How long does it take to design and build a miniature submarine using leftover rocket parts? In a preposterous disaster movie where heroes are racing against time to rescue a dozen children trapped in a flooding cave, probably an hour or two. In reality, with Elon Musk racing against time to rescue a dozen children trapped in a flooding cave, it took just a little longer 鈥� a couple of days. Just as swift was the to his attempt to help. It was misplaced.
On 5 July, Musk started brainstorming solutions to the plight of the trapped Thai soccer team on Twitter. On 6 July, he dispatched engineers from his space and tunnelling companies to the site. By 7 July, he had collaborated with diving experts and settled on a design, which was built and tested by 8 July. It arrived in Thailand on 9 July.
Ultimately, the 12 trapped children and their coach by 10 July.
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His child-sized submarine will now remain in Thailand, just in case it is ever needed. It uses a section of a liquid oxygen transfer tube from one of SpaceX鈥檚 Falcon rockets, modified with air tanks, a window, neoprene insulation and possibly even a music player to calm its occupant.
Technology as saviour
It seems as if Musk is compelled to imagine technological solutions to all the world鈥檚 ills and, once imagined, further compelled to realise them. Once it was clear that saving the world through electric vehicles produced by his car company Tesla might take some time, Musk proposed Hyperloop electric trains travelling in evacuated tunnels. Then he suggested combining those concepts into smaller bore tunnels for urban mass transit.
His fears about malevolent artificial intelligences prompted him to set up the non-profit , dedicated to building friendly computers, and to fund a start-up, Neuralink, to build efficient brain-machine interfaces enabling humans to compete with their digital descendants.
Famously, his wildly successful SpaceX rocket company was founded to pursue Musk鈥檚 dreams of making humanity a multi-planet species as an insurance policy against terrestrial catastrophes.
Some of his more recent endeavours, however, seem focused on problems experienced by billionaires rather than billions. Despite his five sons being educated at one of Los Angeles鈥� most exclusive academies for the gifted, he pulled them out and set up his own STEM school for them, Ad Astra. And his suggestion in May that he would set up a digital service called to rank the trustworthiness of individual journalists and editors reflects his remarkably thin skin to criticism.
People before profit?
But if Musk鈥檚 manner can be irksome, it is impossible to deny his humanity. There are many tech billionaires in the world. How many of them dropped everything they were doing to focus on a handful of children half a world away?
While engineering cannot solve every problem, the example of someone rich and talented putting people before profit, if only for a weekend, is a reminder that rationality, innovation and dedication can be a powerful force for good.
Musk might not be someone you want to be sitting next to in a Hyperloop capsule, let alone a spaceship to Mars. But if you鈥檙e stuck in a cave with the water rising, I can鈥檛 think of a better billionaire to have working on ways to get you out. As he tweeted last week, 鈥淚f I am a narcissist (which might be true), at least I am a useful one.鈥�
Read more:聽Elon Musk鈥檚 new plans for a moon base and a Mars mission by 2022;听Is Elon Musk right, are we really living in a simulated cosmos?
