Elon Musk is no ordinary guy. In fact, he’s the complete opposite. From his ties with Tesla, to being the original doodler of transport concept Hyperloop, Musk is a man of ground-breaking “things.”
It seems as if there is nothing that Musk can’t do, which is why his plan to put people on Mars in a mere nine years, doesn’t seem too far off.
Musk spoke before a large audience at the Code Conference in California, where he mentioned a host of plans for two of the companies he founded and runs, SpaceX and Tesla Motors. In addition, he addressed concerns he personally has about out-of-control artificial intelligence, and whether the world is actually a computer simulation. His fear is that if realistic simulations of the universe are possible, then there would very quickly be far more simulations of reality than actual reality. I must agree, the thought is a bit alarming.
Musk continued to talk about plans specifically for SpaceX. SpaceX’s Red Dragon, a capsule designed with landing on the Red Planet in mind, is on track to launch people to Mars in 2024. It should be noted, however, that because of how far Mars is from Earth, people wouldn’t actually arrive until 2025. Musk noted that first they must “establish cargo flights to Mars.” Getting the first delivery there by 2018 in the company’s planned capsules, a rocket every two years or so after would then provide a base for the people arriving in 2024 to survive.
He isn’t opposed to the idea of being the head of the company shipping the first people to Mars, and as for him, he’d like to go to space himself as well. But, as he said, he’ll likely go into Earth’s orbit first. “I’ll probably go to orbit in four to five years,” he said. “Orbit is really different than space.”
A potential Mars competitor to watch? Musk says Apple, not Google, is the one he’ll watch out for. An interesting sneak peek into the mind of Elon Musk, to say the least. As for me, I’ll pass on the first flight out. Let me know when the kinks have been worked out and maybe I’ll go for a ride.
Filed Under: Aerospace + defense, AI • machine learning