Thoughts on Elon's good and bad ideas.
His technologies:
Driverless cars: Tesla is a great development to the end of building driverless cars. The approach is to collect massive amounts of real-world driving data from the thousands of Tesla cars on the road, that allows for machine learning to develop software to support full self-driving mode (eventually). It seems Tesla has gone far with this.
However, the focus still seems to be about selling cars over providing a robo-taxi service. Tesla could have easily built small 1 and 2 person cars, like the Renault Twizy, and made it driverless only in empty-send mode (to begin with). This, alone, would have had a far deeper impact on transport progress.
Also, the Tesla cars are fully electric which makes no good sense. It's still much more practical to build with small batteries, while adopting petrol-generator range-extenders. It seems Elon wants to boost demand for his batteries, or is being subsidised to be "green"?
Reusable rocket stages: An old dream and a very worthwhile project. Reusable stages gets launch costs down, dramatically, and revolutionises the utility of space. I salute this development, and with advanced control technologies it makes sense for humanity to invest in this.
I hope Musk also looks into the possibility of developing air-launch (using jet planes as a first stage) and maybe even ground-launch, via a magnetically suspended first-stage being fired through a vacuum tube in a mountain. These approaches could be much more affordable still, if demand for space access steadily increases.
StarLink: Another excellent development, made more possible with cheap space launching. Giving us the internet from anywhere is invaluable. Even very low data capacity, in the most remote regions, is worth everything compared to no internet at all. It opens new development and industrial opportunities.
Putting data centres in space: This is one of Elon's gee-whizz ideas that keeps him in the news, which is important enough for a marketing end at least (rockstars are quickly forgotten without constant promotion).
Data centers in space is a nonsense and Elon must know it. The cooling problem (radiative cooling is much too slow), maintenance problem, circuit-killing cosmic ray problem, launch costs, and slow information exchange make it clearly unrealistic. We would be far better off building data centres at the north pole where it's nice and chilly, if energy costs are so formidable.
The battery and solar power obsession: Elon talks about solar energy being free and vast energy, as though that's an argument to invest in it. But the truth is all energy is 'free' and vast. The cost is in converting it to non-intermittent power, and distributing it. Overall, solar, like wind, is problematic as a major energy source because it's intermittent and expensive.
Coal, gas, oil, nuclear, geothermal use/create a stable heat source which outperforms solar as a practical energy option. If Elon really wants to solve energy problems, then he should invest in deep geothermal drilling which has the greatest promise for one day giving everyone, everywhere, cheap and stable electricity with no concerning environmental externality.
Storing energy in batteries is expensive, hugely resource intensive, and relatively inefficient. There's a place for it, but as a mass-scale solution to solve the problem of solar's intermittent power output, they are clearly unrealistic. If Elon wants to store energy efficiently, then he should look to pumping water up hill into reservoirs, or maybe creating giant flywheels, or extremely wide fly-hoops magnetically suspended in a vacuum - as more plausible solutions. Batteries are great for campervans, but not cities.
HyerLoop: Another gimmick. The problem with using a vacuum tube for travel, is it becomes very difficult to load for high (economically viable) capacities. There are other formidable problems such as earthquakes, that could destabilise the supersonic shuttle leading to total disaster. I doubt this could be reliably defended against, for when the tube jolts from a big one. Also terrorists could easily destroy the tube with a modest explosive. It's vulnerable. Aircraft will be king for a long time yet, I would say. If we ever see vacuum tubes, they will most like be placed underground.
The Boring company: I love the fact that Elon is looking to reduce the cost of tunneling. I hope he sticks with it. There's much to be gained from cheaper tunneling. However, using vertical lifts to load cars into an underground tunnel is silly. You will never achieve economically viable capacities like this. Again he must know that, so it demonstrates his willingness to talk up rubbish to keep his name in the arena.
Optimus: Mobile robots supported by AI will have a massive impact on our world, and these are very good developments. Robotics (and AI) supporting medical professionals is particularity exciting. But humanoid robots seem a gimmick to me. More practical robots will not be humanoid (usually) and will be more optimised to their tasks.
The structural optimum for a mechanical system is different to a biological system. Making a robot move on legs instead of wheels only makes it slow, expensive and inefficient. Legs are only good for highly unusual terrain that wheels can't negotiate.
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Elon's politics:
I like Elon's politics and I share his revulsion for government waste and cronyism, but he talks populist nonsense when it comes to Western fertility.
Yes, it's true that Western birthrates are declining, but to suggest this is some kind of existential threat is wrong. Firstly, technology (including his technology) will comfortably overcome the problem of supporting an aging population. Secondly, encouraging people to have kids for reasons other than a simple love for children, is the very last thing we should want to do...
Our world is already overrun by badly abused and unloved people, whose lives are defined by their scares. If our population contracts to a much healthier seed population, at least for a time, then this could only be a good thing. People who need to be encouraged to have children, probably should not be having them.
Indeed, if the global population contracted to, say, just 1% of what it is now, then that's still around 80 million people - more than enough to protect genetic diversity, and provide essential economies of scale for prosperity. And a population boom could still follow along any time in the future. It's just a matter of making it easy for people to have children again, by building private pro-family villages and getting rid of institutional schooling (and other).
Elon surely knows that a population decline is not a real problem. What's his motive in preaching this false concern so loudly? I can only ponder.
Is Elon a genius? Maybe he is, but I see no sign of distinct brilliance myself. I see a highly competent investor, a very strong executive and a clever marketing man, more than I see a great technologist or thinker. He has a commendable love for progress and a desire to improve his world, yet all his investments (minus the silly ones) are commonsense and are from ideas that've been around since forever.
With people like Elon, we should remember that ultimately we have no idea who's behind them. The real brains behind Elon could be people you've never heard of nor ever will. Some have even speculated he could even be a deep state asset, and basically a groomed front-man for military objectives. I have no idea on that, but you can never know. It's possible. Even the celebrated Albert Einstein is 'questionable' on this level. The difference between an average achiever and a superman, can be little more than some critical help from the exact right person/s.
But one thing I can say, is Elon is no god and we shouldn't accept his dominant opinions on X as some kind of exceptionally credentialed gospel (please!). He's a workaholic who loves exciting projects (me too), and again he facilitates some outstanding work, but speaking personally he makes me groan when he goes into geek-mode and threatens waste billions on premature projects (the Martian colony idea is the worst).
Please just stick with the good stuff, Elon. Keep it practical - and real. You have those billions in part because of your talent and drive, but also because of incredible opportunity and the armies of workers who backed you. Please don't waste that money, of which can do so much good, on uncompetitive projects that make no productive sense.
