Elon Musk is a Squid Game
Aliens, Fermi's paradox and how the midlife crises of billionaires is costing all of us our livelihood. And what we can do about it.
It must be absolutely terrible being insanely wealthy in this world.
Like, stuck in a hole being bitten by a thousand mosquitoes type of terrible. Or so the unbelievably wealthy would have us believe. Whilst we are all down here trying to get by and deal with the increasing price of butter and marveling at the lack of almond milk in our local grocery store, the collapsing global supply chain seems to not bother those soon to be trillionaires.
No, instead of worrying about their means of survival, these guys (and let’s face it the relentless chasers of obscene wealth are predominantly all men, and why is that would you ask?) are either a) trying to physically get off the planet as fast as possible or b) trying to create a separate virtual reality where they can hide away from the existential pangs of existence.
Elon and Jeff are building metal containers (see, I didn’t make a penis reference? oops now I did) to simultaneously propel humanity to Mars and to shepherd rich actors to the upper layers of our stratosphere, so they can come back down all dow-eyed and speak of the marvel of human existence. Whilst Zuckerberg recently announced his intent to build a virtual world where he and his misogynist frat boy college buddies will be able to play online poker dressed as robots and nigh extinct orangutang avatars. Whoopy! God bless META! Our salvation, it is finally here!! No more suffering for anyone, anywhere, ever again..
.. errrr.
Now anyone who has ever read any science fiction in the last half a century, will be well aware of the term “the singularity” - it was even made famous in a Johnny Depp movie called Transcendence a few years back. Ray Kurzweil also wrote a fantastic book on the topic called “The Singularity is Near” (which I recommend more than the Depp movie!)
The singularity is a predicted time in evolution when human biology fuses with technology and it will be possible for human beings to upload their entire consciousness to the internet. And live forever? Who knows. The singularity is quite an intriguing concept and it appears that humanity is on the right track to paving the way towards this future, whatever you may think of it. The recent developments in artificial intelligence as well as nanotechnology and quantum computing have leap frogged humanity into a trajectory that should take us to this future in the next decades - Kurzweil predicts it will happen before the year 2050.
The singularity is also a useful explanation for Fermi’s paradox, which asks the fundamental question about why we have not witnessed any extraterrestrial life especially in regards to the size of the known universe and the fact that it is expanding in both human measured time and space.
Where are all the aliens?
After Enrico Fermi made this unsettling observation (a few years after he essentially invented nuclear reactors - yeah he was a pretty big deal) in 1954, he died a few weeks later without coming up with a plausible solution, how dare he, right? So finding an answer to this conundrum was largely left to Fermi’s peers. Twenty years passed until one of these contemporaries of Fermi, the physicist John Hart penned an article in the Royal Astronomical Society quarterly journal called "An Explanation for the Absence of Extraterrestrials on Earth" where he tried to explore the paradox a bit further.
In the abstract he writes:
"We observe that no intelligent beings from outer space are now present on Earth, it is suggested that this fact can best be explained by the hypothesis that there are no other advanced civilizations in our galaxy."
In this same article, he then went on to illustrate that if extraterrestrials did exist, that these were four possible scenarios for why we hadn’t seen them yet:
Aliens have visited Earth in the past, but we have not observed them.
Advanced civilizations arose too recently for aliens to reach us.
Aliens never came because of a physical difficulty "that makes space travel infeasible," which could be related to astronomy, biology or engineering.
For whatever reason, Aliens chose never to come to Earth.
Point number 4) could possibly be the best explanation out there. I mean, beyond Beyoncé and David Attenborough, what would attract a superior civilisation to visiting Earth? Our incessant need to pollute our planet? This insane winner takes all, zero sum Monopoly game we call capitalism? The endless wars that we are fighting? The fact that large swathes of our population are effectively starving (more to come on this) and drowning in their own faeces whilst the other segment lives in luxurious floating houses on our oceans?
Yeah, maybe not, the Aliens would probably think:
Let’s wait a few thousand years until they have emancipated shall we?
So harking back to the notion of “the singularity” and how it relates to Fermi’s paradox - well, you may have guessed already. It is a very elegant explanation as to why a hyper intelligent Alien species hasn’t yet visited and that is, because they do not exist in our physical dimension anymore. In other words, these sophisticated extraterrestrials built an internet or something similar in a virtual world and loaded all of their population’s consciousness on to this Alien internet and hence they disappeared from our physical universe altogether. Pretty neat explanation huh?
Well, call me an old-fashioned romantic, but I absolutely adore the idea that Aliens exist and I have been fascinated with them ever since I was a child. The movie E.T. changed my life when I saw it in the cinema and I have been an avid reader of science fiction novels ever since my dad introduced me to Greg Bear and Isaac Asimov’s masterful storytelling when I was a teenager. The first time we connected our family computer to the internet, I immediately found the S.E.T.I. website (Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and in fact the very first thing I ever downloaded was the S.E.T.I. application that used my machine’s computing power to discern the millions of audiographic files recorded by the planet’s largest antennas in search for sounds that could possibly have been made by an Alien race. Yes I was that much of an Alien space geek. In relation to Fermi's paradox, S.E.T.I. mentions the following on their website:
"Fermi realized that any civilization with a modest amount of rocket technology and an immodest amount of imperial incentive could rapidly colonise the entire galaxy, within ten million years, every star system could be brought under the wing of empire. Ten million years may sound long, but in fact it's quite short compared with the age of the galaxy, which is roughly ten thousand million years. Colonization of the Milky Way should be a quick exercise."
Elon Musk wants to be Matt Damon, so bad
Yes now who does that sound like? Right, Elon Musk and SpaceX and their grand ambitions of colonising space. I mean the audacity right? To advocate spending billions of dollars in space exploration, whilst billions of human beings are suffering and living below the poverty line on this (still functioning) Goldilocks planet. It’s simply outrageous and shows how detached from reality these soon to be trillionaire uberlords actually are. They are operating in a different dimension, one void of simple ethics and morality as it seems. One of my best friends works as a space engineer for SpaceX, he has told me personally that the majority of that organisation doesn’t believe in Musk’s vision and worse, they don’t even believe it is physically possible to establish a functioning colony on Mars.
Don’t believe me? Watch The Martian with an aeronautical physicist and then come back to me. The idea of flying to Mars, landing successfully and then building a place to stay on an unforgiving alien landscape is preposterous. The radiation alone will make living on the planet nearly impossible, on top of that the amount of static electricity built up around the planetary dust would make every surface electric and in danger of going up in flames any second.
So it’s a fucking vanity project. Like other men his age, who buy sports cars or date younger women, Elon Musk’s $50 billion dollar midlife crisis is manifesting itself for the whole world to see, in building rockets and flying into outer space.
Now this wouldn't be so tragic, if all of our lives weren’t intrinsically pegged to the amount of money in circulation and as such to how much money is kept out of circulation (or spent on projects that don’t enhance living for anyone on Earth) by the world’s wealthiest people.
Which made it doubly intriguing when the following tweets were sent out earlier this week.
(By the way WFP stands for United Nations World Food programme)
He then went on to say in a condescending horrible way that only out of touch rich people can muster (a la saying to a barefoot homeless person: “pull yourselves up by your bootstraps will ya")
I mean please.
And yes, the head of the WFP even answered Elon, with this unembittered plea to the robot’s fledgling humanity:
In reply to which, Master Musk was decidedly and perhaps a little predictably stumm. We shall see how this develops.
Because after all:
Games of the spineless sea creature
I wanted to end this treatise on the immensely entertaining and popular Netflix TV show called Squid Game. I managed to watch two episodes and then decided it was too much for my fragile and sensitive nervous system to partake, it was just hyper violent and realistically so in a way that made my stomach churn. Furthermore, witnessing all of these people essentially murdering their own families and friends to get out of debt and become insanely wealthy themselves, just didn’t sit right with me. As did the fact that the show has now been watched by more people than any other moving picture on the planet. Not only is it a sad state of affairs that everyone bought into a series like this, it is also indicative of the state of affairs of our planet. We are all in debt or at least addicted to watching other people struggle with debt and it shouldn’t be like this.
With all of these crazy rich billionaires throwing their money out of the window on out of this world projects and even some of them on a whim, deciding to sell their outrageously priced stock, to help world hunger (but only if the money is accounted for - Fuck You Elon you patronising piece of shit) doesn’t this suggest that perhaps we should be taxing the hell out of the wealthy? And using this money to get the world out of debt, so that we can move the boot off the neck of the poor and underprivileged of the world, so that we can ALL collectively start caring and acting on climate change? I hope le grand fromage in Glasgow have been chatting about this at the United Nations COP26 climate change conference, but somehow I doubt it. It just seems like too simple as a solution for them who like to be bogged down in complexity and bureaucracy in order to keep them all employed.
It seems like a fairly obvious way out for the entire human species, or am I mad? Well, I am not totally mad as under Biden’s perenially stalled Build Back Better (terrible slogan, might as well have called it Make America Great Again 2) bill, the unprecedented $1.9 trillion spending bill aimed at reducing poverty (among other things) will be largely financed by a wealth and increased corporate tax. Hallelujah. But it’s not nearly enough.
During the Great Depression in the 1920s, the US had a marginal top tax rate of 90% on the wealthy. That meant that 90 dollars out of every 100 earned by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and the like, would go straight to alleviating the debt of the disenfranchised, so that these too can become vegan and buy electric cars like the guilty conscience tackling yuppies are doing in drones. Because as it stands now, both of those climate saving activities are out of reach for the majority of the panet, as they are simply too expensive.
And also before I forget, check out the latest Last Week Tonight episode, where John Oliver attempts to dissect the homelessness crisis. The TLDR on why there is a crisis; people are becoming homeless because over 70% of households are paying more than half their income on rent and can’t afford to eat
His solution couldn’t be more simple.
Give the homeless homes!
Thank you for reading, I welcome your comments below, let’s start a dialogue if you feel strongly about anything I wrote above.
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Thank you very much.
Mauri Ora.
“It takes generosity to discover the whole through others. If you realize you are only a violin, you can open yourself up to the world by playing your role in the concert.”
The legend himself, Jacques Yves Cousteau.
I don't disagree with too mucemh you are saying but taxing the super wealthy tends to be rather inefficient as government redistribution tends to come with excessive waste and inefficiency which in an interesting conundrum I shall touch upon in a moment. But maybe a better option might be to require all public and private companies over a certain size to hold a large percentage of shares in trust for their employees (or for private companies to pay a % of profit back to their employees). That way those who actually generate the profit get a fair share of the return. Which brings me back to the earlier conundrum... On a planet with limited resources inefficient use of those resources is bad and one of the positives of capitalism in its purest form is that it drives efficiency in terms of respurce use. But perhaps that just highlights that our solutions will not come from the old left to right spectrum. Ideologies tend in the end to be poisonous... Lets move towards evidence based solutions (tough in our post truth world I know!!!). Lets pod cast this out bro! Peace and light brother.
Aran