Star Pollution

Society is polluted by stars, and stars are polluted by society. Confused? Maybe it helps when I say that the stars who pollute society are human beings, and the stars that are polluted are the actual stars in the night sky. Still confused? If yes, read on...

This is a post about the tragedy of megalomania. The human beings who are seen as "stars" by many of us, like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, are the megalomaniacs in question, and society suffers under their megalomaniacal bullshit projects. I'll come back to that, but first let's focus a bit on another "star"; Mohammed bin Salman, the ultra-wealthy Crown Prince, and de facto dictator of Saudi Arabia. He announced in 2017 project Neom, a city of the future. The name is derived from "Neo," meaning "new" and "Mustaqbal," the Arabic word for "future"; and here I was thinking that the future is new by definition...

The idea is that Neom will become a smart and fully automated city that not only caters to your needs, but will learn to anticipate them. Hmmmm... Learn to anticipate my needs... Just like Google ads serves me personalized ads? And how YouTube seems to know what music I like? All I can think of is that this city will spy on me 24/7! What's more, the Crown Prince says that the city will operate independently from the "existing governmental framework" with its own tax and labor laws and an "autonomous judicial system." Now it's looking like Elon Musk's plans for a city on Mars and Jeff Bezos' plan for colonizing the Moon! Well, at least Neom will be on Earth...

Neom will consist of three main parts: "Trojena," a mountain resort, "Oxagon," a futuristic and fully automated floating harbor and industrial city, and "The Line," a 170 kilometer long, 200 meter wide and 500 meter high multi-level city in a straight line into the desert. Say what? Why on earth (or anywhere else) would you want to build a city in a straight line with people living on top of each other? The claustrophobia! The citizens of The Line will live in an enclosed tube, only able to breathe fresh air and marvel at the sky on the top floor, reachable by a system of elevators and escalators. The Wikipedia article even mentions a plan for a giant artificial moon

To see just how bonkers this project really is, please watch the above linked video, but I hope it's clear by now that a project like this can sprout only from the most megalomaniacal of minds. This is a textbook example of a grandiose and self-serving project that serves no one and nothing but the ego of the Crown Prince. Maybe Mohammed bin Salman is taking a stab at Elon Musk's claim to fame, as he's seen by many as a singular visionary, driving humanity towards a better future. But he isn't, they both aren't. Elon Musk's narrative is a carefully constructed one, driven along by relentless attention from the press and his large following; it's what allowed him to evade scrutiny and become the world's richest person.

Elon has become the powerful man who sold the fantasy that faith in the combined power of technology and the market could change the world without needing a role for the government. Just don’t talk about the billions in subsidies that kept his companies going over the years. Elon's stardom has blinded many people, mainly his adoring fans, to the fact that many of his projects have nothing to do with that better future, and everything to do with serving his own selfish needs. Starlink, a satellite internet constellation operated by SpaceX, providing satellite Internet access coverage to 40 countries, is a good example of how this works. On one hand Musk claims he wants humanity to colonize space, starting with a city on Mars, but with Starlink he obstructs real scientists in their efforts to learn more about outer space and other planets; watch the below linked video for information about that. The TL;DR is that the thousands of Starlink satellites cause "star pollution," obstructing the view from some of the most expensive astronomical observatories.

I's always the same with these megalomaniacal types. Hyperloop was never meant to be built: the goal of Hyperloop was to get California's high-speed rail canceled. Musk and the Kochs, both trying to halt a transition away from automobiles. For Musk, fantasy technologies are preferable to real solutions. And the same goes for Mohammed bin Salman, Jeff Bezos and all the other so called visionaries whose vision is locked firmly on their own bottom line.

Just for fun I'll throw in one other project from Musk that's doomed to fail, at least for the foreseeable future, and is in fact a bogus solution to a very real problem: the self-driving Tesla. Self-driving cars are proposed as a solution to traffic problems; ultimately the cars will become smart and efficient enough, through them being aware of each other and their surroundings, to prevent accidents and congestion. This, like the Hyperloop, is bypassing completely the only real solution to these problems, which is to have less cars on the road. But less cars means less sales means less dollars for Musk, so that's a solution he'll never support. And his "solutions" will ultimately only make things worse...

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