Elon Musk: Tunnels Could Make Flying Cars Unnecessary, Mission to Mars in 11 Years

Even though he did grow up in South Africa, Elon Musk claims he was mostly into the American pop culture, reading comic books, watching TV series and movies that would normally occupy every kid’s time in the US. He reminded how Arcade games he’d first play at the hotels his family took him to while traveling in the US made him want to learn computer programming. He wanted to be able to create his own video games. Elon was 9 when he started to study programming.

When he first came to North America, in Canada at 17, he tried to live on one dollar a day, basically surviving of hot dogs and oranges. Once he saw how cheap he could live of Musk realized it was time to concentrate on what humanity really needs.

At that point he would start thinking on getting involved in the first three things he thought would affect humanity the most - the Internet, sustainable energy and space exploration. Two others followed in the list of Tesla Motors’ founder interests, artificial intelligence and rewriting human genetics.

Elon Musk started SpaceX to make NASA be more popular

Taking each subject into discussion, Elon first explained how he thought raising the public’s interest and excitement for a Mars mission run by NASA was the right thing to do in order for the Agency to get the proper funds for it.

So he decided to create a small mission of astronauts that would eventually show people it’s possible. At that time he thought he could spend half of the 180 million he got of Paypal sale. Today, the inventor believes that we will be able to send a mission to Mars in about 10 or 11 years.

Sustainable energy, a need we have with or without pollution

As to humanity’s need for sustainable energy, Elon Musk believes that even if we were to put the global warming and the climate change aside, once we run out of petrol reserves civilization will seize cease to exist. That is why we need to have a different way on powering our transportation, other than fossil fuels anyway.

As to flying cars, Musk believes if there’s ever going to be such an industry, then these vehicles must be capable of auto pilot. The problem of “cars falling on your head” and the level of noise only come to complete the technical challenges. On the other hand, Musk claims that building more tunnels for the cars would help solve the traffic congestions in big cities, thus we don't really need flying cars.

Artificial intelligence, more dangerous than nuclear weapons

The future in the 43-year old inventor’s opinion is not only about research and development getting better by the day. It also is about the way we see and control artificial intelligence, which Musk believes is even more dangerous than nuclear weapons.