living like it. The goal, for the researchers who send them there, is to figure out how human beings would do on a mission to the real thing.

In February of this year [2018], the latest batch of pioneers, a crew of four, made the journey up the mountain. They settled in for an eight-month stay. Four days later, one of them was taken away on a stretcher and hospitalized.

The remaining crew members were evacuated by mission support. All four eventually returned to the habitat, not to continue their mission, but to pack up their stuff. Their simulation was over for good. The little white dome has remained empty since, and the University of Hawaii, which runs the program, and nasa, which funds it, are investigating the incident that derailed the mission.

According to the Guardian,

In 1991, members of an experimental theater troupe undertook an audacious project to create a completely self-sustained ecosystem. At the Biosphere 2 facility in Arizona, a mixed-gender group of eight volunteers were enclosed in a giant terrarium, with water, plants and animals, for two years.

Tensions ran high; food, and eventually oxygen, ran low. The mission was only completed with the aid of emergency supplies smuggled in. In 1994 a second group tried, but were forced to end their mission early because of a power struggle in the Biosphere’s ownership.

Think of it -- an intrepid crew of astronauts reaches Mars only to be recalled due to conflicts in SpaceX's ownership. Sound believable? But since Mars mission or colony simulations seem mainly to fall apart due to personnel conflicts, it's worth noting that so far, even the most rigorous selection and training programs for astronauts seem to fall short of what would be needed to staff a Mars mission:

Lisa Marie Nowak (née Caputo, born May 10, 1963) is an American aeronautical engineer, convicted criminal, and former NASA astronaut and United States Navy officer. Nowak served as naval flight officer and test pilot in the Navy, and was selected by NASA for NASA Astronaut Group 16 in 1996. . . . In 2007, Nowak was involved in a highly publicized incident of criminal misconduct for which she eventually pled guilty to felony burglary and misdemeanor battery charges, resulting in her demotion from captain to commander, and termination by NASA and the Navy.

Her termination followed an extramarital affair with a second astronaut, something NASA culture has been unable to prevent despite adultery being a criminal offense in the US armed forces. What on earth can anyone do to prevent this sort of hanky-pank on a months-long flight to Mars, let alone in a colony staying for years? And if NASA can't prevent it, how can SpaceX?

There's more frivolity in outer space than just the aliens, and Elon Musk is hardly immune.