Elon Musk is the main newsmaker of our time among billionaires. He constantly criticizes someone, quarrels with someone, sues, releases something and prepares grandiose plans to conquer not only our world, but also other planets. As a visionary, Musk is always focused on the future, so some of his speeches seem like excerpts from science fiction novels. However, the billionaire himself is serious, although he admits that his words sometimes sound surreal.
Finam.ru tells how Elon Musk is preparing to colonize Mars, opposes the Brazilian court and predicts the future of AI.
Musk intends to colonize Mars in 20 years
Elon Musk really thinks it's possible to populate the red planet. The other day, he wrote on X (former Twitter) that humanity will be able to colonize Mars in about 20 years. The head of SpaceX is confident that if we do not become interplanetary, then our civilization will last only a few hundred years, and if we can settle on different planets, then the future of people will last for millions more years.
Musk, giving a 45-minute lecture to SpaceX employees, shared his ambitious plans for the exploration of Mars. The company will soon build a second launch tower in Texas to facilitate additional test flights. And by the end of 2025, it will build two more Starship launch towers in Florida. In 2025, SpaceX will open a new factory and release 6 more Starship ships. Next, the plans include the creation of Starship 2, capable of launching 100 tons into low Earth orbit in a reusable mode, and Starship 3 with a payload capacity of 200 tons or more. These larger vehicles will be required to reduce the number of refueling missions required to load a vehicle in Earth orbit for a flight to the Moon or Mars.
Musk's goal is to settle 1 million people on Mars. This will be only the first step of humanity on the way to becoming a multi-planetary species. Colonizers will need millions of tons of resources to mine, build and grow crops on Mars, as on Earth. This will require launching 10 rockets a day and sending a fleet of hundreds of vehicles to Mars during the short trajectory window that opens between Earth and the red planet every 26 months. The first goal on this difficult path will be to create reusable rockets that are more lifting and cheaper to produce.
Brazilian justice
The social network X (formerly Twitter) continues to create many problems for its owner at the international level. This time, a tense situation arose in Brazil. The country's Supreme Court has launched an investigation into allegations of obstruction of justice against the billionaire after he announced that he would reactivate Brazilian accounts in X, which were blocked by court order. Musk said that the decisions of Judge Alexander de Moraes are unconstitutional and called on him to resign.
Neither Musk, X, nor the Brazilian authorities have disclosed which social media accounts were ordered to be blocked. X first published the blocking order on Saturday. The billionaire also accused Moraes of "brazenly and repeatedly" betraying the constitution and the people of Brazil.
"This judge imposed huge fines, threatened to arrest our employees and block access to X in Brazil. As a result, we will probably lose all income in Brazil and will be forced to close our office in the country. But principles are more important than profits," Musk wrote.
Moraes is investigating the activities of so-called "digital militias" who are accused of spreading fake news and hate messages during the rule of former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. He is also leading the investigation into an alleged coup attempt by Bolsonaro. Far-right activists, in turn, accuse Brazil's Supreme Court of censorship and dictatorship. It seems that Musk has sided with them on this issue.
AI will surpass human capabilities in a year
Elon Musk was one of the founders of OpenAI, which released the revolutionary GPT-4, a generative artificial intelligence capable of creating different types of content and answering user questions using natural language. However, the rapid development of AI alarmed the billionaire. Last year, he even made apocalyptic warnings that eventually new technologies will destroy humanity, and called on scientists and corporations to suspend the development of new neural networks until people learn how to control them.
However, this year Musk began to take AI more calmly and, as Kommersant writes, even shared his vision of its prospects in an interview with Nikolai Tangen, CEO of the Norwegian sovereign wealth fund. According to the billionaire, by the end of next year, a new type of AI with autonomous self-control will appear in the world - AGI (artificial general intelligence), which will be able to master new skills and will be smarter than any person. Last year, Musk expected it to appear only by 2029.
