Maybe pushback is valid. Why do we need an order of magnitude more datacenters with attendant energy demand and strain on the surround people and environment? What is this meant to achieve?
Elon is not a good person to ask on technical matters like this given both his history of saying really silly things about space-related technologies and his enormous incentive to lie to attract investors.
Random objects floating in space do not have GPUs on them which generate heat. You need to move the heat from GPUs to a radiator, so you are describing the actual solution of radiators in a roundabout way. Radiators weigh an amount and cost money. The consequence of factoring this in with optimistic assumptions is that it's about 1/4 as efficient to build space compute as earth compute. It's hype bullshit.
The CEO willing to do something like that would never find themselves in that position. One becomes a CEO through a process that filters those kinds of people out and builds the remaining into willing participants.
What? It isn't a moral imperitive because it doesn't matter at all from a human perspective. It's not human vs slime mold, it's weird-specific-extremeophile-bacteria vs slime mold.
Life is a name we give to arrangements of matter we prefer over others.
There is no intrinsic "purpose".
The universe itself is perfectly content with dynamics over timescales we cannot even approach comprehension of, and never will. The only driving force in the universe is an evolution from a state with heterogeneous energy densities to one with homogeneous energy density. "Life" isn't even in the equation.
Interstellar travel is not possible for humans. Even if we could somehow induce perfect hibernation, scifi style, how do you maintain an engineered vehicle in the abyss for centuries?
Meanwhile, we can't even take care of the abundance of resources here on earth.
Consider that the only reason you exist (and have wonderful things like air conditioning) is because your predecessors did have a purpose.
> Interstellar travel is not possible for humans.
Yes, it is. Transcribe DNA, put it in probe, probe goes for centuries, orbits a promising planet, then employs nanobots to build humans from the DNA. I.e. a seedship.
> abundance of resources here on earth
Our solar system is brimming with resources. All we've exploited so far is just pond scum on the Earth's surface.
The purpose of any particular arrangement could be said to be to proliferate and dominate others, insofar as if it doesn't do that then it doesn't exist and will be overwritten by other arrangements. In this case we humans wouldn't want to spread an extremophile bacteria, we'd want to dominate it and minimize its presence. Human colonization is different from what you're talking about.
Why? For the foreseeable future we'd survive using a bunch of complicated tech. Not so for extremophiles. How's plopping a couple of unicellular organisms on a planet help us learn to do it ourselves?
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