Is Space the last frontier? I recently finished the biography of Elon Musk written by Ashlee Vance. The book is a fascinating look into the visionary world of Musk. Musk says that people will go to Mars by 2025 and he is building the space technology to make it happen – with a goal to eventually colonize that planet. Not totally without a sense of humor, he says “I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact.” Musk believes that video games will soon become indistinguishable from reality, we will see completely autonomous cars in fewer than two years, an apple car is coming in 2020, and that we’re already a cyborg.
If you have a few minutes search YouTube for the new Power Wall technology just introduced by Musk to support an independent power system for your home, including a solar roof that is a part of the shingle system. The power wall is a storage device that allows solar power to be captured for later use. This same person was a founder at zip2, PayPal, and moved on to electric cars at Tesla, building rockets at Space X and now merging Solar City into his company. Musk is a complex and driven person who is not always a great role model or even likeable. I thoroughly enjoyed the life to date sketch in the well written and researched book. More fascinating to watch each day as he continues to defy the odds with his companies. Musk tells us to “focus on the impact of your dreams, not on the odds.” “Persistence pays and you must constantly question yourself”.
As we see the possibilities that technology promises for our future it is a bit mind boggling. Musk says we are already a cyborg, consider today’s wearables that include fitness monitoring and tracking, real time continuous monitoring of vital signs, the ability to predict and alert us to health issues, all related to constant connectivity. You can control every function in your own home remotely. You can have your car drive you to and from work while you safely take a nap. It is projected by Gartner that the typical family will have 500 network connected devices. I believe the sky is no longer the appropriate limit.
Just a few more facts that helped me understand the speed of communication. There are a few more than 7 billion people on this planet, 3.2 billion have access to the global internet. The growth rate was 18.5 per cent from 2013 to 2015. Every minute of every day there are 347,222 tweets (not counting Trump), 4,166,667 Facebook posts, 110,040 Skype calls, 1,736,111 Instagram posts, YouTube users upload 300 hours of new video… And the list goes on. How does the Internet work?
Faced with this level of change I appreciated a friend sending me a Longfellow quote “the holiest of all holidays are those kept by ourselves in silence and apart; the secret anniversaries of the heart.”
Enjoy the week end. Mike