February 6, 2025
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Why Elon Musk’s “bike path” really is the end
Elon Musk’s Fork on the road Not only a sculpture – is the monument to the world obsession in the world, with civil survival, which has its roots to look for extraterrestrial intelligence
Unlike the chapel-esque-hobners in this stock, in Elon Musk Fork on the road Likely more badly about the story rather than achieving a kind of divine inspiration.
On December 7, 2024, Elon Musk has shared the image of the artwork titled by Tesla HQ A crossroads on the road. It is a colossal dish planted at the intersection of the three roads, not subtle – is literally a fork on the road.
The Trump Administration returned to the sculpture in less than two months. It suggests news Musk and His Government Efficiency Department (DOGE) were behind the revival of the sentence.
“At the crossroads” indicates the subject Tech Industry trend: to worry about existential threats, who finds resonance in cold war ideas. In this simple binary, the future of humanity can only follow two divergent pathways. Netentionally led to almost unlimited prosperity on earth and beyond, in any global civilization and ultimately when the disappearance of man. The promoters of this survival thinking justify particular technological scaling programs at any cost, marking the future as desperate the race against disaster rather than growing the most growing opportunities.
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He bubbled this existential anxiety on his December 7, when Musk expressed a picture of sculpture with a cryptical expression: “He had to make sure that civilization took the majority of the great Fermi filters”.
Musk has two separate ideas “Fermi Great Fermic” mentioned in technology circles. Fermi paradox and the concept of existential filters. The paradox was founded in 1950 during the Los Alamos National Laboratory Lunch Conversation. Enrico Fermi, the famous nuclear physicist who worked in the Manhattan project and his colleagues were discussing UFOs, maybe the 1947 drive Flying Craze shook the country a few years earlier. Given many methods of the PERSTELLAR planet and malicious and interesting ways, they asked why humans have not yet found evidence of foreign civilizations. Fermi summarized the dilemma in a single question: “Where is everyone?“
The apocryphal story has become a popular experiment in thinking. It is a common explanation of extraterrestrial residents The economist Robin Hanson called the “excellent filter”-Gorring that there are significant obstacles so that they have the ability to send messages or other clutter systems. The great filter can be behind us, earth life overcoming the opportunities to overcome some catastrophes, allowing our civilization to develop. Or else they could be in front of a challenge that is difficult to survive. Although the period itself is relatively new, it is based on cold concepts of war, especially those related to Kardashev scale, the scope developed in the 1960s that alien civilizations can move forward.
Kardashev scale It has become a key impact on certain technologists. Nikolai Kardashev proposed Nikolai Kardashev in 1964, classifying the civilizations of extraterrestrial scale based on their energy: I breathe all the energy available in the home plans; II civilizations captures the total energy exit of their star; And write the energy of the III civilization energy on the scale of the whole galaxy. Musk has mentioned the Kardashev scale in the last year in the last time, often in terms of raising the progress of humanity, he repeatedly wrote: “At least one civilization that respects one’s Arrive the Kardashev II type. “). Originally the experiment of thinking, scale is usually treated as a literal road page, with an unavoidable, inevitable, greater energy consumption and interstellar expansion.
Cold war, Fermi Paradox and Kardashev scale, was defined by existential anxiety. Nuclear weapons in the possibility of quick self-destruction of humanity and Scientists were very aware The role of the potential disappearance of our species. This fear has had a great influence Seti early scientistsSettle ideas about civilizations that were expected to meet the galaxy. Often, civilizations represented by their anxieties and desires.
On Kardashev’s scale ENERGY CONSUMER FLIGHT PRIMARY METICS XX. It reflects in the worldview of the century, consisting of numerous overlaps of technological revolutionaries. Kardashev developed his scale as part of a broader exploration that the supercovilizations of extraterrestrials could be. It was designed as a scale tool to imagine that the artificial signs imagining that scientists imagine that such civilizations can be created. Kardashev was not a oracle or prophet; It was a 30-year astronomer who lived behind the iron curtains, in the future, thought it was an amazing mix of hope and fear.
Existential anxiety has also become very harmful in the world of technology. Tech Billionaires drives to invest in space programs, Defender of the Pronatalist policy to Collapse the horror populationand, and promote multi-settlement to escape climate change and other malicious ground. But worries about potential disaster are not without merit (if we have not left the cold wars behind us, there is no shortage of existential dilemma facing our civilization), there are the future about adaptation all the way or useless.
Instead, we should be a huge skeptical narratives presented as a single way of civil progression, inevitably, with all the deviations of progress “towards a predetermined notion. Humanity is really an unprecedented bloom or immediate doom, or is it just another iteration of an age-old trend to see this moment in a single way? Kardashev Scale and large filters are fascinating ideas, to consider the career of civilizations, how they may take advantage of energy, navigate to existential risks and reach beyond home planets. When they are treated as fixed frames and predictions, we risk reducing the complexity of the futures of humans and extraterrestrials to a raw caricature.
But even if you accept a prescription of these cold ideas of the war, why do Musk and other technology impersons have key to convert to type II civilization or prevent excellent filter? If we take on the “path” on the way “on the way to the presentation, they have been involved in the problem, very conditions, systemic control, and accelerating the degradation of the environment? It is an existential disaster Etos speculative, after his head, reveals his contradictions: A world view that claims to protect humanity is to easily be easily enlarge power structures.
The digital embrace of the theories of the cold wars that justifies aggressive changes to the U.S. government and emphasizes its own workforce, but also highlights their limits. By marking the challenges of humanity as a simple engineering problem, technologists locate as a decisive architect of our future, the work necessary for social, politics and collaboration, the necessary work and the necessary perspectives.
The real fork of the road is not among the survival and disappearance, but it discourages the idea that several paths and opportunities recognizing a rican approach and the opportunity to be in the hands of our fates. Technology trillion.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views indicated by the author or authors are not necessarily American scientific.
