Thursday, March 19, 2026

What does Elon Musk really want?

I wonder what Elon Musk really wants. What follows will necessarily be very speculative.

My impression is that Elon Musk is very smart. It therefore seems hard to believe that he really believes humans could live on Mars. What he could believe, without diclosing as much, is that a temporary robot colonization of Mars will be possible. Using his human colonization narrative, he would be able to argue that we have to send robots there to prepare for human colonization. That would be plausible enough, on the face of it. But the real intent would be to hand over Mars to robots. Sure enough, he stated that he is a human specieist, unlike perhaps Google founders, but it may not have necessarily have been an honest statement. Robots on Mars would achieve backing up something like mind or intelligence, albeit not human one. They would not be sustainable, I think, especially as for material recycling; that is a major problem.

Musk indicates he wants to make humans not only multi-planet species but also multi-star species (per video below). That is even more crazy than human colonization of Mars, given the current state of physics.

One reason I think Musk is not after human colonization of Mars (an argument that I made in Wikiversity) is that he is not investing in something like Biosphere 2 project. Surely one seriously interested would invest not only in rocketry but also in the biohabitability (as opposed to robot-habitability). One could object that he has deferred the problem and wants to make a robot colony first. 

As for Musk's involvement with electric cars, I do not know what to think of it. In a Wikiversity pro-con analysis I created, I calculated that making all personal mobility electrical still would only handle a fraction of GHG emissions. In Czechia, a lot of transportation is electrical anyway (eletric trains, trams, trolleybuses), albeit not personal transportation.

In one video (I do not have a link now), Musk indicates that we are likely in a simulation and we have to keep the simulation interesting or else the operator is going to turn the simulation off. A related article is Koebler 2016, which links a relevant YouTube video.

Musk has over 10 children. That does not look environmentally friendly to me. It looks like someone playing the Donald Cameron's game, of making copies of the genes. In case of a future population collapse (caused by a resource crisis, not by people not having children), the genes located in more biological bodies will have an advantage. Relating is Musk's idea that underpopulation or population collapse is a major problem (which I find implausible). A possible cynical interpretation: Musk does not believe his underpopulation narrative but rather is pushing it to be able to publically justify having so many children.

To my naive analysis, it all looks like him doing and saying things in such a way as to state or imply: look at me, I am a superman and a savior. That could be pleasing on its own, and it could improve access to women and, in particular, access to best specimen of human females (excuse my cynical language, reminiscent of Conan the Barbarian, where, as per the screenwriters, he was bred to finest stock). Such an idea would be quite Freudian as well, I think.

Consciousness vs. life: Is it (human?) consciousness that matters, is it life (living things including bacteria) that matters or is it both? Finding out would require a more careful analysis. For the time being, a relevant quotation: "And that's why it's important to make life multi-planetary, such that if there is a natural disaster or a man-made disaster on Earth, that consciousness continues."[Davos 2026]. One way of analyzing the sentence is that life is an instrument to consciousness: after "such that", there is only "consciousness continues" rather than "life and consciousness continues". Caveat: this is a transcript from live conversation and these generally tend to be less pricise than edited text.

I don't really know. Perhaps the speculations are unfair to him. But a serious analysis cannot just blindly assume that his verbal behavior is truthful. In any case, I find him impressive.

Further reading and listening:

posted by Dan at 8:47 AM

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