Crazy Ideas Archive

I hope you’re reading this on some obscure history blog sometime in t he  22 nd Century, smiling wryly at my lack of foresight as you Hyperloop across Mars,  past Calrketown, Saganville and New Bezos on your way to Muskbury. I really hope you   are because I’d like nothing better than to be proved conclusively wrong with this crazy idea – maybe Space X won’t get us to Mars. If they don’t, it wouldn’t be the first time the space dream has come crashing to earth. This article –  ‘Paper Rockets’  and the one that follows –  ‘The Interplanetary Marshmallow Test’  – were published in the British and US Mensa magazines to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing. Though different, they have some overlapping themes and language so I hope you’ll forgive any similarities. A giant, 50 metre tall rocket with the lifting power of four Saturn V’s, fully reusable and capable of putting 500 tons into orbit every flight. B...

You can tell Elon Musk was probably the kind of kid who would have aced the Marshmallow Test. The test goes like this; put a small child and a marshmallow in a room. Tell the child they can eat the marshmallow now but if they wait they can have 2 marshmallows when you get back. Leave the room for 15 minutes. The children who wait – the ones who can forgo one marshmallow now for two later – generally tend to do better in life. That’s the idea anyway. The test’s conclusions are disputed but the ability to postpone instant gratification in favour of a long-term goal is certainly an important life skill – for a species as well as an individual. Image: NASA Leaving Earth and colonising space – whether that’s orbiting space habitats, the Moon, Mars or elsewhere – is, effectively, an interplanetary marshmallow test. A species that can look past short-terms costs to the long-term benefit wins. They win in the only way the Universe cares about – by staying alive. There’s no guarantee humans are...