Loading ...Until I realised that his car motor was a 140 year old design running on a few thousand AA batteries (and green govt subsidies). Which makes him a brilliant salesman, not a brilliant technocrat.
His rockets are great, certainly. And his Starlink system is fantastic – the antenna design superb – but if it comes at the cost of no more radio astronomy, which it does and he has known this for several years but has refused to do anything about it because “we are not breaking any rules” he is just a selfish arrogant plutocrat.
Then he announced that he wanted to colonise Mars. He makes it sound so easy – “Mars is about half again as far from the Sun as Earth is, so it still has decent sunlight. It is a little cold, but we can warm it up. Its atmosphere is primarily CO2 with some nitrogen and argon and a few other trace elements, which means that we can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere.” All lies. Blatant lies. Anyone who buys into his salesmanship is simply being scammed.
Half as far from the sun means only 44% of the sunlight (the inverse square law). Much slower plant growth.
It is a little cold – what is a little cold? What, precisely, do you want to warm up? The planet?
Its atmosphere is negligible. For practical purposes, there is no atmosphere. Yes, you can compress it 100 times to reach one earth atm, but then you have a pure CO2 atmosphere and plants die at over half a percent CO2. Oh, and you need water, and humidity (more water), and soil. There is no soil on Mars. The dirt and dust on the surface is toxic, nothing can grow there. “we can grow plants on Mars just by compressing the atmosphere” is total bull***t.
Don’t believe a word he says.