The Engineer - Follow Elon Musk on a journey from South Africa to Mars - Erik Nordeus

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This is a book about the beginning of a journey. Elon Musk is the main person in the journey through a roller-coaster life. His journey includes everything from Winston Churchill’s adventures in British colonies to demolished sports cars. From failed marriages to German scientists escaping from the Red Army. From the oil industry to the Burning Man festival.

Elon has been described as the Steve Jobs of heavy industry, as a modern version of the scientist Nikola Tesla, and as the Henry Ford of rockets. There’s a high probability that the British Secret Intelligence Service has a file on him. As the files of other James Bond villains, it describes secret rocket launches in the Pacific Ocean. But Elon doesn’t own a white cat - he’s more of a dog person. Maybe the most comparable persons are the great explorers who voyaged across the globe. They had an entrepreneurial spirit, were a little crazy, tried what no one else had tried, and thought what no one else had thought.

If you want to describe the companies Elon has founded with one theme, you can say that they improve the world with the help of innovative technologies. This is exactly what our world needs. The history of mankind begins about 50,000 years ago. We know little of the first 40,000 years, except at the end of them, we had learned to use the skins of animals. Then we emerged from our caves to construct other kinds of shelter. 5000 years ago, we learned how to write and how to use a cart with wheels. Now began the acceleration of technological progress. Within only a few hundred years, we invented the steam engine, electric lights, telephones, cars, and airplanes. In the last few years, we developed penicillin, television, and nuclear power.

Then something happened. Everyone forgot the larger problems and began to focus on the smaller problems. The computer in a modern phone is more powerful than the computer in the craft that landed on the Moon, but we are only using the power to fire birds against pigs and to watch pictures showing what our friends ate for breakfast. Was it that future we wanted? In a famous speech, the former US President John F. Kennedy said, “So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them.

This country was conquered by those who moved forward.” We are no longer moving forward with ever-greater speed, we are moving slower. The Concorde could fly across the Atlantic Ocean in three hours, and the commercial said, “The world is now a smaller place.” But with the decommissioning of the Concorde in 2003, the world is now a larger place. We’re not just flying slower, other modes of transportation are also moving slower. The US state of California ordered a bullet train that would be one of the slowest bullet trains in the world at the highest cost per mile.

The world has not just become a larger place; we are also destroying the world. One explanation to why we no longer are moving faster is because we are using expensive, dirty, and sometimes dangerous energy sources. We are not only using nuclear power plants, we are a world dependent on oil. The problem is that oil is a finite natural resource we are running out of, and we may begin to run out of it as soon as 2020. Unless we want to start using horses, we need to design technology that doesn’t rely on oil.

The question is why we are focusing on the smaller problems and forget the larger ones. One of the reasons might be that it’s complicated and more expensive to build an electric car, while it’s less expensive to build yet another Facebook clone. Another reason might be that we are satisfied with what we have. We don’t have to replace the world’s oil dependency today. But what happens when we need to? What if we need to leave the planet because something has happened or will happen to it. Then we have to trust that someone has the answers to these larger problems no one cares about today. But someone who cares about these larger problems is Elon. He knows how we can replace our dependency on oil.

He knows how we can colonize Mars and escape to the red planet if something happens to Earth. To yet again make the world a smaller place, he has designed an aircraft that’s faster than the Concorde. The difference between Elon and other pundits is that he realizes his ideas. To save the world from its oil dependency, he’s creating companies with exactly that purpose. To be able to escape to Mars, he has already begun building the rockets needed. To make the world a smaller place, he will release the technology for free. The rest of the world needs to just sit back and enjoy the ride.