Celebrated entrepreneur and industrialist Elon Musk earns plenty of attention each time he floats
a new idea online. As the founder of the startup that became PayPal, and CEO of tech companies
SpaceX and Tesla, he’s one of the richest people in the world. In fact, more than once, he’s been
recognized as THE richest, vying back and forth with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. But though many widely
celebrate him, he’s not without his critics. This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering
the extraordinary question: which of Elon Musk’s ideas won’t work?
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Musk deserves credit for several innovations that have transformed their respective industries.
While Teslas were far from the first electric cars, the company popularized and generated new
demand for them - an important step towards tackling climate change. The entrepreneur’s
company SpaceX has achieved an impressive number of firsts, pioneering the reuse of
orbital rockets. Their spacecraft Crew Dragon has made it easier to shuttle back and forth between
Earth and the International Space Station, a trip that was previously reliant on Russia’s Soyuz.
However, while Musk might be a visionary, that doesn’t mean that all of his ideas are good ones.
Some just won’t achieve their intended effect; others exacerbate unaddressed problems.
Easily the most prominent idea of Musk’s that has little to no grounding in reality is his plan to
terraform Mars with nuclear bombs. This “nuke Mars” initiative is just one of many plans he
has to eventually build a city on the red planet. It’s supposed to be a way to potentially make
the entire planet habitable so that we won’t be confined to complex, artificial habitats when we
finally arrive. According to Musk, if you were to detonate nuclear bombs at Mars’s poles you would
release enough methane and water vapor to give Mars an atmosphere thick enough to support life.
Mars does have an atmosphere at the moment, it’s just incredibly thin
and made up almost entirely of CO2. Nuking Mars would,
in Musk’s theory, create a greenhouse effect like the one we’re currently experiencing on
Earth – it would just take hold more rapidly and will have been triggered on purpose.
But it simply wouldn’t work, and not just because the nukes would generate radioactive fallout on a
planet that’s already quite radioactive. For one thing, Mars’s polar ice doesn’t contain
anywhere near enough methane or water vapor for this to be remotely viable.
And even if it did, the planet lacks an electromagnetic field and solar wind would
continue to strip away its atmosphere; any water vapor would be blown off into space.
This would ultimately leave Mars in a worse position than if we didn’t do anything to it.
There are also issues of legality; it’s against the law for countries to place
nuclear weapons in space or on any celestial body according to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty,
and though Musk wouldn’t be nuking a country or any people, it’s difficult to imagine his plan
being accepted by the global community. If we do decide to terraform Mars one day, nuking the polar
ice caps is certainly not how we’d go about it. Another idea that Musk, among other inventors,
has floated is a mode of transportation known as a Hyperloop. The incredibly ambitious proposal
aims to replace both trains and airplanes someday. It’s a pressurized tube through which compressed
air will propel a capsule, potentially reaching speeds of hundreds of miles an hour – which is
just as fast, or even faster than most commercial planes. Elon Musk isn’t the first person to talk
about Hyperloop, nor are SpaceX and Tesla the only companies working on a viable model – Virgin is
running similar experiments – but Musk’s version has been very widely publicized.
However, it also has a few glaring issues that could prevent it from ever being viable. Hyperloop
tests have been successful, but only at speeds of around 100 miles an hour; this is definitely fast,
but not as fast as the designers want it to go or anywhere near as fast as planes or trains.
The problem with Hyperloop reaching those speeds is that the compressed air inside the tube would
heat up drastically. Musk has accounted for this in his designs by providing a large water tank
that serves as a coolant system, but Sam Jaffe, a senior research analyst at Navigant Research,
contends that this coolant system just isn’t efficient enough. Even if it refueled at
every stop, as Musk proposes, it would still likely not be enough to keep the pod cool.
And if Hyperloop, which is much harder and costlier to build than a train,
can’t go anywhere near as fast as a train, there’s no real benefit to having it. High-speed
rail networks can already exceed speeds of 300 miles an hour, and just like Hyperloop they can
be completely sustainable and powered by green electricity. The only downside to rail networks
is that building the tracks can lead to the destruction of natural landscapes and habitats.
But building giant tubes full of compressed air can do the exact same thing! Ultimately,
while Hyperloop could technically work, when compared with existing, high-speed rail networks
and subway systems, it’s a nonsensical idea. Far closer to reality than both nuking Mars and
building Hyperloop is Neuralink. The idea is to implant electronics inside the brain
to create a brain-machine interface, enabling completely wireless communication between
both computers and other people who have a Neuralink implant installed.
There have been many experiments into the viability of a brain-machine interface,
generally to try and help “locked-in” coma patients communicate using only their minds – one
doctor even paid to have implants installed in his own head. The FDA since stopped approving implant
surgery in coma patients, which means Musk’s Neuralink has been performing experiments on pigs;
in 2020, Musk presented a pig named Gertrude with a computer chip installed in her brain.
He has noble aims, like curing dementia, but it’s easy to see how a system like Neuralink could be
used to the detriment rather than the benefit of mankind. The biggest concern is one of privacy:
if your very thoughts are being digitized and processed by machines, do they become valuable
data that corporations will pay handsomely to get their hands on? Would the contents of your brain
be owned not by you, but by Elon Musk? And that’s not taking into consideration the risk hackers
might post to these “smart humans” if they could break into your head and do all kinds of damage.
There’s also the threat of a rogue AI using these systems for evil if we ever develop one
and it gets out of control. It’s highly unlikely that Neuralink would ever be completely safe.
Plus, it would still be an elective surgery that would probably cost a significant amount of money,
which could exacerbate divisions between the haves and have-nots - effectively creating two
“tiers” of humans. Imagine trying to compete for a job position against someone with the
brain capacity of a supercomputer, when you can’t afford the same tech.
Along with his dreams to colonize Mars, Musk’s other biggest venture is Tesla, a global leader
in the production of electric vehicles. Electric vehicles were once seen as a joke by many; they
were expensive, needed to be recharged constantly, and the infrastructure to keep them supplied
wasn’t yet available. But all electric vehicles require one thing: a powerful battery. The Chinese
company that makes batteries for Tesla is on the precipice of releasing a so-called “million-mile
battery” that will be a game-changer, supposedly making EVs as affordable as gas-powered cars.
The big problem isn’t that batteries won’t become more and more efficient; they have been and will
continue to do so. The issue with modern battery production is that the minerals required to build
them – like lithium, cobalt, and coltan – are unethically produced. Lithium mining has destroyed
areas of Tibet, while child labor is used in the Democratic Republic of Congo to dig for cobalt.
Many major tech companies that rely on batteries, including Tesla, are part of this problem,
exploiting both the environment and workers for the sake of building bigger and better batteries.
It’s a completely unsustainable model,
though it is possible to change it. If workers throughout Tesla’s supply chain had better rights;
if companies vowed to have no part in child labor and actually made sure that this was the case;
and if costlier but more ecologically friendly methods were used to extract resources;
then battery production wouldn’t be the contentious topic it is today.
Musk’s proposals have promise and generally altruistic goals, like cleaning up the
environment, advancing science, and improving life. But where the execution is concerned,
many are failures waiting to happen. And those are four Elon Musk ideas that won’t work.
What do you think? Is there anything we missed? Let us know in the comments, check out these other
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