Elon Musk says we need to colonize Mars so that there will be humans who survive the next war.

Courtesy of The Guardian:  

Humans must prioritise the colonisation of Mars so the species can be conserved in the event of a third world war, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk said on Sunday.

“It’s important to get a self-sustaining base on Mars because it’s far enough away from Earth that [in the event of a war] it’s more likely to survive than a moon base,” Musk said on stage at SXSW – just days after Donald Trump announced plans to meet the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, in an attempt to defuse rising nuclear tension. 

“If there’s a third world war we want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of human civilisation somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages,” Musk said, responding to questions from his friend Jonah Nolan, co-creator of TV show Westworld.

You know just a year or so ago I would have said this is hyperbolic and a severe overreaction.

Now I am simply hoping that Musk has enough time to solidify his plans before it is too late. 

Elon Musk predicts that in 20 years new cars will no longer include a steering wheel.

Courtesy of Axios:

Elon Musk predicted that within 10 years nearly all new cars made in the U.S. will be autonomous, and half of those will be fully electric vehicles. "China is probably going to be ahead of that," the Tesla and SpaceX chief said Saturday, speaking at the National Governors Association meeting in Providence, Rhode Island. 

Within 20 years, he said driving a car will be like having a horse (i.e. rare and totally optional). "There will not be a steering wheel."

This piggybacks well with my post from yesterday morning that predicted that all new cars in Europe will be electric by the year 2035.

I know a lot of you poo poo'd that prediction so I imagine this one will also receive some blowback from the those who fear and mistrust change as well.

But whether you like it or not the future is one where cars run on batteries and people are merely the passengers.

Remember, there was a time not so very long ago when research required a trip to the library, phones were attached to the wall, and computers took up several rooms of space.

We cannot imagine having to live without the conveniences we now take for granted, and soon the same will be true for manual driving.

Musk also had this to say about the future of energy: 

Musk noted that it would only take about 100 square miles of solar panels to power the entire United States and the batteries needed to store the energy would only need to take about a square mile. That said, he imagines the energy shifting to a large dose of rooftop solar, some power plant solar, along with wind, hydro and nuclear power. 

"It's inevitable," Musk said, speaking of shifting to sustainable energy. "But it matters if it happens sooner or later."

Personally I am very excited about the future. Well at least the future of technology.

I am still not at all confident that human beings are evolving as quickly as out technical advances. 

Donald Trump to remove America from Paris Climate Change pact.

Courtesy of Reuters:  

President Donald Trump plans to make good on his campaign vow to withdraw the United States from a global pact to fight climate change, a source briefed on the decision said on Wednesday, a move that promises to deepen a rift with U.S. allies. 

White House officials cautioned that details were still being hammered out and that, although close, the decision on withdrawing from the 195-nation accord - agreed to in Paris in 2015 - was not finalized. 

Trump, who has previously called global warming a hoax, did not confirm the decision in a post on Twitter, saying only, "I will be announcing my decision on the Paris Accord over the next few days." 

The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Trump was working out the terms of the planned withdrawal with U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, an oil industry ally and climate change doubter.

This pact had virtually every nation on earth making a commitment to work together to deal with climate change, with only Syria and Nicaragua refusing to sign on.

And now America will join them in their shortsightedness.

This has caused Elon Musk, once deciding it was better to work with Trump than to leave him without intelligent input, to second guess that decision.

Courtesy of Business Insider: 

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he would leave President Donald Trump's advisory councils if the US withdrew from the Paris Agreement.

"Don't know which way Paris will go, but I've done all I can to advise directly to POTUS, through others in WH & via councils, that we remain," Musk said on Twitter on Wednesday. 

Musk then said he would have "no choice" but to depart Trump's advisory councils if the US pulled out of the climate deal.

While I applaud Musk's integrity, I also worry that if all of the intelligent, ethical people abandon Trump, who is left to advise him?

Yeah, that's what has me worried.

And so marks the beginning of the end of the truck driver.

Courtesy of Teslarti:  

Elon Musk’s announcement that a Tesla Semi will be arriving as early as September is the first step to what will eventually be a reinvention of an entire industry. We’ve discussed before what, exactly, that means, but given that the man in charge of the Tesla truck program is Jerome Guillen who has a history with Daimler (specifically Freightliner) and large Class 8 semi-trucks, it’s not hard to see where Tesla plans to go with this. That leaves only the question of how far, literally, they plan to take it. In tractor-trailer operations, there are two basic types of freight moving: short-haul and long-haul.

Currently, the trucking industry is seeing a lot of change, internally, as technology improves the way that freight hauling operates. The Internet and faster communications, for example, has begun to erode the traditional consignee-broker-hauler paradigm in which someone with goods to haul contacted a freight broker who then contracted a freight hauler to move the goods, skimming a percentage off the top for the connection. The middleman is often cut out in today’s trucking, with many trucking companies having load brokers on staff.

Electronics and global positioning have also changed how trucks operate, with computers more efficiently organizing load and truck movements to minimize empty movement. The USDOT says that about 29 percent of all truck movement is pulling an empty trailer to or from a freight drop-off point, costing about $30 billion annually. That number, while high, has been dropping for some time and drops exponentially as networks of computers get more efficient at organizing trucking and trucking companies consolidate into larger and larger fleets.

Technology comes to trucking.

Soon the roads will be filled with self driving big rigs with only a token human on board to troubleshoot if something goes awry, but even that job will be short lived as the technology continues to improve.

I believe many of us will live to see the day when trucks transport goods across the country, that are loaded and unloaded by autonomous forklifts, and then distributed to various markets by smaller self driving vehicles.

If the machines themselves became the consumers of the goods, man's usefulness in this enterprise would disappear altogether.

As somebody whose father was a truck driver, and who was forced to listen to truck driving songs like  "Convoy," Eastbound and Down," and "On the Road Again," until my ears bled, I can barely wait.

Just another subset of jobs that Donald Trump can do nothing to save.

Conservative fake news sites have a new target, Elon Musk.

Courtesy of Quartz:

Many of the attacks on Musk begin with something factual: His businesses were built, legally, with the help of billions in government contracts and incentives for renewable energy and space transport. But they go on to accuse Musk of fraud and wasting taxpayer dollars; some compare him to a convicted felon. At least three conservative sites have run negative pieces about Musk—by a nonexistent writer named “Shepard Stewart”—that include “Elon Musk Continues to Blow Up Taxpayer Money With Falcon 9” and “Elon Musk: Faux Free Marketeer and National Disgrace.” Two later retracted the stories. 

“There’s a very obvious precedent” for this, says Sam Jaffe, managing director of Cairn Energy Research Advisors. “That’s Hillary Clinton.” 

Jaffe says that whoever is behind the attacks is aiming at Musk personally because they fear he could go into politics. He cited the allegations of fraud (emails) and negligence (Benghazi) levied at Clinton during the presidential campaign, charges that cemented the public’s perception of her as shady. “It’s the exact same thing as Musk. There’s a portion of the political spectrum that is scared to death of Musk as politician. They see him as a threat. They’re starting that process.”

Jesus these people are disgusting.

But hey if they can derail a juggernaut like Hillary Clinton, and we let them get away with it, then why wouldn't they go after somebody who may present a future challenge like Elon Musk?

And believe me, he really could be an unstoppable political force in a couple of years.

Millennials LOVE the guy, including my daughter who thinks he walks on water and that he is the future of America's progress with renewable energy, transportation, and space exploration.

Hopefully after what we saw with this last election her generation is going to be much more careful as to where they get their information.

Forget Nostradamus, the real prognosticator was Nikola Tesla.

Nikola Tesla 1926:  

"When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket." 

Almost ninety years ago this man predicted the future we are living today, including cell phones and the internet.

Tesla is one of my daughter's all time heroes, along with his contemporary counterpart Elon Musk.

What can I say? I raised her right.