To Elon Musk

Mr. Musk:

Hello!

Over the past long period of time, I have seen your news on social networking sites countless times, in all aspects. Most of them describe your success, confidence, tidbits, etc. But what impressed me most was not what you did, but what you said. When a reporter asked you why you wanted to let go of your patents on electric cars, you replied: Throwing stones at second place in a sailboat race won't make you go faster. (Okay, I just checked Tesla’s official website. Your original text said: We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than Tesla diminish’s position in this regard.)

It turned me into a fan of you. But this article is not to praise you, but to ask for your help: Mr. Musk, can you speed up the progress of the project to fly to Mars?

When I was a child, our village was very poor and most of the villagers relied on farming to make a living. However, the land and water sources in the village are always limited. Although we all have the surname Huang, the villagers sometimes yell and even fight over a water source, a field ridge, or a mountain top. After all, everyone has to support their own little family! This went on for hundreds of years.

It was not until after the reform and opening up that the road to the outside of our village was opened. Young people were fed up with continuing to live facing the loess and back to the sky, and one after another went to the cities in the Pearl River Delta to work and do business. Everyone slowly discovered that in the big cities Although working in the city is a bit harder, there are various policy restrictions, and the working hours are long and boring, the income is much better than farming in the countryside!

Time flies and the stars change. Time comes today, more than 40 years after the reform and opening up. Nowadays, most people only return to the village during the Spring Festival to worship their ancestors together in the rebuilt ancestral hall. Those once extremely important water sources have now been replaced by tap water. People no longer cultivate the fields, and the mountains are covered with countless dense trees that no one has cut down. There are no longer disputes with each other, replaced by a strong kinship.

When I recall all this and look at the current news about the Russian-Ukrainian war and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, I seem to have returned to that afternoon when I watched the fellow villagers arguing over the field ridges that no one cares about now: such violent incidents will happen again. How many times does it take for everyone to understand that we are all just human beings? Why bother?

So Mr. Musk, I sincerely ask you to speed up the progress of the Mars project? Shift more energy from managing Twitter to the Mars plan, and find ways to promote Sino-US cooperation in the space field instead of confrontation: the United States’ basic science is strong, and China’s execution capabilities are stronger. Strong alliances complement each other rather than complement each other. Promote global progress together and give people new hope!

I know that even if the colonization of Mars is completed, peace will not last forever: it is not about scarcity but about inequality. People's desires are growing many times faster than the improvement of distribution efficiency. But I believe that space is very big, much larger than Shenzhen back then, and it will take a long, long time to develop and construct it. And in the process, we will usher in a long-lost time of peace.

As for whether there will be further disputes after the development is completed, this is probably a matter of hundreds of years. Children and grandchildren will have their own blessings. Let’s make the cake first. As for how to divide it, let the future generations communicate by themselves!

What do you think?

                                                                                A global villager

October 11, 2023