Comment by kurthr
1 day ago
Yes, the quote "a million earthlings will be living on Mars in 20 years", is hilarious. It would require us to start launching hundreds of SpaceX Starship rockets a day every day, now. It's just dumb.
I know that there can be an amazing level of self confidence and denial of current reality required to build a new company from scratch, but this stretches all bounds of credulity. I just don't believe that they believe what they're saying. It's so far beyond marketing hype and "self driving" being available in 2018. At some point, this moves from encouraging hype to pure cult level deceit.
Remember that the quote is coming from the same guy who has been promising FSD for years and hasn't come any closer to delivering it because it turns out that the devil is in the details. Elon Musk allegedly has a photographic memory that allows him to commit entire science books to memory but he apparently fails to appreciate real-world complexity. Even if you would want to give him credit for being a hype man, ideas guy, visionary, whatever, it's pretty obvious that he doesn't concern himself with the nitty gritty of every step of the way and he also doesn't seem to actually conceptualize them.
It's very much like the reasoning problem many of us software developers face: because we're used to working in extremely complex business domains without having actual real-world domain expertise, we overestimate our understanding of those domains and thus underestimate the complexity of various domains in general. We look at problems, recognize patterns we're familiar with and think the problem is trivial to solve. Hence "second system syndrome" and all that - even when looking at software we underestimate the complexity because we see the general structure and mistake the complexity for cruft.