this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Risa
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So I'd completely wiped this from my memory ... but Elon Musk is Star Trek canon now?
Like even if Musk doesn't do anything justifying him being remembered by Starfleet ... in the Star Trek timeline ... he did??
Also on Discovery, Tilly mentioned attending Musk Junior High School, so yeah, apparently. Both of these mentions would have been before he bought Twitter, I’m not sure if the writers would be so quick to name drop him today.
Which is the problem with name dropping someone from the present.
SpaceX pretty much kept US Spaceflight alive between the time of the Space Shuttle, and... whatever comes out next. Tesla corporation has proven to the rest of the car manufacturers, and other startups, that the way of the future is not via burning fossil fuels.
Elon showed the world what a shitheel he was after that.
So, I'm pretty sure that this dialogue was written before Elon became the obvious shitheel that he is now. And, as many point out, mirror universe Elon Musk might've been even more instrumental to their world, than ours.
It was really disappointing and cringy. I thought the show came out after the Thailand cave incident where he said people who were helping rescue trapped children were only in the country because they were pedophiles, but I just looked up the dates and the first season of Discovery came out a year before that incident. I waited a while to get Paramount+ because I didn't want yet another streaming service on top of Netflix and Hulu.
The Musk references aged very quickly. It's not great to name off living people as future historic figures when they are still alive and able to wreck their legacies.
The cave thing was worse than you remember: he got in an argument on twitter with a guy telling him how dumb the submarine idea was, so the smart reply was to call the guy a sex tourist... and it was obviously the cave expert called in to supervise the entire rescue.
Nevermind how that was an ad hominem to begin with lol.
This is a bit of a spoiler, but the guy who mentions Musk is actually from the evil mirror universe. So the second guy from the mainline universe is confused as to why Musk is on that list. He was probably a bigger figure in the mirror universe.
Eh. There are a bunch of other references to him even after Lorca returns to his universe. For example Tilly was on musk high school iirc.
I don’t think I was ever more ashamed and disappointed of trek than when they whipped out those lines, billionaire worship in a show about a socialist utopia. A fucking embarrassment
I'm with you on this. I actually think it speaks to something Disco kinda didn't do well on ... being a bit to mindful of its real life present.
Like the Stacey Abrams thing. I'm sure some loved it but I think many are very fair in asking Trek to not be so directly connected to the real world like that. If she wanted to be on the show ... cool ... I think the Voyager style cameos were done well where they weren't really central to the scene but were just there and you'd be forgiven to not notice ... more of an easter egg than something central (even if for only a moment).
I'd forgotten all about these Musk references but boy have they unnecessarily aged and tarnished the show in retrospect, and, honestly, made the writers look a bit too much like influencers trying to get engagement with their writing than focusing on the core philosophies, values and story telling.
Discovery had it's moments.
From a Star Trek universe perspective it hit way too many lows, though. This is just my opinion, of course. I found it hard to sit through some episodes. The actors are generally great, but there is too much cheap dialogue (listen to some of the Season 2 and 3 "Picard" dialogue in comparison!), underdeveloped characters, statements like the above that were written without even considering how they might age... well, this was discussed ad nauseam in many places, so I'll stop the rant before it starts.
Thank you Discovery for showing us what doesn't work. Other shows learned from you.
The Wright brothers were patent trolls and Cochrane was a drunken slob who stole all the credit from his assistant. Also don't forget records from the early 21st century are spotty, so they might not actually have a good picture of what an incompetent boob little Lonnie is.
Just a bunch of Edison's trying to act like they're Tesla's.
Woah which show is this?
Second picture is not actual dialogue though - but in light of what happens later it just might have been.
Well... Devil advocate here. He believes he can get a crew to Mars in 2029 so if it happen it will be an historical event.
IF it happen...
Probably not.
Has he ever met an initial timeline? I mean it literally. Has it literally ever happened on a major Elon Musk-affiliated project?
Good point, he hasn't. However he has beaten every other company and government timeline. Plus changed orbital launches from a government focused business to a commercial one
SpaceX did that, Musk just claims credit. He was at his best when he just got good people;e and got out of the way, don't know WTF is up now. Saw syphilitic dementia recently, as good an explanation as any...
Just for clarification, why is him pocketing the American public funds supposed to go to nasa an accomplishment? he took something that every American shared in, even the whole world shared in during the space race, and made it his private plaything he can exploit for profit in the future m.
Because NASA, with nearly 30 billion in funding and using technology designed half a century ago, took 11 years to build a Shuttle cosplaying as a Saturn V. They were legally mandated to. That's not a dig at NASA, it's a dig at the morons who hold their purse strings.
In roughly the same timeframe, SpaceX developed two brand new engines, both of which have amazing performance in their weight class. They developed a reusable medium lift rocket that's now one of the most reliable launch vehicles ever. Now they're working on a fully reusable super heavy launcher that's capable of interplanetary missions. And they did all that without NASA's budget.
Private launch companies, of which SpaceX is only one, allow for faster development, faster innovation and cheaper launches. They're actually saving taxpayers money. And the amounts that NASA does pay them don't just vanish into the CEOs' pockets the moment the payment clears. It goes to engineers, maintenance workers, construction workers, caterers, everyone employed by these companies and their suppliers.
His craft will implode. But seriously he isn't going to Mars, he was always all talk and acting like he's Tony Stark, when in reality it was always other people doing the inventing, while he was being a rich kid jackass
Man, imagine imploding in a vacuum. Now THATS a fuckup
To be fair Elon/SpaceX revolutionized apace travel, even if you ignore Starship.
Doesn't really change that he is a dick, but Wernher von Braun also was a Nazi.
It kinda annoys me to see people say "Elon revolutionized electric cars and space travel"
No. No he didn't.
Tesla took full advantage of economies of scale. If you mass produce an item, you can sell it for cheaper and still make a profit. Elon did not create Tesla, he bought it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc. So it's fair to argue that Tesla's idea was likely not Elon's idea. He just bankrolled it
SpaceX created a reusable rocket. However that's not the first time they were created, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reusable_launch_vehicle#:~:text=In%20the%201960s%20and%201970s,were%20reduced%20to%20prototype%20testing. So spaceX took an idea that had been proven as a proof of concept, productized it and... Took advantage of economies of scale, again.
Elon isn't a genius. He just has enough money and the right people who manage him to successfully pull off other people's ideas and take advantage of economies of scale.
Ps: to be faiiiiiir
But Tesla actually did it. Amd its not a money thing, VW also has the money.