I haven't blogged in a while, so I thought it'd be nice to tell a story I have told people in real life. At the end of this post, you'll realize why aliens made me think Elon Musk is a baller.
First, let's go back to elementary school. The flavor of apocalyptic movie was aliens and Near-Earth objects (e.g. Independence Day, Armageddon, etc.) As a kid, I remember staying up nights thinking I was going to eventually (a) work in the slave pits of alien overlords or (b) die like the dinosaurs when the BIG ONE hits. As a kid in Colorado, I loved the wide expansive night sky, but during this period, I remember being terrified of opening my shades.
So, I got to thinking that if Hollywood was really the soothsayer of America, what could I be doing before I meet the grim reaper from outer space. I asked myself, what could I do that would make my life worthwhile?
My first thought was that I would just play video games, read comic books, and watch TV/movies all the time. Having only played video games at friend's houses, read comic books from the Bookmobile, and watched movies from the local video rental store, I realized that if I wanted choice, I would need money. To a kid, I needed SERIOUS money (like hundreds of dollars!). So, I would work and then the logical choice would be to live a life of consumption.
That summer, I did live a life of consumption... I found out that it was utterly unfulfilling. Not only did it give me headaches playing video games and watching movies from morning till night (I should take food breaks), but I just felt selfish. The Tiger Mom conditioning from birth kicked in and I felt that I needed to do more... I had to be productive!
My next thought was that as a movie lover, I thought that I should make movies. I was a huge fan of Steven Spielberg and I thought that we needed more life-changing movies like Jurassic Park! I thought it would be awesome to be an actor because if we can't bring back dinosaurs, at least you can escape into your imagination and pretend. That seemed like a ton of fun!
At some point though, I became really disappointed. It may have been that I failed at a lunch table trade of fruit for chips, but I thought to myself, what is the point? We're all gonna die from the tentacled aliens anyway.
I had an epiphany though after watching Star Wars... that's right, WARP SPEED! If we developed technology to transport us to new planets, then we could escape the aliens, perhaps colonize other planets and with all our forces combined - fight back! See below for one time we fought back:
Looking back, I realized I was on to something (albeit through the eyes of a 5th grader), I found cause in either a life of:
- Great creativity, i.e. movies - the highest form of art for any pre-adolescent
- Great advancement for humankind, i.e. the warp engine - the most awesome form of scientific advancement known to a pre-adolescent
One person who has done both is Elon Musk - see his vision for Space X in this article: 1 visionary + 3 launchers + 1,500 employees = ?, and that he played himself in Iron Man 2.
Both of these things (great creativity or great advancement of mankind) made me think that for the brief time alive, I would open my shades and yell out to the unreplying universe: "Hey, I'm here! I'm human!"