Just because I'm buying something for someone other then myself it doesn't follow that I don't care how the money is spent. If my tax dollars are wasted it's no comfort to tell myself that the money would have been spent by someone else for someone else in any case.
decade+ is not really that long, is it? Say you're correct in that time frame. If you put money in now to a venture that seems uncertain then in 5 years it's going to seem much less uncertain - and so the investment will be worth that much more.
I think there's an oft repeated view that markets only look to the next quarter. That's not really true. Markets (or people) are willing to go in on long term investments as long as they believe they understand the uncertainty. Which leads to crazy 2nd and 3rd order speculation (I think you think that they think...)
Personally putting money into space based datacenters seems crazy to me currently but in a couple of years it'll be more clear as to just how crazy this is. At which point the opportunity (and risk) will be gone one way or the other.
Someone upthread mentioned that arguments can be about convincing the person you're arguing with or convincing the audience which is absolutely true.
I'd suggest that arguments are frequently not about convincing anyone of anything. They become conversations withe people who already agree with you using the person you're arguing against as a foil.
Yeah but more bright is more safe ... for me driving around with the light of a thousand suns coming out of the front of my care at night it seems pretty safe, "good luck everybody else".
Nah, there'll be a lot of people who think they know what happened and there'll be one person someone at BO who really knows what happened they just don't know they know it yet. In the course of the analysis that person will hear a couple of known facts and there will be feeling in the pit of your stomach when all doubt goes away. Worst case scenario is that it's something they signed off on.
I hear what you're saying but ... clearly SpaceX has made some broad technical decisions - I'm think of using metholox or making starship out of steel or falcon first stage re-usability - that seem to have been the correct choice.
I doubt Musk originated these idea but he was the one who ultimately made the decision on them. There were a lot of other people who had the same choice and either didn't come down that way or took a lot longer to come to the same place.
Like I said, genius? I personally wouldn't use that word. He's not an idiot though. He might be the minimum viable product for technical knowledge combined with a large amount of money but that's still pretty remarkable.
No one looks at money that way. If it were I'd find a million dollars under the seat cushions of the couch that Bill Gate's owns. No one is so flaked out they don't know that a 100 grand is a nice chunk of change or what the costs of staying vs. moving are.
I worked with a guy who had an internship studying the effects of some drug on rats. He said he didn't have much of a problem killing the rats but also claimed that he knew his dog realized what he was up to at work.
It made me think he might have had more of a problem with it then he thought.