According to Forbes Elon Musk, the CEO and founder of Tesla and SpaceX is the most innovative
person in the world for the consecutive second time this year. And that is very clear of
the unbelievable success he has achieved in business. Ten years ago, people considered
him a reckless man with extravagant ideas. In 2008, his company Tesla collapsed during
the financial crisis. Now Tesla is one of the most successful niche car companies in
producing electric cars, all due to the fact that Elon Musk persevered and was determined.
He has done what was thought to be impossible 10 years ago. But he has no plans of stopping
soon. He has many innovative and wild plans for the future of mankind which would improve
the quality of our lives.
Elon Musk believes that day by day the technology is only getting better and better. Things
are developing so fast that the future might be filled with Exponential tech advances that
would change the world. In the future, we will have video games so realistic that it
would be difficult for us to tell the difference between games and reality. From self driving
tunnel networks to brain controlled computers, we’re going to look at how Elon Musk and
his technology will take us forward and creating the city of the future. Elon says that we
always want the future to be better than the past. A future that is exciting and one that
the people would want to live in. A few decades ago a lot of technological advances seemed
unimaginable but today they are our new normal, life without them is unimaginable. So let’s
look at what would Elon Musk’s city of future look like.
So how will we get from one city to another in Elon’s future city? It’s hard to imagine
being able to fly from New York City to Shanghai in 39 minutes or from Sydney to London in
an hour. But this is something that Elon and SpaceX are working on. Elon compares Space
Rockets to airplanes saying that if you do not reuse a plane, it would cost up to 250
million dollars to fly one way but because we can reuse them tens of thousand of times,
it becomes affordable. The same is true for Space Rockets. A SpaceX rocket costs about
57 million dollars and if the rocket is reused a thousand times it nearly costs 57 thousand
dollars per flight and by carrying people, we can get the price of a rocket flight down
to the price of an economy flight ticket. The starship rocket is being developed to
take people to mars, it can also transport people from city to city. In a 2017 interview
Elon said that he is working for this to become a reality in the next 10 years and if you
can carry people, you can also carry cargo which means a super fast delivery for people.
Another way of getting packages fast from one part of the country to another will be
by Electric semi trucks being developed by Tesla. These semi trucks require a driver
but in the future we will see entirely driverless version of these and making deliveries and
making the transportation cheaper. Also these trucks will be good for environment because
25% of greenhouse gases come from the trucking industry. Though these ideas seem far fetched
and Elon has planned to make them possible in the next 10 to 12 years. There is yet another
way that Elon plans to develop, and that is transportation via hyper loop. Elon Musk
asks that when you think about a new transportation system, what would you want ideally? You will
want something that would cost half the price to travel, would be twice as fast, cannot
crash and immune to weather. To make this possible Elon is working on the idea of Hyperloop,
which will take about 12 minutes to travel from Dubai to Abu Dhabi and will also be powered
by solar panels. There will be Hyperloop stations inside cities, making it easier and faster
to travel. There are several Hyperloop routes being planned and in the Elon’s future they
will be a major subject of attraction.
Elon is constantly coming up with new ideas and innovative technologies that are astonishing.
Apart from the ideas discussed above, lets inspect Elon’s futuristic city. Most people
would imagine a future city to be full of flying cars and drones with state-of-the-art
technology. But Elon differs with this vision. In a TED interview when he was asked about
his vision for an exciting future he rejected the idea of flying cars and drones saying
no one would like to see cars flying over us and creating all kinds of disturbances.
Elon is right in many ways, he said that one of the most soul-destroying thing is the traffic
and if there is traffic in air or cars that would block the view of sky, would be affected
by weather and many other factors, that would not be an ideal future city you would want.
To counter this traffic problem that takes away so much of our lives, he has planned
to build a 3-D network of tunnels. For this he has founded a company named The Boring
Company that would carry on the construction of tunnels. He believes the solution to the
urban traffic is the network of tunnels that go deeper under the cities. He says, “since
you can always go deeper than you can go upwards, that the deepest minds are deeper than the
tallest buildings. SO we can have a network of tunnels that could go 20, 30 or 40 levels
deep where cars could go up to 200 kilometres an hour as railings guide the car and your
autopilot takes over when you enter the tunnel. But creating a tunnel is a slow and expensive
process and will require the process of digging tunnels to be cheap than they are currently.
The Boring company is working on to make this a possibility with a new tunnel digger. Elon
says that the first thing that needs to be done is to cut down the tunnel size. Tunnels
today need to be large allowing for crashes emergency and ventilation for gas powered
vehicles. Using self driving electric cars that will shrink the size of tunnels can eliminate
this. To make the digging process efficient, we need to build a faster digger, one that
can dig and reinforce the tunnel at the same time. This idea of building tunnels is safe
and also a one that is would allow people to live peacefully. A trip from Westwood to
LAX Airport which takes 30 minutes and can increase because of traffic will only take
5 to 6 minutes in a boring company tunnel. Elon says that in the coming 10 to 12 years
it will be unusual for cars to be built that are not fully self-driving as they are getting
close to being 100 to 200 percent safer than a human driver. He says getting into a car
would be just like get into an elevator today and pushing a button. Electric cars all possible
today today because of the falling prices of the lithium-ion batteries . Batteries are
what Tesla’s main expertise is in! Tesla is building Giga-factories which make lithium
ion batteries along with other parts for Tesla cars. Elon believes it would take a total
of 100 Giga factories to give humanity enough battery capacity to go fully renewable. Currently
there are two Giga factories in the United States and one in China. Tesla has announced
plans for another Giga factory in Germany. As our cities and lives would become electrified,
everything will also be connected. This will be made possible by StarLink, a project by
SpaceX which aims to launch nearly 12000 satellites in the orbit which will provide internet all
across the world and even in places where people don’t have internet today! SpaceX
launched the first batch of these satellites in May 2019, which Elon in his very ELON MUSK
announced by posting a tweet using these satellites. As of when this video is out SpaceX has launched
about 750 StarLink satellites into orbit and planning to deploy even more of them in a
long term vision of providing connectivity and internet to all. They will not only be
deployed on Earth but also will be deployed as a communication system around Mars.
So far we have discussed a lot of projects and visions of Elon musk for his future city.
Now let’s look at how our lives would be like in one of Elon’s future city. The things
will be a lot different in the future even where we get our food from. Elon’s brother
Kimball musk who is a board member of Tesla and SpaceX is also the co-founder of Square
roots, a company that is building shipping container vertical farms in towns and cities,
as this is a more feasible way of growing food. We would get our greens from farm to
table in merely 4 hours and Kimball says that the tech being used today to farm food in
climate-controlled city spaces will also be used on Mars! Imagine when you are dropped
off at your office by your self-driving car. You will have more time to go to meetings
and events because of time saved from driverless cars. So in a future city which would be a
completely mind-boggling, what is going to be taught in school? How is the education
going to be? Elon Musk believes the way children are taught in regular schools does not adhere
to their needs. It is completely outdated in this new era of technology. For that he
started his own school for his children and a few children of employees at SpaceX and
is also on the SpaceX campus. It’s called Ad Astra, which means to the stars! The founder
of SpaceX and NeuraLink believes that there is a fundamental element that the modern education
system lacks and that is: problem-solving. He explains this with an example: “It’s
important to teach problem-solving. Let’s say you’re trying to teach how engines work.
Now, a traditional way is to teach all about screwdrivers and wrenches, which is a tough
way to do it. A good approach would be like: Here’s an engine, let’s take it apart,
and how are we gonna do that? We need a screwdriver or a wrench for that. When we teach like this,
something important happens, the relevance of the tools becomes apparent.” And he
is correct, the education of our new generation should be compatible with the advanced technology
and scientific knowledge today. He breaks down education as downloading of data and
algorithms into your brain. He wants to gamify the learning. If the learning is like a game,
the more interesting, it is to children. He also focuses on to explain why things are
being taught as it makes an enormous difference in a Child’s motivation. At Ad Astra they
don’t make kids go through grades like an assembly line, which is being done in many
schools today As every child is unique and has their own capabilities and interests.
The children should explore the non-traditional topics such as robotics and artificial intelligence,
even studying the ethics of AI and also studying physics because its best way of understanding
our future and also Physics instills a skill of problem solving in you and especially the
harnesses the shining process. In this future city children and adults will
spend their free rime playing crazy and fascinating video games that are unimaginable today. Elon
points this out that only 40 years ago the most advanced game was pong, which comprised
two rectangle and a small ball, but today we have games with high graphics which very
much resemble reality. People can play these multi-player games from across the world,
and in future it will be even more advanced. We would have VR sets and force-feedback gloves,
in the future we’ll be playing inside games that will be indistinguishable from reality.
Elon says that we are building progressively greater intelligence and that the percentage
of intelligence that is not human is increasing. Elon says we can think of human as a biological
boot loader for starting a digital super-intelligence, so there need to be some merger which links
biological intelligence with machine intelligence, since in the future we will be too slow to
keep up with AI and so we would have to develop or there will be a crisis in the future. To
fix this problem, Elon Musk has come up with a technology of future- NeuraLink. He founded
this company in 2016, and the company is making a chip that will be implanted in the brain
allowing you to be linked with the computer. So far, a monkey has been able to control
a computer with its brain. NeuraLink is now petitioning to different authorities to start
a human trial of this in the coming 2 years which would give us superhuman powers of thinking
and gaining information. Elon musks future city would differ greatly from the one we
live in today, many things will change many would not, but one thing is sure we are in
a golden age of technology and with the help of this technology we could improve our way
of lives even more in the future. In a future where we could travel to any other city in
the world within an hour where everything would run on batteries, not fossil fuels.
A thousand satellites which would connect every part of the world and people. The rate
of change of technology is incredibly fast, and every new decade is one that no one had
imagined in the previous decade. Elon musk is very much motivated to work for long-term
well being of humans and to inspire many others of the new generation so that we could all
advance as a civilisation become a type 3 civilisation.
So what do you think about the amazing technology sand ideas we talked about? What do you think
our future would be like? Let us know what you think and your ideas in the comment section
below. And don’t forget to like and share the video and subscribe to our channel and
stay tuned for more interesting videos on Science and Astronomy.