there are few conspiracies

Plenty of far-left absolutists opposed to any industrial tech of any kind, for whom nothing is ever green enough, and who basically want to cause human extinction or at best de-industrialization. Also plenty of conservatives who support breaking free from oil for national security and macro-economic reasons, as well as the environment - me for instance.

Of course it evolves, now faster than ever--lexically…seems to me we should preserve as much as we can, for the sake of stirps & historians alike…syntelligence may soon render shifting nuances easy to grasp, but what if, meanwhile, we collapse back to a simulacrum of the pre-Watt era…why not make it easier for survivors to access & appreciate our beleaguered prosody--especially if der Sensenmann ist schnell und fur immer gekommen?…it was parsimony, cogency & elegance that propelled respondent to the top in Guiness-time.

Omegamigo: these octo-cataracts must make their exit [under the aegis of Obamacare]...respondent concedes his orthographic fascism as well [fonetix wood sayv tym, but boggle our decendants, obliterating all manner of word-play]…flux drives everything [Heraclitus], but why not preserve as much of the past as feasible? classical usage is a splendid tool for thermodynamic 'conservation of nuances'...innovation shouldn't enjoy reflexive priority…career counsel for Millennials & X-ers: respondent's pre-teen decision to master English grammar in 90 days was career-critical, propelling him to the top in a half-dozen disciplines before age 30…even accountants & physicists can be crippled by Escher syntax--respondent saw it often as he accelerated past those better qualified--despite his unimpressive somatype & lousy personality...meanwhile, what's your position on the 'N' issues respondent addresses on this & other sites--esp. v-a-v necessary but tragic, easily demonstrable, illusions like consciousness & volition…then there's the ontological conundrum--but sufficient unto the day is the terror thereof.

He is creating the First foundation on Mars, while the Second foundation is left back here on Trantor, sorry Earth.

Well, I wish they'd hurry up: http://xkcd.com/1274/

Huckster is as huckster does...absent Max Push, zero happens.

Excellent, Christopher, I hope you succeed fully at this and end up working at SpaceX. Elon Musk is a hero of mine, for all he's done and for his integrity and vision. In your brief words, you speak with the confident clarity of an engineer who has a firm vision in mind and a plan to achieve it. Whatever is learned about fission as a means of space propulsion will also have applications on Earth, where we desperately need fission (go Thorium!) to replace our dangerous 19th-century energy sources.

In my lifetime I hope to see the first humans set foot on Mars. Perhaps they will travel in a spacecraft powered by a system you've designed. And perhaps you & Elon will be sitting in the control room together, cheering with the rest of the ground crew as the pictures come in from the mission.

This is a future that's inspiring to all of us, and one that is worth working for with all we've got. Even for those of us whose only contribution will be our taxes and perhaps some shares of stock, and our moral support. One species, one future, many planets, and some day many stars.

I'm actually a Computer Science major, but I've been a space exploration enthusiast most of my life. I even got to participate in NASA's National Community College Aerospace Scholar (NCAS) program a few years ago. Some friends and I are trying to put together an educational website about space exploration. My personal ambition to document the commercial space industry melds in nicely with the website's goals. I'm in the process of putting together the website, besides trying to write some of the content and getting somebody out to the new SpaceX location in Brownsville, Texas.

Would you care to write an article describing space-based nuclear power? I can't offer to pay anything, but we would, of course, credit you.

There are only 24 hours in a day. I think his focus is admirable. There will be some lulls in between now and the optimal launch windows coming up, and those other problems already have a far more vigorous start. I tend to align closer to you and Kurzweil than Musk in prioritizing this, but Musk's billions could have him overtake my "priority" in a split second, so I don't rule anything out.

I'm just glad someone is working on space exploration, and not willing to let the naysayers piss on his parade.