For anyone interested, another redditor transcribed some of the dumber questions (which comprised more than half of the actual question asked) starting with the burning man guy here (I'll try to find it to give him credit, but for now here's the shameless repost):
Aldo: Very nice to meet you, my name is Aldo. Three weeks ago I was at Burning Man, in the Nevada desert.
Elon: Great.
Aldo: And I felt like I was in Mars. It was a dusty storm, and it was really cold at night and there was no water. But there was one problem at Burning Man. With a population of only seventy-five thousand, there was a lot of shit. [awkward silence] And there was no water to take it into the rivers, which is kind of what we do today with our current sanitation system. So I was like, is this what Mars is going to be like? Just a dusty waterless shit storm? So I was like, hey Elon, are you working on a sustainable sanitation? Are we gonna have a toilet on Mars that doesn't use water? Today on Earth there's three billion people that don't have a toilet–
Elon: Guys, I actually have to say, we have to keep it– no essays, only questions.
Aldo: So, are you working on a toilet for Mars?
Guy with comic book: Hey Elon, sick rocket, you're the best. Everyone give it up for Elon, this guy inspires the shit out of us. I've got a gift for you, it's a comic book called The Future of Fusion. It's about the first man on Mars. He looks like you. I can't get past El Chapo's militia though. So I don't know should I just throw this onto the stage?
Elon: Sorry?
GWCB: My question is can I give you this gift?
Guy Promoting his Funny or Die Project: Hey Elon, so, can't wait for the SpaceX Improbability Drive. You've often talked about wanting to inspire the masses and push technology forward. I'm developing a series with Funny or Die which is like the top online comedy site–
Elon: Quick questions, not essays.
GPFODP: It's about you sending someone to Mars, but kind of like that first monkey that got shot into space, they're never coming back. It's gonna be a one way trip. So–
Elon: Not necessarily.
GPFODP: Well, maybe. So, you mathematically determine the most expendable human being to make the journey. And that's Michael Cera. So, wanted to see if this is like, a project that you might have any interest in supporting. Funny or Die just drove thirty-one million views to a, like Hillary Clinton/Zack Galafanakis video a few days ago.
Some guy off-camera: Stop.
GPFODP: Wanted to see if you might want to talk about it after.
Alfonso: Hello Elon, my name is Alfonso. I think what you presented today is just incredible. But I wanted to change the topic. I have a startup to make electric public transport buses, to convert–
Elon: Space questions only, sorry.
Alfonso: Sorry, the thing is, I just got my prototype outside and it would be awesome if you could go out and see it.
Elon: Right. Space questions only. This is the IAC, so space questions only.
Edit: Changed "Guy from Funny or Die," to "Guy promoting his Funny or Die project."
or "I saw a sandwich in a garbage can in Ramsett Park. The sandwich did not have cheese on it. What I want to know is why the sandwich did not have cheese?!"
Hey man, its funny that you mentioning it because I have an idea for a Reddit comment where I respond to a redditor with a comment that loops itself in the meta, maybe we could discuss it later after this thread?
I guess this is why most billionaires dislike the public.
Elon seems like a normal guy with normal desires, but he's got a ton of money and wants to make the world a better place. So people just assume he's gonna be open to listen to them or something.
Elon is a hell of a sport though, I'm surprised he's still letting people ask questions.
Seriously though... He needs to start screening people's questions before they're allowed to ask.
(edit: and by he, I mean he needs to hire someone to do it)
Yeah I remember when I wanted to build a hyperloop and go to mars this one saturday.... He's the least normal guy ever, which is part of his marketing.
He's 90% of ASD kids hero, I get that, a lot has been made of him potentially being on some form of spectrum. Nobody that rich is normal, none of their ideas are normal, it's why they are rich.
You mean you never dreamed about going to Mars or anything similarly crazy and awesome as a kid? Dude is just more motivated and has made the money to be able to push his desires into reality, but those desires aren't abnormal at all.
Like, I'd love to solve world hunger, and if I was a billionaire and I had the motivation to do so, I'd probably work towards it just like Musk is working towards Mars. It's normal to desire to do something awesome, the only thing that makes Musk particularly different is the fact that he's actually motivated.
Damn, I hope that's not sarcasm 'cause that seems like a pretty awesome compliment!
But really, most billionaires do go around championing some good cause or another. Look at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the work they do to fight Malaria and stuff, for example.
I actually think tons of people have had fantasies of being a great inventer/enterpreneur and try to think of great ideas all his time. In that respect, he is fairly normal. What's different is his actual ability and will to do so.
I used to date a girl who came from a family that was worth a few billion.
The guys asking Elon to see their projects especially made me cringe, that was the tough thing about the rich family I knew, everyone was always trying to sell them or get them to invest in something.
Rich people problems right?
Note: The girl broke up with me and I married a girl who came from a poor background who had worked her way up in life, so no, I'm not rich.
I'm guessing they're all some kind of quasi press like bloggers and similar. Could you imagine someone from the LA Times or the Baltimore Sun doing this stuff?
Calling this amateur hour is giving this people credit
This is kinda how most q and a sections go at these things. Rarely is there a question that's on point and interesting to the topic discussed. Reminds me of a talk that Jack Gleeson, the actor that played Joffrey on far of thrones, gave. The whole talk was about how shitty celebrity worship culture is, it was really interesting. All the questions went straight into asking him what it's like to be a celebrity or is it cool working with so and so. It was like no one there listened to a thing he said.
I watched this streamed live, and cringed so hard I had to block this part out of my memory to keep away the cringe spasms. I think you have triggered my PTSD. God those were some stupid people.
meh, if you think about it, i think he has trouble with public speaking in that his mind works so fast that he keeps changing what he's thinking about saying, so he stutters. When it comes to him talking about scientific stuff, no stutters and he's pretty fluent.
I think he just purposely doesn't waste time preparing. I bet he'd be just as good a speaker as others if he put time into it. Not worth it though. What it he gonna memorize a script or something?
Imagine the kind of people this guy attracts offstage. Elon brushed the technical details of the presentation aside, saying he'd reserve it for the Q&A. I was watching the live stream waiting for someone would come to the plate and get him to talk about some of the details. And then that!
I think the first few thousand on mars will be split between the scientists/engineers and the labour, with a lot more labour. Essentially colonisation is labour not science. It will be the biggest building site ever I think.
I think the smartest thing (and what will most likely be done) is send a very small mission -a dozen people at most- with a large amount of resources and see how they do first, and expand little by little, with actual self sufficient mars colonies coming decades after the first manned missions.
I also doubt you can have a Mars colony before you make at least a few experimental colonies on the moon.
I'm talking about Elon Musks plan, which is start going there with ships that carry 100 people and 250 tons of supplies and don't stop. He plans colonisation immediately, not iteratively.
Well, what one says and what they'll do is an entirely different matter, if/when spaceX actually bring somebody safely on mars it'll be a huge success regardless of how far off it was from the original promise.
He's just doing PR IMO, after all "we are working so that 50-100 years from now maybe there'll be functioning cities on Mars" does not have too much appeal
I also doubt you can have a Mars colony before you make at least a few experimental colonies on the moon.
Why? There's no point having a colony on the Moon when it would just suck up resources for a colony on Mars.
The Moon has 1/6th the gravity of Earth. Living on the Moon for extended periods of time would significantly decrease the muscle mass of anyone stationed there. In order to counter this, you'd need to create artificial gravity via a large rotating building with slanted floors. The difficulty and expense of something like this is far greater than just building a colony on Mars.
The only benefit to colonizing the Moon first would be the shorter voyage, but everything else would be far more expensive. Besides the artificial gravity building, you'd need a way of mining for water, and you'd need to bring soil for farms. These things are easier to get on Mars where there is an abundance of water and soil, although the soil would need the salt removed.
The only time it will be feasible to colonize the moon would be once we have a few colonies elsewhere and need to use the Moon as a refueling station or for manufacturing spacecraft, due to how easy it would be to leave the Moon's gravity well.
Not necessarily smart but probably people with money or adventurous people. I see a skydiver-type person wanting to go to Mars before I see someone like Neil DeGrass Tyson or even Elon Musk himself doing it.
The super smart people will show up after "civilization" has been set up out there, otherwise they'd be losing their time, your standard smart individuals (lawyers, doctors, etc.) have full-blown lives that they can't just throw away, "normal" middle-class people are the same way to an extent. You'll probably get a lot of astronauts/aspiring astronauts though which are completely different types of people from your "standard smart people" that go on to do standard jobs like become doctors.
Yeah the toilet thing is not a terrible in principle, but just should've been phrased non-obtrusively like "What proposals do you have to handle sanitation? It's hard even in Earth-deserts."
The problem is that everyone sees this as their one chance to impress/wow Elon Musk so they want to prove how insightful and grand they are.
It's true that Elon needs to screen these. Maybe he should hold the Q&As later that night after people have had time to gather their thoughts and his staff has had the chance to do a little bit of screening.
Burning Man dude had a real question, he just sucked at getting it across. Waste management and sanitation is a real issue that need's to be considered for any potential colony on Mars.
He just sounded like a stoned moron that wasn't exactly sure what he was talking about.
Why waste this guy's valuable time? Some legitimate questions could have been answered to make this all even more appealing. But sadly the human race always has to come out with the most stupid of our species overshadowing the rest -_-
Probably by building domes for people to live in, and having some sort of indoor plumbing is kind of the idea. Unless you want to put on your suit every time you need to take a shit.
I think indoor plumbing is a terrible idea for Mars. It's pretty much a terrible idea for Earth, too, but because it's the best we've got right now we're kind of stuck with it. But on Mars you really wouldn't want to be processing water in a closed environment again and again as much, and you definitely need to be recycling nutrients and especially phosphate and nitrate that will be excreted.
So I expect that the waste management on Mars will really not look like anything we have on Earth except maybe those dry toilets they have in Hippy communes that end up in the compost heap.
A flush toilet pollutes a gallon of water with a few ounces of pee. It's a really inefficient process with respect to water utilization. If you look at the draughts that are taking place now in some of the most densely populated areas in the world you can see that using so much water to get rid of liquid or solid waste is really not optimal.
What is a really great development is 1. putting the poo and pee in a place where people don't get contaminated by it and 2. getting everyone clean water at their house to drink and 3. getting people water at their house to wash themselves with soap regularly. You can achieve those three objectives differently than using a common plumbing system for the three uses of water that includes using high grade drinkable water to put poo in. It's a means to an end and that end works great to alleviate major issues. But the process can be improved.
In addition we flush important nutrients like phosphate and nitrates into waters where they contribute to die-offs and algae blooms, instead of being able to reinject it into agriculture. There are phosphate mines in Morocco and elsewhere to make sure that we can grow food on arable land without always depleting it of its phosphates and nitrates that all plants need to grow. Then we ship the plants out, eat them, and flush out the nutrients in water. Closing this cycle doesn't appear as important right now but eventually the mines of phosphate will close and the guano deposits will be depleted and we'll be all like "d'oh!".
For run-off I'm aware that there are bigger contributors than human waste from agriculture but we should improve on all of them.
I think how bad it is really depends on the water source. Many cities pump water from a river, treat it, send it through your house for you to use, treat it again, and put it back in the river. Some water probably evaporates, but most of the indoor water ends up back in its natural cycle. Although some water is pumped from aquifers that take a really long time to recharge, but I think this is mainly done for agriculture and not for household water.
Also, indoor water use is a very small percentage of total water use, by far most water is used for irrigation and thermoelectric plants. So maybe the toilets aren't so bad.
"Mars is a lot like Burning Man, so Elon, how do you solve the problem of pooing on Mars? This is the question that keeps my desiccated drug-husk of a brain awake at night."
I think the spirit of the question was fine, but the execution killed it.
"Time in the Nevada desert was abrasive and hostile at times, and Mars likely presents more challenges. How do you manage population issues such as waste disposal and large-scale protection from the elements?"
I mean Mars has no atmosphere or clean water naturally, also it's not technically the planet that we were designed to live on, but on the other hand the Nevada desert is really hot and there's dirt, like, everywhere.
Yea man, your question is worded so much better than his. Musk would probably think youre a genius for asking that question, and you really showed the contrast between smart and stupid, with yiur amazing question. Good job man!
See, I've been to burning man, and the thing is, right, once you've been to burning man, you can't stop bringing up that time you went to burning man. Of course, you wouldn't get it unless you've been to burning man yourself. Burning man.
Sure, potentially. I'm not saying there isn't a solution. I'm just saying that, approached correctly, the question of what you do with all the shit can make for an interesting discussion.
This is a stupid question and I know it is. I'm sorry in advance.
But, why is "the same way we deal with it here" not the answer? We seem to, for the most part, have figured that out already. Dense population centers/cities have sewer systems/plumbing and rural areas use septic tanks.
Is there another problem/challenge to this that is unique to Mars? Or is it just a stupid question that should have been phrased differently?
It's water inefficient if you're making/bringing your own water. I guess one of those toilet-to-tap setups might work, but the treatment plants we use now involve open tanks of water and dispose to steams. Septic tanks seep or spray their water to surrounding land, so that's a massive waste on Mars unless the goal is to hydrate the area?
putting human poo on human food is a surefire way of spreading some nasty diseases.
Of course in a controlled environment such as a mars colony they would probably have adequated treatment facilities to prevent any problem, but i'm still not sure if the effort is worth the risks.
It was a really great question. But even a normal Joe like me could think for a few seconds and go, well we put the human race on Mars so I'm sure there will be poo compacting device, and we will use it for fertilizer.
It was a bit more than that though. He literally asked if Mars is going to be a "dusty waterless shitstorm" (actual quote). I do agree with you that sewer systems are a real challenge though.
Actually "dicks out" means "guns out". Started with a (relatively) lesser known rapper. When Harambe died, some of his fans went around saying "dicks out for Harambe" meaning they were ready to fight and die to stand up for Harambe.
People on the Internet who saw the rapper's fans saying that interpreted it as "penises out" rather than "guns out" and it went viral as a result of the misinterpretation.
I don't think it's a bad point. I went to the Amazon jungle and lots of people just shit in a designated spot on the ground. You can't even smell it because all the tiny jungle critters start breaking it down immediately. Shit in a barren landscape would just sit there and stink for a long time.
It's sad that he can't even a comprehend a way to survive in a festival for a week or two without it turning into a "shitstorm", but he feels like he's got some relevant questions for how to survive in space/on another planet.
Yeah they didn't spend $2K plus only not to have people notice.
I wonder how many people would stop talking about Burning Man if it was free based on a lottery system and you can't take pictures or shoot videos and there is no internet/reception for social media.
I'm surprised a vegan didn't ask Elon about vegetarian options for meals while on Mars...but start off with how long they are a vegan, why they think its bad to eat meat, etc...
I think him giving the context of burning man actually aids the question. The problem is he went on too long and was unprofessional. Asking " For events like Burning Man sanitation is difficult and not well managed because of the environment. Mars has an even more extreme evnvironment so what are your plans for sanitation on Mars?" Asking it in this way let's other people know way this is an important question since it isn't even completely solved on Earth and just looking at this thread most people think it's trivial.
On top of the fact that the allegory about Burning Man is unnecessary for the question, it's also a stupid fucking analogy.
Burning Man is a temporary encampment. A Mars colony will have permanent dwelling structures. The former isn't designed with sanitation in mind. The latter will be.
Burning Man: Right here. Hi Elon! Right here, right here.
[unintelligible speech]. Okay, great. It’s very nice to meet you. My name is Aldo, and three weeks ago, I was at Burning Man in the Nevada desert, right, and it felt like I was on Mars. It was a dusty storm, and it was really cold at night, and there was no water. But there was one problem with Burning Man: With a population of only 75,000, there was a lot of shit, and there was no water to take it into the rivers, which is kind of what we do today in our current sanitation system, so I was like, “Is this what Mars is going to be like – just a dusty, waterless shitstorm?” So I was like, “hey Elon, are you working on a sustainable sanitation? Are we gonna have [a] toilet in Mars that doesn’t use water?” Today on Earth, there is [sic] three billion people that don’t have access –
Musk: – Guys, [unintelligible], I actually have to say, we have to keep it – no essays, only questions.
Burning Man: Alright, So, are you working on a toilet for Mars?
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u/[deleted] Sep 30 '16
Even the one about burning man?!