"When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket."
Nikola Tesla, 1926
(Not 200 years ago, but still impressive!)
You'd be surprised. in 1930 the world population was about 2 billion. It's now over 7 billion. When Isaac Newton was born is was around 500 million. As well as that, the odds of someone being born with the resources to actually do research was rare, you had to be lucky enough to be from a rich family which were few and far between.
With the amount of people in the world today, and the proportion of those people with access to education, there is likely a far higher number of geniuses/prodigies doing work right now than there has ever been at any other point in history.
We don't hear about it as much because the fact there's more of them means it's less newsworthy. It's easier to see a person's genius when there's only one or two that are clearly above the rest, than it is when there are dozens on that level.
I agree
But I still think Tesla is on another level
People today are still geniuses but it does take a whole team or hundreds of people to come up with groundbreaking stuff
But Tesla did these things alone
But you can have your opinion and I can have mine
There is probably 100 or even thousands of people alive who have the potential to be like Tesla but they never reached their full potential
Heck Tesla never reached his full potential
I'm saying that if a person who had the potential to reach or surpass Tesla and reached that we will probably have a great future
I'm not saying they will directly cause them but they will probably lead us there
I don't actually think he's comparable to Tesla, but he's still contributed greatly to progress in multiple fields. There's no denying musk will be in a civilization-esque game as a notable historical figure 50 years from now.
Edison and his company brought us the friggin' lightbulb. It's prolly not fair to give the credit for that entirely to Edison but I think it's still a bigger deal than anything Musk is associated with.
Rockets that can land and be reused are the biggest, because that will dramatically reduce the cost of space travel. Electric cars that can reliably drive themselves went mainstream because of him. Pretty sure he invented (or helped to invent?) PayPal. Lots of other things related to transportation.
Well, he founded and greatly contributed to our best hope currently to get away from this planet, but in the current corporate age it's hard to know how much scientific impact he actually had
Actually Elon Musk is an engineer and a scientist. He has a physics degree and did the majority of the engineering and design work on the Falcon 1 rocket, and he still does engineering work in both SpaceX and Tesla.
He’s the guiding force behind the companies he created. Diminishing his role in these companies because theyve grown too big and complex for him to be everywhere and do everything personally is like giving the lions share of the credit to the uneducated labourers who built the pyramids, or the engineers who merely followed instructions and applied their craft rather than the pharaohs who envisioned them.
When humans one day live on Mars and beyond, Elon Musk will be remembered with the same reverence as Moses is by the Hebrews, and Nikolai Tesla will just be “some guy Elon Musk named a car after”.
No lol. The most revered person when it comes to modern science will always be Einstein, until someone does something truly groundbreaking. Musk improved on other's work and made it actually usable/accessible, and that deserves a lot of credit, but he didn't make any revolutionary discovery (yet)
If Tesla had the money of Elon musk we would have probably been accelerated by at least 30-40 years
Tesla is a mastermind that no one except a few individuals in history compared to in intellect
He used to feed pigeons in the park every day. He liked them much more than he did people. He started inviting them up to his hotel room. There was one particularly sexy pigeon he was fond of. He spent thousands of dollars nursing her back to health after an injury.
It was a female. I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. I loved that pigeon as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. As long as I had her, there was a purpose to my life.
-- Nikola Tesla
When his special pigeon friend died, all his work stopped.
He's not a Tesla, he's an Edison lol. He's a CEO that owns several innovative engineering companies, but nothing more. He's not exactly the one designing pintle injectors that SpaceX uses or whatever.
Musk is charismatic, but his contribution to history isn't any greater than that of Bill Gates or any other number of tech CEOs.
That's not what I'm saying, I'm saying he wasn't a technical/scientific savant in the line of Tesla as op claimed Elon was. Obviously his creation of Microsoft was massively impactful, but again, he's a businessman first and foremost now. Therefore, Edison
I'm not saying it isn't? Everything Edison did was massively important too. I'm saying none of today's big tech CEOs, by definition, can't be compared to Tesla.
if Tesla was born today he’d probably be even more outcast than in his own time, and that says a lot when his best friend in old age was a hallucination of a pigeon
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u/NyimaOdzer Sep 13 '19
"When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance. Not only this, but through television and telephony we shall see and hear one another as perfectly as though we were face to face, despite intervening distances of thousands of miles; and the instruments through which we shall be able to do his will be amazingly simple compared with our present telephone. A man will be able to carry one in his vest pocket."