Who is the greatest American? Part 2

This follows on from part 1 (the context of the Question)

What future did you want?

To stand by, enable and witness slave labor in Mordor, or to live in Hobbiton? Indulge me.

View (via an advertisement for a Wind energy company) how another alien culture might see our possible futures–and then learn who is best implementing the answers:

In part one I set up the context and the rules associated with this question. When one understands the rules, the historical context, and accept the national need for redemption–then there can only be one person. Only one greatest American.

Before proceeding, I would like to make one comment about the pool of candidates. As I was researching for this piece a certain pattern became evident. I was struck by how amazing it was that immigrants are behind the success of so many dynamic companies like Tesla and Google, with the son of an immigrant behind Apple.

Oh those damned Syrian refugee terrorist Muslim migrant moochers…

While Steve Jobs was born in California he was actually adopted, and his biological father was a political migrant from the Syrian city of Homs, a now devastated by the civil war in Syria. Amusingly Steve Jobs was famously critical of Bill Gates lack of creativity saying:

 “He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an *ashram when he was younger.”

*a hermitage, monastic community, or other place of religious retreat for Hindus.

As one considers great Americans,

• Swiss Einstein
• Kenyan/ Indonesian / Hawaiian Obama
• Google’s Russian Sergey Brin
• Tesla’s  South African/ Canadian, Musk

one is in awe of the melting pot that is America, the wonders of heterogeneous communities, the pitfalls of tribal customs and prejudices. Walt Disney was the child of an immigrant (from Canada), as was the founders of Oracle (Russia and Iran)–IBM (Germany), Clorox (Ireland), Boeing (Germany), 3M (Canada), and Home Depot (Russia).

40% of the Fortune 500 Companies were founded by immigrants or sons of immigrants. Meanwhile the list of worstest Americans are primarily blue blooded 100% American jerks.

USA, USA, USA.

You just cannot get more American than Yale Alumni Bush Sr.; Yale Alumni, Cheney; Yale Alumni Bush Jr; Roger Ailes, and John Birch Founding Father–The Koch’s, and then Rush Limbaugh and his cohorts.

Now back to America’s greatest person, someone who actually can make America great again:

Let’s provide to clues to this person’s identity.

• Born in South Africa
• Severely bullied as Child
• At 12 having self-taught himself programming, sold a game to PC Magazine
• Bachelor of Science degree in physics at Penn’s College of Arts and Sciences, and a Bachelor of Science degree in economics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
• In 1995, he and his brother,  started Zip2. Bought by Compaq,  his take—$22m
• In March 1999, he co-founded X.com, an online financial services and e-mail payment company, with US$10 million from the sale of Zip2 (this company was soon after renamed Pay Pal)
• In 2002 he took the oath of American citizenship at the Pomona Fairplex  with 3,500 other immigrants
• For one of his less ambitious dreams—to colonize Mars–he calculated that the raw materials for building a rocket actually were only 3 percent of the sales price of a rocket at the time. Ultimately, he ended up founding SpaceX with the long-term goal of creating a “true spacefaring civilization”.
• In September 2009, SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket became the first privately funded liquid-fueled vehicle to put a satellite into Earth orbit.^[36]On May 25, 2012, the SpaceX Dragon vehicle berthed with the ISS, making history as the first commercial company to launch and berth a vehicle to the International Space Station.
• 2016 – he does what NASA could never do, and at a fraction of the cost:

But he does not just have dreams, he has nightmares:

“An asteroid or a super volcano could destroy us, and we face risks the dinosaurs never saw: an engineered virus, inadvertent creation of a micro black hole,  catastrophic global warming or some as-yet-unknown technology could spell the end of us. Humankind evolved over millions of years, but in the last sixty years atomic weaponry created the potential to extinguish ourselves. Sooner or later, we must expand life beyond this green and blue ball—or go extinct.”

• 2004 he led the Series A round of investment joining Tesla’s board of directors as its chairman with an active role in the company, overseeing Roadster product design at a detailed level.

Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man sees comparisons with his alter ego, super hero, Tony Stark, with our very own rocket man, Elon Musk.

Impressive, right? But what are we missing? What makes Elon Musk today’s real life Iron Man the greatest American in living memory? Well it goes back to that nightmare—the end of mankind either at the whim of nature—or more likely the end result of man’s stupidity as is now so transparent in the Stupidparty (and in the Stupidparty’s two leading 2016 candidates, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz).

We are now in the end game, if not quite in the end times, as we witness the inevitable devolution of America’s mass loss of critical think skills.  In part 1 I explained how we got  to this point—the corrupting power of oil being a critical lynch pin. How can we cart this dark insidious power, this poison back to Mount Doom?

Well in this case that would not work because it would just create more pollution. Sadly no Hobbit can save us this time. How can we destroy oil, neuter the parties that are allied to it, take away the massive flow of dollars that contribute to the destruction of the integrity of Congress and the resulting geo-political tensions that only bad guys profit from?

Well, as it happens that battle is already won—it is just that it will take some time for the fatal blow to register. Hopefully we have enough time to at least mitigate the worst of the inevitable catastrophic scenarios.

Sometimes stuff happens so fast that certain people still do not recognize what has happened. Back in 2000–few saw that gay marriage would become normalized, but today the few that still bitterly struggle with the concept, have yet to comprehend that they have lost. One day the same thing has to happen over America’s extraordinarily infantile gun culture, or its sick and deadly pro-life absurdities.

But why am I so bullish, why is the life expectancy of big oil far shorter than most can possibly imagine?  A lot of different factors are involved, these I have discussed here.  And well done Obama for getting back America’s dignity on the issue. America right now is no longer the great stumbling block. But America is now in pole position to be at the helm of mankind’s survival. And there really is one man who has given America this golden opportunity, as he has become the mastermind for the next three stages of transportation, all of them will have a massive disruptive impact on the status quo.

Before focusing on Elon Musk’s most obvious accomplishments we should spend a moment to comment on the fact that there is a great deal more in the pipeline than simply sending the fossil car to the dustbin of history, and this whole process (Musk’s part) is about much more than simply making a quick profit—so consider the following:

• Elon Musk has a dream, about saving mankind from itself, and he has been consistently willing to bet “the house” on it, his house.
• Each time he wins, he doubles down.
• He is a workaholic and like Steve Jobs is extremely demanding and very involved.
• Unlike Steve Jobs, Musk is determined to save mankind from itself:

1. All his Tesla patents are available to any one.
2. He understands that his preferred paradigm shift requires a) solar power and b) back up battery capacity, c) a new infrastructure for electric charging d) a total reevaluation of how personal cars are used and e) other forms of transportation.

• Unlike Steve Jobs at Apple, Tesla is just not enough for Musk, hence Solar City and Space X.
• But none of this is enough—thus his determination to promote the Hyperloop, a massively fast, affordable, clean and simple solution for city to city transportation—friction-less 1,000 MPH bullet like trains powered by the sun.
• But this is not a enough, now he his planning to change transport, via tunnels, autonomous driving, car sharing replacing individual ownership, be the catalyst for building the 100 battery Gigafactories that can replace oil, by eradicating the internal combustion engine, storing peak energy production for peak demand… it just goes on…
• Elon Musk’s ideas and imagination are somewhat akin to Einstein, (another immigrant)—but with two big differences. First, if one chooses to try understand Musk’s vision, such knowledge is accessible to virtually any one. Secondly, unlike traveling at the speed of light or figuring out how space might be expanding—which are things that either never happen or are so abstract that they hardly impact how we live, on how we survive—right now. But the clean car is here, the infrastructure is being put in place, far cheaper reusable rockets have already been launched and the Hyperloop can happen within years of some one getting off their backsides and building it.

How Elon Musk allowed this dream to become an imminent reality, and why fossil advocates will soon be looking very foolish:

See part 3.