To Elon

Relax, take it easy, live your best life, and help people worthy of help live their best lives, because humanity is not saveable

We are aware of Albert Einstein’s fame, and that he contributed a lot to science. He’s the most famous scientist of all, ever. His Theory of relativity changed how physicists look at nature; it was one of the few paradigm shifts. Before that, Physics and her established scientists who had set up the base for making human life much easier through technology thought that nature is absolute. They wrongly believed that there exists an absolute standpoint, an absolute reference to be used, so that when we use it, everything else would be determined exactly in relation to it. Everything had a determined cause, and a determined effect. Then came Theory of Relativity, which said that even time is relative, and space is relative. Even cause and effect themselves came under scrutiny.

Time and space are now how much they are, but only from a given stand point; they can be a different amount from an other stand point. If a person travels within a space ship at half the speed of light for ten years, when the traveller comes back to Earth everyone else will be 11.5 years older, not 10 like him or her.

If relativistic effects, the effects prescribed by the Theory of Relativity, are not considered, our GPS system would always miss the target on Earth. Satellites will correctly determine our location — and send it to us — only after a relativistic modification to the calculations is made. So, the Theory of Relativity is real; it’s not just some scientific assumption that PhD’s blabber about because they have nothing else to do. 

Physics experiments are sometime genius, like Measurement of the Relativistic Time Dilation Using μ-Mesons (a wonderful, easy to understand video documentary about it: Time Dilation : An Experiment With Mu – Mesons (1962)). Elementary particles called mu-meson travel at about 99% of the speed of light, and as they do, time travels nine times faster for the rest of the world. So, when one microsecond is registered by the mu-meson’s own clock, nine microseconds had passed for the scientists’ clocks on Earth. The clocks are fine, precise, no trickery applied.

When a certain elementary particle is set up so that it does not move relatively to the laboratory (Earth, the experimenters, etc.), it decomposes for a given time A. But, when this particle is travelling with a speed comparable to the speed of light in Earth’s atmosphere, everyone on Earth measures a significantly longer lifetime for this particle. How could this be?

Now, the answer. If it had a precise clock of it’s own, it would have measured that it’s total lifetime is exactly the same as the same particle when it was immovable, measured by the aforementioned experimenters. But, because a free particle is travelling through Earth’s atmosphere with a high speed relative to Earth, everyone and everything are measuring a considerably longer lifetime for that particle. This is known because of the simple fact that the particle travels much more distance than expected. The speed of the particle is known, so if it’s lifetime was the same as the one for it’s immovable twin, it should have travelled much less distance. Since the distance travelled is more than expected, we know that more time had passed for us, than for the particle in it’s own, narrow world. This is proven in lots of laboratory experiments with elementary particles. A lot of elementary particles are behaving this way in nature right now, since the Sun is a gigantic radiation furnace, and a lot of it’s particles come to Earth, and hit, or just travel through it every second. If relativistic effects were not considered, a lot of these particles would have never reached the surface of Earth.

Let’s set aside the wow that comes after realising that even time is not exactly set everywhere, and return to how Einstein figured it all out, after generations of physicists working with the wrong concept that time is what it is, no matter who measures it, and from where it’s measured.

Theory of Relativity is in essence, math. That is why it’s measurable, can be experimented with, and determined with 100% certainty if it is true or not. You calculate things on paper (or computer), you set up an experiment, and see if the results match. If they match, we have a winner, if they don’t, then your assumption is not true. The math equations that Einstein used to discover the Theory of Relativity are not his discovery. They were discovered by an other famous physicist, called Lorentz, and are actually called Lorentz Transformations. So, Einstein used Lorentz equations, made his own interpretation of them, and announced them to the world, with a twist of his own math wizardry, in a paper of his own named “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”.

It’s safe to say that if Einstein didn’t discover the Theory of Relativity, someone else would have, maybe a year, maybe a few decades later. Imagine now, that at the time when Einstein lived, there was a physicist named Goran (like myself) that had a company with 2,900 colleagues-employees. Goran was so enthusiastic about discovering the Theory of Relativity, that he worked on it 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for months. He pressured all of his employees to either work like himself, or they will be fired. In the end, since Albert discovered the Theory of Relativity, Goran wasted his time, resources, accrued a lot of stress, likely made bad decisions about his nutrition and lifestyle, but discovered nothing.

To create the most expensive company in the world is a great success. Elon Musk will be remembered as the person who created the Tesla company. Yet, if you didn’t do it, someone else, or a number of companies would have taken on the electric vehicle market a few years or decades later. Maybe even with a better technical concept, cheaper, and more environment safe. I could imagine, for instance, rails over the road used by vehicle-like pods, overground trains, if you will, run purely on electricity. Imagine all the roads used only by people, the few vehicles being huge trucks for heavy transport. Maybe after fifty, or a hundred years? As controlled, and energy-efficient fusion is now achieved, maybe the next steps and commercialisation will come soon, within a decade, who knows? Then, most vehicles you are making right now would be obsolete.

Even if nobody would have created any electric vehicles till the end of the universe, still, the end will come, eventually, and none of it matters, truly. What matters is how you live your own life at the moment, and what kind of a life your employees live because of your actions aimed at them. Do you live a healthy life? Are you truly satisfied with your sleepless nights? Do you want more of them, or less of them? Do you want more relaxation, more respect by more people, or more stress and less respect? The answers should be obvious, that you want more, and better quality sleep, more respect, more physical health, and more life satisfaction, in general. So, take it easy, please. You don’t need to save the world, or the tiny peace of it that you really are trying to save. As humanity progresses, it will have it’s own saviours in the future, and even if it doesn’t, the end is clear: the heat death of the universe, so it doesn’t matter. What matters is living your own best life, and please, don’t make others’ lives worse.

Even if you get a million people on Mars, with a self-sustaining ecosystem, it doesn’t mean that it will last even a hundred years, let alone thousands. We will be humans on any planet, and sometimes humans self-destruct. Even if humans on Mars thrive, and get to a billion people in a few centuries, still, in the end, after billions and billions of years of human survival, the heat death of the universe will come. Even when after a few more billion years, the remaining humans manage to spend all the hydrogen, and then every other fusion energy source is used up, still, there will be an end to humanity since there will be no other energy source left, while everything around them will be heat-dead.

So, stop worrying so much about saving humanity, since it’s not saveable; think about living your best life, along with the people around you, and everyone that happens to live while you do. You’ll get more out of your life, more pleasure, more respect, less boo-ing, and you’ll become a better human. Maybe even you will be fresh enough not to offer stupid ideas like that straight pod through a crooked cave you thought of in order to rescue those unfortunate people in Thailand.

An other realistic possibility: you may die within this year. I sincerely hope you live at least fifty more years, don’t get me wrong, please. But, your Mars goal may stop because of lack of motivation, lack of funds, bad management, or a just an inability to achieve it. What would you have left, after that? Wouldn’t the ghost of you (I’m sure you would see yourself among the angels, though) be sad that Elon, The Living One, didn’t use more of his time to enjoy life, be a more compassionate person towards everyone around worthy enough, so that at least the nicest 5% of them will return joy, respect, overall positive energy towards him? Wouldn’t you like it if you lived a more relaxed lifestyle? A physically healthier one, too? Wouldn’t you love it to have spent more of your time in the company of people you enjoy, chatting about deep ideas, offering solutions, getting new perspectives? I’m sure a lot of people would have loved being in Elon, The Living One’s friends circle, or at least hear him speak.

Do your thing, get people on Mars, make Twitter a better app, make Tesla even better, but humanely, please; live your best life in business, and outside of it. Relax, take it easy. David Heinemeier Hansson has made a $100 billion company called 37signals, even tough you may have not even heard of him at all; he even has an acronym of his own: DHH. Similarly to you, he built it out of nothing. Please listen to this guy’s interview here. One can detect from the podcast that DHH is very smart and a very interesting guy, and I believe you two would enjoy each other’s company immensely.