Elon Musk has a Messianic mission of saving the world
Elon Musk. Photo AFP, Roberto Schmidt
Christian Life
Elon Musk is known for the high sales of Tesla, his overtake of Twitter, and his cuts in the American government. But behind his seemingly unpredictable behaviour is a Messianic mission. And his universe has only one god.
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Why would you want to create a civilisation on Mars? What is the use of building a supercomputer with Artificial Intelligence? Or why would you push for a higher birthrate in a world where children are oftentimes seen as a burden?
For Elon Musk, this is more than impulsiveness. Instead, his ideas belong to an almost divine mission he wants to undertake. Humanity plays a crucial role in this plan and must be preserved at all costs. At the same time, it needs to be better, greater and smarter than ever before to take on the quest. Ultimately, Musk aims for omniscience.
Let's have a look at some strategies Musk employs to achieve his goal.
Birthrate
The falling birthrates in Western countries are a thorn in Musk's side. If people do not quickly start getting more babies, civilisation is headed for a collapse, he fears. On X he wrote: “Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming”.
“If we increase the scope and scale of civilization, then we have a much better chance of understanding the meaning of life and why we're here or even what are the right questions to ask.”
In an interview in 2014, Musk expressed the fear that civilisation will die, if people do not “revive the idea of having children as a kind of social duty”. The tech entrepreneur himself is a living example of someone who takes this duty very seriously. By now, he has fathered 14 children by four different women.
Population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 26, 2022
For Musk, it is not sufficient that the birthrates in Africa are high. Instead, he is part of the pronatalism movement, which encourages especially white people in Western countries to have more children. And ideally, these are also the people with high intelligence. “He really wants smart people to have kids”, one of his previous partners says in Musk's biography by Walter Isaacson.
According to Musk, someone's personal success is closely linked to his or her IQ. Therefore, he encourages especially smart people to have as many children as possible. His goal: “Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness.”
Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness https://t.co/0wUUADibcl
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 17, 2024
Artificial intelligence
Demography is not the only thing Elon Musk worries about. One of his biggest headaches, his biography says, is the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). “I don't love the idea of being a house cat”, he once said, referring to what would happen if AI surpasses human intelligence. According to him, it could pose an existential risk.
As a solution, Musk presented the option of coupling AI closely to human beings, so that it would not turn against people. His company Neuralink fits perfectly into this view. It is working on chips that improve the abilities humans have. People, for example, would be able to operate computers with their brains.
Biographer Walter Isaacson writes: “One way to ensure AI alignment [with humanity, ed.], Musk felt, was to tie the bots closely to humans. They should be an extension of the will of individuals, rather than systems that could go rogue and develop their own goals and intentions.”
By doing so, Musk wants to ensure that Artificial Intelligence will no longer pose a threat to humanity, but rather help to improve it, and ultimately answer all the questions mankind cannot find.
Science fiction
Another way to protect humanity, Musk believes, is making it multi-planetary. He is very concerned that something will happen to the earth and destroy all life on our planet. Therefore, he pleads for the colonisation of Mars. By living on two planets, the preservation of humanity is more likely in the case a large disaster happens, he believes.
Musk's ideas about humanity living in space are based on a childhood book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In it, a human, Arthur Dent, is rescued by an alien starship right before the Earth is destroyed. The aliens build a super computer to understand the universe. At some point, the computer comes up with the answer 42. Yet, no one knows what that means, because the question to that answer remains a mystery.
That last idea stuck with Musk in particular. “I took from the book that we need to extend the scope of consciousness so that we are better able to ask the questions about the answers, which is the universe”, he says in his biography.
Motivation
Preserving and expanding human consciousness is Musk's greatest ambition. But why is he so obsessed with human consciousness?
The question could arise whether Musk has converted to Christianity and sees human beings as valuable because they are creatures of God. However, this does not seem to be the case. In 2021, during an interview with the Christian programme The Babylon Bee, he denies being a Christian.
Questions
So, what is it then that makes humanity so important for Musk? Once, he told someone at his birthday party that he saw human consciousness as “a precious flicker of light in the universe” and added that “we should not let it be extinguished.”
According to Musk, human consciousness and intelligence is the only one that exists as far as he knows. Therefore, he argues in an interview with CNBC that the human consciousness is crucial for the survival of any consciousness in the universe at all. “We've got this delicate candle of consciousness flickering here, and it may be the only instance of consciousness, so it's essential we preserve it”, he says at another event.
Ultimately, Musk's goal is to have a complete understanding of the universe and of human consciousness itself, in other words to discover the meaning of life. “If we increase the scope and scale of civilisation, then we have a much better chance of understanding the meaning of life and why we're here or even what are the right questions to ask.”
Pronatalism
Elon Musk is said to be part of the Pronatalist movement, which encourages people to have as many children as possible. The Collins family stood at the cradle of the movement. Malcolm and Simone Collins see the demographic crisis as a cultural problem in societies that do not value children.
Simone Collins finds it understandable that especially billionaires in Silicon Valley appreciate the pronatalist ideas, she says in an interview. “They look into the long term. That is where you will see the consequences of the demographic rate.”
However, there are ethical questions that come with the pronatalism movement. Oftentimes, members of the movement use IVF or other technology to select the most intelligent embryo or the embryo that has other desired traits.
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