WE NEED ELON MUSK BECAUSE ... ... I WANT TO GO TO MARS

t must have been fun to have been alive when Mark Twain walked the earth. You might have lived in Columbus, and made your own living selling barrel hoops. But among your everyday pleasures was included the possibility that when you picked up the newspaper, you might read a serialised report from the sometimes distant travels of Mark Twain, a highly recognisable guy with a contrived-sounding name, who wandered around the country thinking big ideas.

Not everybody liked Twain. They still don’t. He could be scandalous and self-indulgent. He smoked too much. Judgmental. And Twain, a one-time riverboat pilot, made nothing substantial, produced no commodities or goods, except his tales and observations. He took you somewhere. Mark Twain didn’t think for you, you barrel-hoop baron you. But he was out there. Thinking. He spoke past his newspaper editor, directly to the people, to his readers, whether they agreed with him or not. And while he certainly produced outsized, often painful, observations about what we had become as a people, he also offered glaring, satiric propositions concerning what we might want to try to be henceforth. And why.

In person, he could be wily, cold and unpleasant, but Twain stood out as a man who reliably saw the truth of human purpose beneath the weighty mess of human foibles. He had ambitions for humanity. At the very least, he believed that humanity ought to have ambitions for itself.

And now, Elon Musk walks the earth. The pleasure of his presence on this mantle is similar to Twain’s. You might live in Tacoma and make a living working in a consulting firm that helps affordable hotel chains rebrand themselves using urban graphicdesign strategies and overlapping pricing platforms. But admit it, among your everyday pleasures is the possibility that you might pick up an item in the news feed on your smartphone concerning Elon Musk’s next great idea. Electric cars. The colonisation of Mars. Tunnels beneath Los Angeles. Brains linked to computers.

If the last ten years have convinced you of nothing else, you have to admit Elon Musk is somewhere out there, thinking. Right now. I’m glad about it. He has ambitions, sure. That’s easy to assert. But his ambitions relate to something more than monetising a good idea. They relate more to the obligations of possibility, to our larger sense of self. Musk speaks these ideas to us, the people – straight past the analysts, the corporate boards, the stockholders narcotised by profit statements – because he knows we will respond. Ambition is an element of our humanity.

My favourite Elon Musk idea is the one about going underground. The tunnels. The hyperloop. The creation of low-pressure tubes carrying trainloads of commuters at speeds approaching 1 230 km/h. Tunnels running the length of the West Coast, from New York to Washington, beneath the 405 in central Los Angeles.

To be honest, I don’t much care about the economic effect, or even the environmental impact. I just want to try. I love a tunnel. The weight, the shape, the darkness, the mystery of its engineering. I have never entered a single traffic tunnel where I wasn’t aware that once upon a time human beings set out to do what must have seemed impossible to the hundreds of generations that preceded. They moved heaven and earth to make a way forward. Downward. Into the land. And Musk proposes that we do it now, but on a scale never before attempted, using a transportation technology previously featured primarily in steampunk fiction.

We should do this, he said of the hyperloop and its tunnels. And then, in a real Mark Twain moment, Elon Musk, in the fashion of Tom Sawyer when whitewashing the fence, opensourced the hyperloop project and challenged the works, essentially tricking his friends into picking up the paintbrush. It is trundling forward, too. Meanwhile, said Elon Musk, let’s go to Mars! And we will. Yes, he can be annoying, and sometimes a bit ever-present. He seems brusque and impatient at times. He’s sometimes clumsy in his tweeting. But I’m glad Elon Musk is out there, wandering the Earth. Like every other greedy schmuck who stumbles out of Silicon Valley, he seems to be a tissue of want at times. Truth is, I couldn’t care less who he lives with or what he drinks.

But some of that comes with the territory. Musk is a riverboat pilot in his own right, like Twain before him. And he wants what I want. Something larger than simple profit. Something large. Profit is fine. Just take me someplace.

– Tom Chiarella