Prometheus Unchained and Reaching For the Stars — by Polydamas
Greek mythology, which serves as the inspiration for this website, has long delighted people of all ages for distilling the wisdom of ages in colorful legends. One of its more prominent legends features the story of Prometheus. Prometheus, whose name in ancient Greek means “foreward thinker”, was an immortal titan much celebrated for being the benefactor of humanity. Prometheus had displeased Zeus, the most powerful deity in the Greek pantheon, when he taught humans to sacrifice to the gods bones wrapped in fat and keep the meat to themselves. To punish humanity for this affront, Zeus hid fire from human beings. His love of humanity prompted Prometheus to steal fire back from Zeus and to return it to humans. For Prometheus’ actions, he was punished by Zeus and was chained to a rock. An eagle would visit Prometheus every day and would eat his liver during the daytime after his liver had regenerated in the nighttime. In time, Prometheus came to symbolize inventors who greatly benefited humanity and the sacrifices they endured for their work.
Today, we celebrate the monumental accomplishments of one such modern-day Prometheus. At just 41 years of age, Elon Musk has accomplished more during his lifetime than the vast majority of his elders. Todd Halvorson’s January 29, 2005 article in Florida Today, titled “Entrepreneur Aims For an Economical Gateway to Space”, brings Musk’s extraordinary story to light. Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa. He left South Africa at age 17 to avoid military service in that country’s apartheid-supporting military. He came to the United States because he believed “It is where great things are possible. I am nauseatingly pro-American.” While at school, he worked part-time and summer jobs and obtained two bachelor’s degrees in economics and in physics from the University of Pennsylvania. Then, he cashed in on the meteoric rise of the Internet in the middle and late 1990s. After selling Zip2, his online news publishing software, to AltaVista and his majority holdings in PayPal to eBay, he turned his talent, attention, and $100 million of his self-made money to space exploration.
In Halvorson’s article, Musk explained, “I’ve always thought that space is important to the future of humanity. I think it’s important that we one day become a space-faring nation, and I just didn’t see that happening by itself. I just didn’t see that from Boeing or Lockheed or big aerospace companies. So that’s really why I started SpaceX — to really lower the cost of access to space, initially for satellites but eventually for human space travel. And the goal is to one day — although it will take a lot of time and effort — to make space accessible to your average citizen.”
Musk realized that the impediment to space exploration was that, in the previous six decades, NASA and the aerospace industry failed to produce rockets that are both reliable and inexpensive. Government agencies and large, ponderous aerospace companies require — pardon the pun — astronomical budgets. Musk then founded in 2002 Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX to succeed where the others failed. On May 22, 2012, at 3:44 a.m., SpaceX launched from a launch pad in Cape Canaveral, Florida the first-ever commercial rocket into space to deliver supplies to the International Space Station orbiting Earth. SpaceX‘s Falcon 9 rocket and the the unmanned, reusable Dragon spacecraft will replace NASA’s space shuttle fleet as part of a $1.6 billion NASA contract to deliver cargo to space. Not bad for a 10-year old private company which defied conventional wisdom in the aerospace industry and produced the reliable and inexpensive rockets that people said could not be done.
A feature article in IEEE Spectrum, titled “Risky Business” and authored by Musk, revealed much about this most remarkable modern-day Prometheus and his underlying philosophy and motivations. (http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/space-flight/risky-business/0):
“In the history of life itself, there are only a handful of really big milestones: single-celled life, multicellular life, differentiation of plants and animals, life extending from the oceans to land, mammals, consciousness. On that scale, the next important step is obvious: making life multiplanetary. By that I mean the permanent extension of life beyond Earth. A goal like that, something that is important on the scale of life itself, deserves at least a small amount of our resources—less than we spend on health care but probably more than we spend on cosmetics. To me, making life multiplanetary means going to Mars.”
Elon Musk’s personal goal, which he calls “Mars Oasis”, is to “land a small robotic greenhouse that would establish life on another planet and show great images of green plants on a red background. It would get the public excited, and we’d learn a lot about what it takes to sustain plant life on the surface of Mars.”
Predictably, the prospect of humanity expanding into space and bringing plant life and, eventually, human beings to Mars will not sit well with some political factions. The Marxists, whose ideas were highlighted in a previous article titled “The Road to Ruin or to Salvation” object to the private, commercial aspect of Musk’s endeavor. They would rather have the government of the proletariat seizing, by force if necessary, every penny of Musk’s fortune and use them on more earthly pursuits.
Environmentalists do not believe that the plague of humanity should be spread to other planets. In their view, Mars and all other planets must remain pristine, unspoiled by rapacious, materialistic humans. Their opinion on humanity is most clearly articulated by Agent Smith in the groundbreaking 1999 film The Matrix:
“Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment. But you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague.”
In stark contrast, Elon Musk believes in humanity, its future, and is committed to its continued, long-term survival. As he stated in an article, dated October 1, 2008, in Esquire, titled “75 Most Influential People” ( http://www.esquire.com/features/75-most-influential/elon-musk-1008):
“The next big moment will be life becoming multiplanetary, an unprecedented adventure that would dramatically enhance the richness and diversity of our collective consciousness. It would also serve as a hedge against the myriad–and growing–threats to our survival. An asteroid or a supervolcano could certainly destroy us, but we also face risks the dinosaurs never saw: An engineered virus, nuclear war, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us. Sooner or later, we must expand life beyond our little blue mud ball–or go extinct.”
Elon Musk’s dreams of sending human beings to Mars within the next ten years and pushing humanity to become a true, space-faring civilization are magnificent ones. Future generations of human beings, who will advance the frontiers of space and, at the same time, avoid accidental or intentional extinction on Earth, will owe a huge debt of gratitude to Elon Musk.
