026: The Evening Rocket

A couple of weeks ago, I watched Return To Space on Netflix. The documentary tells the story of Elon Musk’s SpaceX - including all of the significant challenges that he (and his team) overcame to be able to return American astronauts to space. 

NASA’s Apollo program (which took us to the moon) was concluded in 1975, and human beings haven’t been back to the moon since the Apollo 17 mission of 1972. 

After Apollo, we had the Space Shuttle program. This enabled America to be able to launch satellites into orbit. It also launched the Hubble telescope and provided the ability to build and service the International Space Station (ISS). But with eye-watering and spiralling costs, along with two tragic accidents (Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003), the Space Shuttle program was cancelled in 2011. Since then, America has been reliant on the Russian’s and their Soyuz rockets to get U.S. astronauts into space. 

Elon Musk had a vision though. 

His vision was to build a brand new, fully reusable rocket, that could operate at a fraction of the cost of the Space Shuttle. He also thought he could win over the hearts and minds of NASA (and the US government) to fund commercial space exploration. He then thought he could return American astronauts to space and to one day, enable humanity to colonise other planets (so that, as a species, we can survive in the event of thermonuclear war, climate disaster or any other existential threat).

SpaceX was born.

Add in the dramatic plot twists (of nearly running out of money, of the danger of losing human lives and the fact that SpaceX is only one - yes one - of Musk’s businesses), you see a picture of an incredible man. A man that can seemingly overcome anything. An otherworldly man. 

(At the time of writing this, three parts of Musk’s vision have been realised. He’s now working towards the colonising other planets bit.)

I finished the documentary and thought, “Wow, how can I be more like Elon Musk?”

Then, by coincidence, I was driving home from a project in Newmarket. I was listening to BBC Radio 4 and “in a change to their planned programming”, Jill Lepore’s The Evening Rocket came over the airwaves. 

Lepore is a historian at Harvard and a journalist, writing for the New Yorker amongst other significant publications. Over the five episodes of The Evening Rocket, she explores Musk’s life and the things that have influenced his worldview.

She traces Musk’s inspiration back to the science fiction stories of the 20th Century, notably Isaac Asimov’s The Foundation Series and Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

In many of these science fiction stories, there is a common thread. It goes something like this (and cue your best science fiction narrator voice as you read this):

    “A single, genius, mysterious man saves all of humanity with science and engineering. Is there anything he cannot do!?”

It’s a similar theme that runs throughout many of the big tech companies of Silicon Valley - with their grandiose statements about changing the world or saving humanity. But Lepore asks, which part of humanity is really being saved by these companies? Is it for you and I, or is it for themselves? 

In the world of Muskism, where a vision can be dreamt (but more importantly, also built because of the enormous wealth that is available to these visionaries), are these titans of capitalism really working towards a better future for us ordinary humans? Or is it a vision of the future for the powerful, wealthy and elite?

Well, I don’t think I could ever afford a ticket for one of their spaceships, could you?

Now this isn’t meant to be a criticism of Musk. It’s easy to take pot shots at people in the public eye - and that’s not what I am trying to do here. What he (and his teams) have achieved is truly staggering - utterly remarkable. And you cannot deny that his investment into EV and renewable technology is advancing the adoption of technology for us (ordinary) earthlings.

But there is a great bit in Episode 4 of The Evening Rocket where Lepore features Vandana Singh (author of The Woman Who Thought She Was A Planet) about the idea of ‘paradigm blindness’. The transcript went something like this:

Lepore: 

“To me as a historian, Musk and [Jeff] Bezos’ vision of the future isn’t futuristic at all. It’s antique, it’s ancient. I asked Singh how she understands their attachment to stories written in the 1950’s and even earlier. She said she’d come round to thinking that Silicon Valley techno-billionaires suffer from paradigm blindness.” 

Singh: 

“Because we live in such unequal societies. And because white, male, super rich people have a disproportionate amount of power, they tend to keep this paradigm alive because it suits them.” 

Then, the next bit went something like this:

Lepore: 

“Paradigm blindness is a deficit of imagination. A culture’s inability to imagine that other people really just don’t subscribe to its view of the world. Singh thinks stories can cure that blindness.”

Singh: 

“Stories are one way, not the only way, of course, but one way of changing the underlying narrative of the paradigm in which we are immersed.”

And finally, Lepore summarised her thoughts:

Lepore: 

“All of us suffer from blindness of one sort or another. What’s different about Silicon Valley billionaires, who are trapped in a cultural paradigm though, is that they have enough money and enough power to build that paradigm. And then the rest of us are trapped in the world that they are building. As if we’re subjects of their experiments.”

At the end of the episode she introduces Noelani Arista, Chair of the Indigenous Studies program at McGill University and part of the Indigenous A.I. working group. Arista provides us with an alternative origin story for futurists. This is what she said:

Arista: 

“I use the story of Haloa. The child of Ho’ohokulani and Wakea the Sky Father. They have a child, the first child is born stillborn, it’s planted into the earth and from that child is born the taro - the kalo plant that we subsist on as a people. The second child born of that union is named Haloa after his brother. Haloa in Hawaiian means ‘the long breath’. And the oha, or the corm that grows off the root of the plant, that becomes the word for Ohana - or ‘family’. So, the story itself is that the second child, the human, cares for the first, the brother, or the plant, and ensures the life of generations to come. The Haloa, ‘the long breath’, the life of the people. That story, about reciprocal, mutual respect, relationship and care, is at the centre of a lot of the protocols that we approach A.I. with.”  

Looking closer to home, I’ve always tended towards adopting the grandiose, ‘humanity saving’ worldview to describe what I am trying to do. My website has always featured a hyped-up mission statement declaring my vision to the world as I tried to emulate the tech titans I looked up to. 

For me, it was about trying to give myself a purpose, or the means to build a legacy that’s greater than me. After listening to Lepore, Singh and Arista though, I’m going to keep it simple. I’m just going to focus on trying to make things of value for my fellow humans.

It’s easy to get lost in the hyperbole.

James 

P.s. At the time of proof reading this, Musk was tweeted by one of the defenders at the besieged Azovstal steelworks in Mariupol, Ukraine. I wonder how Musk will respond to this? By the time you read this article, maybe we’ll know.