The world is bendable
The unpredictability of where opportunities lie should motivate us to try more
We use amazing creations everyday. I’m typing this on a wonderful creation. The world didn’t need the Apple products to look like this. It was also not yearning for steam engines, reusable rockets, supersonic flight or any of the other items that we use. Items that are a luxury today, will become normalised over time.
I think it is only by sheer passion, determination and drive that people create this much value in the world. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich shocked the world with his Population Bomb. He doesn’t seem to have found out that over 150 years before, Alexander von Humbolt’s work on plant geography and biodiversity had provided arguments about why there are many interesting ways in which nature can adapt to increased human population which would not lead to a “bomb” on resource scarcity.
In much the same way, NASA has always worked on single use rockets, but before Elon Musk came along, another person, Lutz Kayser, had tried to build reusable rockets. Which “hair on fire” problem does a reusable rocket solve? We could make assertions, but by the typical definition, it doesn’t really solve one. At a species level, it solves many problems, and the technology required to produce a reusable rocket will have many uses that we cannot predict BEFORE taking up the task of building a reusable rocket.
Many people can bend the world. Napoleon, Jobs, Musk, Brunel, Curie, all changed the world in many ways, without intentionally aiming to do that. A lot of solutions to problems are not intended to be solutions to that particular problem in the first place (e.g. viagra or the first anti-depressant). Boom, will do the same thing and Blake Scholl, their CEO, said it succinctly - “Passion trumps knowledge”.
Let’s create things we are passionate about.