Thursday, 29 May 2025
Thursday, 29 May 2025
In typical fashion, Elon Musk set the Internet ablaze with a single reshare.
“Hear, hear!” he posted on X in response to a reflective post by user @DavidSHolz: “In the 1900s, it was common to dream of the 21st century. When was the last time you heard talk of a 22nd century? It’s like we don’t believe we’re going to make it anymore, but to endure, we MUST dream of futures worth suffering for. Please, dare dream of a 22nd century.”
For a man whose business empire rests on selling the future, it was a misstep.
What followed was less inspiration and more mockery.
One lengthy response to the original 22nd-century post summed up the disconnect: “The notion of progress has transformed dramatically since the 1900s... Unlike the 1900s, when advancements directly addressed daily life, today’s developments often seem detached from clear utility.”
The comment pointed to AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, and Moore’s Law, but ultimately landed on a human concern: if people can’t understand or see how innovation fits into their lives, the enthusiasm to dream forward collapses.
In that vacuum, humor thrives.
Some users posted sarcastic encouragements like, “Just keep woke people out of the planning process.”
Others mocked the ambition entirely: “We must power through the dumb age. The future awaits,” one wrote. The meme implied people have evolved from the stone, ancient and medieval age to the dumb age that is going on right now....basically it is dumb to think about the 22nd century now.
Another compared the surreal optimism to “a dog painting, such as Monkey.”
"A lot of people don’t talk about the future because they don’t see one,” one user replied. “People can’t even dream of owning a home anymore unfortunately.”
It wasn’t Musk’s first futuristic proclamation this year.
In March, the billionaire declared that SpaceX’s Starship would depart for Mars “at the end of next year,” and that Optimus Tesla’s humanoid robot would be on board. “If those landings go well,” he added, “then human landings may start as soon as 2029, although 2031 is more likely.”
In 2019, Musk had told Time, quoting The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “The universe is the answer. What are the questions?”
But five years later, the questions seem to have changed.
Even questions have context and the Internet questioned whether Musk’s 22nd-century dreams made any sense in a world struggling to secure the next 22 months.
Yet not all responses dismissed the idea outright.
A few offered grounded rebuttals, stressing that people focus on what’s realistically ahead of them. “I have no illusions that I will ever see the 22nd century,” one user noted, “but I will see a few more decades, and I am very interested in what they will be like.”
Herein lies the paradox: Musk is urging society to dream bigger while many are simply trying to get by. His futuristic aspirations...robot surgeons, Mars colonies, AI-driven living collide with present-day despair about housing, climate, healthcare, and inequality.
Musk didn’t respond to the backlash. Nor did he clarify his intent beyond his brief “Hear, hear.”
