elon musk

SpaceX Launches A Dream Into Space

It was business, as usual, today for SpaceX with their ambitious Falcon Heavy vehicle as I watched the rocket soar into the blue skies amidst cheers taking with it the aspirations of a billion humans to become interplanetary travellers. There was nothing about this first launch which would suggest SpaceX was testing this beastly projectile whose thrust would be equivalent to 18 Boeing 747 aircrafts or its technology of Falcon rockets with 27 core engines firing at full force during launch – the most by any working rocket, or even getting all the 3 stages back to the Earth safely. Everything went smoothly, just like the previous Falcon missions bringing SpaceX closer to realizing its potential of sending humans to Mars and beyond. For me though, that wasn’t the highlight of the launch today. What made it momentous was its rather uncommon payload of the ‘Starman’ in a SpaceX-designed space suit behind the wheels of Elon Musk’s cherry red Tesla Roadster which is right now orbiting the Earth on its way to Mars and will orbit the Sun indefinitely. On the Falcon Heavy, only time would tell how this behemoth will disrupt the commercial space industry.

Elon Musk, Games, and The Last of Us

I somehow stumbled upon this Y Combinator interview of Elon Musk – actually a clipping, on YouTube – I’d seen the full interview but this video reveals his deep interest in gaming. After stating his recommendation ‘Overwatch’ & applauding the gaming studio Blizzard for their titles he quickly turns to the interviewee (Sam Altman) and asks what his recommendations are, and he says “The Last of Us” (TLOU). It struck me right there that Elon could see his prophecy of human extinction being proved through this amazing gaming experience.

In his presentation at the Astronautical Congress in 2016 he laid out a plan to “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species” and colonizing Mars to avoid the danger of becoming extinct due to some unforeseeable incident. Without revealing much, TLOU presents a similar scenario in which human species is infected by a mysterious virus and a chaotic sequence follows which brutally resembles a doomsday apocalypse.

If there’s one person who’d really appreciate a script such as ‘The Last of Us’ it’s definitely Elon Musk.