He is so profoundly bazinga :melon-musk:
The billionaire is urging “civilizational diversity” as a hedge against total global collapse
Any attempt to create a single world government is a cause for concern, since it could strip humanity of diversity and precipitate the end of civilization, billionaire Elon Musk has told a summit of government officials in Dubai.
The SpaceX CEO made a virtual appearance at the 2023 World Government Summit in the UAE on Wednesday. The event is aimed at fostering cooperation between nations, but Musk warned against taking it too far.
“We want to avoid creating a civilizational risk by having – and this may seem odd – too much cooperation between governments,” Musk said.
Historically, different civilizations were separated by distance, so when one went into decline, others could rise, Musk reasoned. When Ancient Rome fell, Islam rose and managed to preserve much of the Roman knowledge and build upon it, Musk said. But in a globalized world this may no longer be a viable scenario.
We want to have some amount of civilizational diversity, such that if something goes wrong with one civilization, that the whole thing doesn’t collapse, and humanity keeps moving forward.
The imperative for humanity’s survival may be of universal importance, Musk believes, considering that as far as we know, there may be no other species anywhere that has developed consciousness.
“I have seen no evidence of alien technology or any alien life whatsoever. I think I’d know,” he mused. “SpaceX – we do a lot. I don’t think anyone knows more about space than me, at least about space technology.”
The thought that there are no aliens is “troubling,” he added, because it means that human civilization “is like a tiny candle in a vast darkness, and a very vulnerable tiny candle that could easily be blown out.”
Musk urged his audience to take great care to avoid humanity being wiped out by some cataclysm.
edit : also https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2023/2/16/tesla-to-recall-362000-us-vehicles-over-full-self-driving-softwa
Tesla to recall 362,000 US vehicles on full self-driving software
:data-laughing:
Bruh the only thing that changed in Europe after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire was the amount of state organizational capacity to carry out large projects and dispatch and disseminate expertise.
He's literally arguing for the rump states. Large scale collaboration and capacity is what made the Roman Empire so capable. And humanity didn't just stop existing, even in western Europe. Most normal people's lives changed very little. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but over the scale of centuries we're talking about, the standard of living (i.e. access to food, etc) didn't even decline.
uses an example of one culture preserving another culture's knowledge as an example of why internationalism doesn't work
... what :cat-confused:
:us-foreign-policy: He's a wealthy white South African, what other conclusion is there?
Hey, Elon Musk actually gave props to a non-western civilization, that's progress!
(inb4 Mr. Musk gets called woke)
look if the roman empire wasn't invaded by germans and arabs then nobody would have built it back up ok its not like the actually rich part of the roman empire lasted a thousand more years and stuff. its not like the roman empire went through a civil war a century and put itself back up every time.
No, in fact it went up for the great majority of people AFTER the "fall" of Rome. Giant imperial machines leaching off the populace is actually not that good for said populace.
Definitely true for the Eastern Empire, but the west got absolutely wrecked over the course of 175 years; cities disappeared, roads became dangerous, trade both international and regional dried up and the wars of the Vandals and Justinian pretty much destroyed Italy and North Africa, there was a famous archeological case that discovered a former bathhouse in Roman Britain was converted into a shelter
Of course for the people already at the bottom of the Western Empire's totem pole the only thing they really lost was the miniscule chance of social and physical mobility thru the army and cities