I watched a great video about the start of Tesla, as explained by Elon Musk, which brought back memories of my first startup that eventually sold for over $100M and then claimed many fathers of success. This, while nobody but me, was around to establish the company’s vector and gating operating excellence. Just like in Elon’s case, this company would not have existed if it weren’t for me.
Fathering
After setting the record straight, Elon talks about many other things he believes in or ponders about. While I admire his groundbreaking achievements with Tesla, SpaceX, and other endeavors, I disagree with his goals of humans living on Mars.
When asked about aliens, Elon’s knowledge and imagination about our place in the universe are on the verge of laughable. In a meta kind of way. Surprising for such an intelligent human being. And yet, intelligence often proves to be a much-misguided driver of human adaptability.
No Chance
Elon gives a discombobulated answer of maybe or maybe not when asked about aliens. Which is fair because we don’t know. Intelligent people know how little they know. The discovery of nature’s truth is infinite, and someday we may discover extraterrestrial life we did not breed.
The statistics do not favor that discovery, given the 400 billion galaxies, each with 100 billion stars like our sun, surrounded by a few planets equivalent to but different in composition to Earth. Especially not likely because the objects in the universe are moving away from us at an accelerated pace, already so far away that no human could conceivably reach in their lifetime.
This Way
Could aliens reach us before we reach them?
Possibly, but that would suggest they would develop an interest. For us to meet and recognize those aliens, they would need to overlap with our limited sensory capabilities. Remember, we look at the universe through a proverbial straw, incapable of noticing they might already be amongst us.
Beyond that, how would extraterrestrial aliens even pick the right galaxy out of 400 billion, select the right star out of 100 billion, and then pick the suitable planet? They would need to hurry, as the most intelligent species on Earth is currently on a trajectory to live the shortest. With Homo Sapiens’ 5,000 years of cognitive ability halfway down a planetary lifespan of 8 billion years, humanity is an insignificant factor in planetary existence. The likelihood they would get here while we are here is minuscule.
The most important question that needs to be asked is why you think aliens would only live in outer space?
Microorganisms have been around for about 3 billion years. Today, they outnumber human cells in our body ten to one. We are nothing but a petri-dish to them. Our survival as a human species is dependent on how healthy we are and how we fight off those microorganisms attempting to eat us alive.
Humble Abode
My point is that the aliens are already here.
They are the microorganisms that have already outlived us by about 3 billion years. They, not humans, are at the top of the pyramid. Hence the focus on securing a longer life for humanity cannot be achieved by living extraterrestrially but by using and adapting to the forces of nature that will otherwise devour us.
The survival strategy of humanity should not be to engage in the proverbial escapism of extraterrestrial life, despite the need to expand and understand more of the universe. The survival of humanity is predicated on –for the first time– establishing a theory that consistently improves human adaptability to nature’s entropy and creates a healthy and renewable equilibrium with the aliens that surround and live inside of us.
Adapt
Our planet will survive another 3.5 billion years without us. Whether humanity will is based on how well we adapt to the curveballs nature throws our way. We must learn to adapt, not individually or based on elective morals, but systematically by the theory, in the words of Albert Einstein (1879-1955), that determines what humanity can –and must– discover.
We explain how to build the method, using nature’s first-principles, to formulate the theory, systems, rules, and marketplaces (in that order) to improve human excellence systematically.
We do not need a scorched earth approach to achieve human excellence. All we need is a new compass, as dictated by nature’s first-principles.
