Hillhater said:
Musk may not realise how "dangerous" some of his ideas are.
..Not physically neccessarily, but he has huge influence, so when he says something people respond and some blindly follow.
..such as the Solar+Storage battery total solution to utility power !
The whole Mars thing seems like a folly, or ego trip of little value, but thousands of people are now involved.
However, there may be some usful "spin offs" , such as the intercontinental transport via low orbit, and cheap satelite launchs.
How fortunate that your lack of vision doesn't have the same dangerous level of influence.
Everything is built on something else. Without incremental advance, we would stagnate. Clearly space is inevitable, either for expansion, exploration or just pushing our understanding of the universe. Musk saw an opportunity, or perhaps even an obligation to further the current state of space travel after years of stagnation. In no small way he jump started the era of private/public partnership in launch technology and has made quite revolutionary advances in cost to orbit, primarily by bringing it back to first principals. There's no inescapable reason that rockets need to be cripplingly expensive. The BFR is the latest iteration, incrementally improving on what came before, perhaps leading to revolutionary change.
Energy is the same. Solar is the fundamental power source of the planet, coal/gas/wood/oil are just manifestations of this. Logically we should harness it as directly as possible. We now have an opportunity to harvest this energy directly and to store that energy for later use. These technologies were built and improved after many years of investment (Grants, subsidies etc) with an ever accelerating pace of improvement. We have now reached a critical inflection point where this harvest method not only makes logical sense, but financial as well. As the use of PV and batteries increases, so does the pace of discovery leading to a rapidly iterating evolutionary process, massively reducing costs while delivering incremental improvements to function over ever shortening time-frames. This process has played out many times in technological disruptions as billvon and others have pointed out, most people were caught unawares, denying the new reality even beyond the point where it was all around them. Oil, roads, electricity etc all were niche novelties until suddenly they weren't.
You can argue the numbers all you like with costings based on irrelevant outdated figures, but the inescapable fact is that the people who decide what makes financial sense in all the profit driven energy companies are opting to deploy PV over most every other option. All of the same arguments apply to EV's for primary transportation, we are seeing the same disruptive change play out right now too.
..Wow bill, ita a miracle... 
