It's been a while since I shit-talked Elon Musk, so I'm overdue. In related news (and we're taking the scenic path here, folks), when I was in high school and college, I took Spanish classes. Some of it stuck, most of it went out my head quicker than if someone had actually shot me between the eyes. Fast forward a few years, and I decided I wanted to be Daniel Jackson on Stargate: SG-1, so I tried learning Spanish again, as well as German and French. What I learned instead was that I don't have a head for languages except my own. Yet even with my fairly large understanding of the English language, I don't think we have a word for the kind of person I want to talk about tonight. Your first impulse will be to say "idiot savant," but that doesn't cover it. That's more like someone who has very little intelligence but who knows a lot of stuff.
Let's set aside the enormity (the original definition, not the one indicating largeness) of Elon Musk, just for the purposes of this column. I think he's a complete piece of shit, but I didn't start out that way. I liked Musk when I first heard of him. I thought his goals were noble. Colonizing Mars won't solve all of our problems, but it will buy us time that we desperately need. If there is any single person on this planet who can possibly accomplish this, I have to grudgingly admit that it is Musk. But we're going to look past that for tonight. Because we can all, even grudgingly, call him a genius, right? He is very smart. Much smarter than the average bear. But there's a reason he's not a scientist. He's a businessman, and his business is stealing other people's ideas and claiming them as his own. Take Tesla, for example. Heh. Funny I should bring Tesla up, as I'm sure their namesake would be embarrassed to be associated with Musk, who is nothing if not the embodiment of a modern day Edison. Not the guy who came up with the light bulb. I'm talking about the Edison who electrocuted elephants. (A word of warning, do not click on that link if animal torture is a trigger for you. I think people who treat animals poorly should in turn be treated poorly, but I also have a point to illustrate. My honest opinion: that film sickens me. He did it to prove that AC (Tesla's current) is dangerous, whereas DC (Edison's current) was not. So he electrocuted that elephant for the sake of fucking commerce. So fuck Edison.)
But put that all aside except for the genius thing, because Musk is a genius. But back in 2012 he overlooked the most obvious fucking fact in his entire life and was rendered speechless because of it.
Dennis Hassabis is the man behind Google DeepMind, and back then he was looking to get an investment from Musk to make AI possible. Musk took him on a tour of SpaceX, bragging about all the cool shit he was doing. More to the point Musk talked about how Mars colonizers will escape Earth's problems, like overpopulation, for example. To quote one of the articles I read, "Hassabis agreed, with one caveat: if AI surpassed human intelligence, it could easily follow us off-planet, and kill us there, too."
No. Fucking. Shit.
That's not just AI. That's *all* of our planet's problems. I think hunger should go on the list, too, because the first colonizers won't have anything to eat except for what they brought with them. Sure, they could pull a Matt Damon and "science the shit out of this," but if they fuck up, what then? Pollution would be a problem down the line somewhere. I know it would take a lot of fucking effort to terraform even a patch of Mars, much less the whole thing. Who has deep enough pockets to fund a terraforming mission? Oh, I don't know. Say . . . corporations? You know they would blow money on this much sooner than paying a fair wage to their workers on earth. The scientists would understand the strain it would take to terraform like that, but the corporations have bullshit on their side, and bullshit trumps science nearly every time. How long do you think it would take them to shit where they eat? Or would they keep corporate HQ on earth? With Musk probably being the first one to Mars, I imagine that he would be the one to make the rules, and I don't see him NOT giving a huge tax break to those corporations who would incorporate there. I think it would be fair to say that Mars would be one big celestial tax haven.
But none of this even occurred to Musk, and his answer to Hassabis was NOTHING. He was at a loss for words, and with all the shit he talks, have you ever seen him at a loss for words? How can someone who everyone (especially him) says is a genius be so stupid as to miss that very obvious fact?
One other thing. That article also calls Musk's Mars aspirations a "pipe-dream." They worded that incorrectly, I think. Colonizing Mars is not a pipe-dream. It's a pipe-dream for Musk, specifically. He's 53 years old. I don't see him not having the best healthcare in the world, so I wouldn't be surprised if he lived to be over a hundred. But even that is not enough time to colonize Mars, and it's nowhere near enough time to terraform it. So if there's one thing I can take solace in, I know that Musk will never live to see his dream be a reality. He's a dick, and he deserves that. But he'll somehow still get us there. Eventually.
So yeah, I don't know if there's a word for what Elon Musk is: a very smart person who is prone to occasional extreme stupidity. Can we get the Oxford Dictionary on that?
PS: It's Nikola Tesla's birthday today! He would have been 168 years old!
A horrible thought just occurred to me. What if Musk goes the Kevin Kline route in Fierce Creatures? Ever see that one? There's a scene where he plays both a father and son, the former being wealthy beyond imagination, the latter desperately hungry for that wealth. The father says he's going to be crygenically frozen, and the son is aghast. "You mean, YOU'RE GOING TO BE IMMORTAL?!?!?!" I hope to fuck he hasn't seen that. Don't give him ideas. He has a fickle sense of humor as it is.
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