Category Archives: society

The Big Challenges and Musk

Musk is arguably one of the most controversial figures in technology nowadays. He has undoubtedly contributed to several interesting technological trends that go beyond the “let’s focus on optimizing clicks” kind of trend we have had in the last couple of decades. At the same a lot of criticism has been raised about the way he does business and how human resources are treated in his companies.

The Milky Way as we still can see in some places (source: Wikipedia)

What I want to start talking here is about his work in space and how this stands against the interests of humans in general. Musk is a big fan of XX century science fiction and a lot of it revolves on the idea that the world as we know is going to come to an end soon and we need to save humanity by conquering space.

OK, that is very cool but there are several issues that appear: how much of our energies do we need to spend in space exploration now as compared to dealing with much less sexy topics as getting grips with rubbish generation worldwide or having a plan once automation speeds up a couple of factors of what we have now?

One little issue now: how are the skies going to look in 10 years from now if all the satellites Musk wants to get around the Earth get there? What will happen if Starlink keeps doing what it is doing? You can read here a bit about what scientists are discussing now. The sad part of this is that the vast majority of people in the nations producing this technology do not have a clue about how the Milky Way looks once you get out of their highly urbanized areas. They do not know what we are going to lose there and they do not even know how much even the very polluted skies we have in Europe or urban North America will look if Musk and others keep sending satellites around. What is the cost? What is the gain? What are the alternatives?

I think scientists need to explain in more visual ways what we are about to lose.

On beliefs

Some time ago I read Harari’s Homo Deus. Although I did not consider it a very original book, I found it offered a detailed discussion about how beliefs in science, economics and other fields have shaped the  world and will keep on shaping it.

Hariri presented an interesting discussion about how societies are manipulated by a few. Here the communist elite in Romania, with dictator Ceasescu back in the seventies (Wikipedia)

Harari focuses on what is happening now with humankind’s desire to re-engineer everything.

One item I did not like were his references to the Internet of Things. I am not an expert on it but even I could see he just needed to talk about it too without having a grasp about it. At least that is my take. All in all, it was an interesting reading.