Elon Musk Delivers Surprise “Resilience Day” Presentation

This morning, at 2:00 am Adelaide time, I watched Elon Musk’s “Resilience Day” announcement.  I wasn’t happy about the timing.  I had under four hours warning of the event and less than 3 hours sleep. 

But I made the sacrifice so I could tell you not only how Tesla is coping with supply chain disruptions and raw material price increases, but also how Elon Musk is working to ensure humanity’s long term survival.

In a four-hour presentation, Elon delivered what he called a “Four Horseman” speech.  He described how Tesla was dealing with:

• War: How Tesla is ensuring production isn’t delayed by war related supply chain disruptions.
• Disease:  The Tesla Shanghai factory has been closed down because of COVID, but this will only be a temporary disruption.
• Famine:  Tesla and Elon Musk’s Boring Company are working on ways to overcome the famine of raw materials.
• Death:  Musk is working to protect humanity from the threat of nuclear war and the disaster of nuclear winter that could follow.  He is taking steps that could save civilization or humanity itself. 

I am quick to admit many of Elon’s schemes are impractical and his good ideas normally take far longer to bear fruit than he originally claims.  But I’m behind him 100% when he says that we, as a species, need to work harder at ensuring the survival of future generations.

A Weird Location

When the presentation began it was exactly 16 minutes after it was supposed to start, which was an extra 16 minutes I could have spent in bed.  I was surprised to see the first image was a drone shot of Elon Musk standing before a pool illuminated with eerie blue light. 

I thought this meant he was going to tell us he had developed a solar-tiled pool that would soon be as popular and affordable as his solar tile roof.  That is, almost unavailable and incredibly expensive.  But it turned out the pool was there for a totally different reason, which I’ll get to later.

A New Powerwall Sneak Preview

What we were shown was a sneak preview of the new Tesla Powerwall 3.  But because numbering Powerwalls 1, 2, 3, is far too mundane for Tesla, it’s not called that.  Especially since they now pretend the Powerwall 1 never existed.  Instead, they’ve given it the funky name Powerwall Infinite.  It’s a very appropriate name, as that’s about what it costs.  But a high price is not surprising, as it takes the technology in a new and unexpected direction.

The Threat Of War

Before showing us his new toys, Elon Musk had some important things to say:

“It, uh, has always been my, urh, intention to, er, make humanity a multiplanetary species.  Only by colonizing Mars and other planets can human survival be ensured if disaster strikes one world.  But at the moment, we’re all trapped here together.  We can’t get to Mars before Putin can press the button. 

If you think there’s only a 1% chance everything humanity has worked towards over the past 10,000 years will be wiped out by nuclear war, then that chance is over a trillion times too high.  This is why here at Tesla, we’ve been working hard to make sure we can live in safety on earth today, so tomorrow we can live among the stars.”

There were are a lot more “uhs”, “urhs”, “ums”, and “ers” in what he said, but I edited them out for clarity and so this blog post wouldn’t go over 10,000 words. 

He continued:

“There’s no such thing as a limited nuclear war.  The logic of escalation is, if Putin uses one nuclear weapon and the world doesn’t give him what he wants, he then has to use 50 or 1,000 or 5,000.  Because if he backs down at any point it’s over for him, and he knows it.  But if other nations give in to his demands he will continue to use the threat of nuclear war to get what he wants until he’s satisfied.  And that will be never.  Trust me on this, I know how he thinks.”

Elon then went on to explain the danger of nuclear winter:

“The threat of nuclear winter was downplayed because atomic test studies showed modern nuclear bombs wouldn’t lift material high enough into the atmosphere to block the sun long term.  We now know multiple nuclear detonations in an area the size of a city, along with the firestorms they create, will funnel smoke and debris into the upper atmosphere and cause long term cooling.

Just one of these events could cripple agriculture for years to come, while multiple events could destroy civilization as we know it and return humanity to a dark age from which we may never emerge.  We know Russia’s strategy is to saturate targets with multiple warheads.  Even if Putin uses weapons inside Russia’s borders, he can still put the entire world at risk.  Multiple nuclear explosions in a remote Siberian forest could be enough to cause civilization’s collapse.”

At this point I was so depressed I was longing for the old Elon Musk who would do stupid things like smash car windows or bring out a stupid dancing robot.

A Boring Way To Secure Oil Supply

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has disrupted supplies of oil, gas, coal, nickel, neon, helium, and wheat.  Elon Musk revealed he’s had a hand in helping secure the supply of one of these commodities.  Surprisingly, for a man who is famous for starting an electric car company, it’s oil.

Elon explained his rationale as follows:

“The world needs to get off oil as quickly as it can.  But if we don’t secure supply over the next few years, Putin will use oil as a weapon.  Russia was the world’s second largest oil exporter and he will bribe nations to support him with below market price oil and prevent the world from presenting a united front. 

We can’t let this happen, otherwise we run the risk he’ll turn to war again.  But this time he’ll make damn sure his trucks have decent tires and his tanks are well-maintained.”

He went on to say the world needs a way to immediately extract large amounts of oil from fields that are either old and nearly exhausted, or difficult to exploit with conventional drilling techniques.  The Boring Company, of which he is the founder, is apparently up to the task.  Using their giant boring machines to create a wide tunnel — either straight down or at an angle — allows oil to seep out of the deposit and into the tunnel where it can be recovered through simple pumping.  This eliminates the need for expensive extraction techniques such as CO2 or water injection. 

The amount of oil recovered by this technique will fall rapidly after two to three years, but Musk said this length of time would be enough.  He also said it was not a low cost method of extracting oil but:

“Cheap enough to stop the world being held hostage by a madman.”

The Boring Company is currently working on their 4th test well in an oil deposit at Anahim Lake just east of the Canadian Rockies in British (Canadian) Columbia.  Oil production from the four wells is expected to soon reach 100,000 barrels a day.

A Solar-Free Powerwall

It was then we arrived at the most impressive part of the presentation and found out why it was being held in front of a pool. 

Elon explained it contained heavy water:

“Don’t worry, it’s perfectly harmless.  You can even drink it if you want.  If you drink enough it will sterilize you, but if that’s what you want, that’s okay.”

He then said if there was a nuclear winter, people would need heat and electricity to survive, but there would be no sunlight for solar power.  However, he had something neat to show us that would get around the problem. 

He then walked off stage and pulled a lever. This caused the new Tesla Powerwall 3 — or Powerwall Infinite, as it’s called — to rise up out of the pool. 

The water just seemed to flow right off it.  Probably because it was heavy. 

Elon then announced: 

“The Powerwall Infinite will supply 5 kilowatts of continuous electrical power and 10 kilowatts of heat.  It will do this for over 200 years without sunshine because it’s not a battery but a thorium/heavy water Small Modular Reactor.”

He than handed the presentation over to the Powerwall Division’s Chief Engineer, Louise Slotin, who gave the following details:

• Power: 5 kilowatts electric, 10 kilowatts thermal
• Design Life: 240 years
• Fuel type:  Thorium
• Reactor:  Thorium/Heavy Water
• Dimensions:  170 cm × 80 cm × 25 cm
• Weight: 381 kg
• Supporting Hardware:  Gateway Thermal Exhaust Port
• Warranty:  5 years

Tesla Powerwall Infinite’s Thorium/Heavy Water design is an improvement on the NASA-developed SAFE reactor.  Because it’s thorium fueled there is no nuclear weapon proliferation risk and because of its low power, even in a worst-case situation, there is next to no radiation hazard. 

To demonstrate how tough it is, Slotin threw a steel ball at the reactor and it bounced off causing no visible harm.

After the Tesla Powerwall infinite sunk back into the pool, Elon Musk returned to the stage and told us how much it would cost:

“$440,000.”

Note that’s American dollars and not Australian dollarydoos. 

On the bright side, Musk says it’s available to certain select customers right now.  Everyone else will need to put down a $40,000 deposit and go on a waiting list. 

Obviously, this is not a product I can recommend, as it’s clearly not intended for normal human beings.  Even if a purchaser valued every kilowatt-hour of electricity it produced at 20 American cents, it would take 50 years to pay for itself.  Of course, if a nuclear winter did occur, its owner would probably value its electricity and heat more highly than that. 

Nuclear Oil

Musk then explained that even though Mars only receives 59% as much sunlight as earth, it would be possible to use solar power there if it wasn’t for giant dust storms that block the sun for months at a time.  This means a future Mars colony would need Tesla Powerwall Infinites to be viable.  Musk described how they would provide heat and light to underground tunnel farms bored through martian rock.  

Powerwall Infinites have already been well tested and are currently in use in three of the boring machines used for the enhanced oil recovery project in Canada. 

Because oil can be refined into rocket fuel onsite and because his SpaceX Starship rocket — which will have its first orbital flight next month — is capable of landing anywhere there is a flat patch of ground, there will potentially be a wide range of remote oil production sites that can also double as launch sites for the world’s largest heavy lift rocket. 

Question Time

Elon and Slotin then took questions from the crowd.  The first one was:

“Are you still going to fight Putin?”

Musk’s reply was:

“If you are going to take everything on social media seriously, you should be a lot more concerned about the tweets of our previous President.”

That was a pretty reasonable reply by Musk standards.  If I’d just given a looong talk about the dangers of nuclear war, nuclear winter, and the work I was doing to save humanity itself, and then topped it off by showing a nuclear reactor I’d invented that fits in a freaking closet — I’d expect to be asked about that rather than a bad, off-hand, internet joke I’d made a couple of weeks ago. 

But hey America,  go right ahead and ask the questions important to you.  Always be true to yourself and never stoop to using sarcasm like you’re some sort of South Australian running on only two and a half hours of sleep.

The next question was on nuclear winter:

“Could Putin detonate nuclear bombs in a Russian oil field to create a nuclear winter?”

This question seemed to surprise Musk.  After collecting himself, he rapidly said he didn’t think it would be effective.  Then he added that because Russia was heavily focused on oil production he doubted they would even consider it. 

The next few questions were more congratulations than inquiries, but then there was a question with some weight to it:

“Given the Powerwall Small Modular Reactor is out of reach of all but the extremely wealthy, what steps are you taking to help the large majority of the world’s people survive the disaster of a nuclear winter?”

Musk’s response to this question, like the first, was measured and reasonable.  He’s getting so good at sensibly answering questions I think he may have actually become an adult at some point in the last 50 years:

“I’m not the one who’s threatening the world with nuclear weapons.  I’m the one doing what he can to protect the world from entering another dark age from which it may never emerge.  Even if the worst happened right now and the world is plunged into the darkness of a nuclear winter, what I have done so far will ensure a small team of engineers, scientists, and their families will survive and lead us into a brighter future where we will become a multiplanetary species and never again be faced with the threat of extinction. 

I will do everything I can to guarantee humanity’s survival.  There is nothing I will not do to achieve this goal.  I am doing all I can and I will do more.  We are investigating what can be done to increase agricultural production in low light conditions.  We have top minds working on it.”

Elon was then was asked to give names of specific people he had working on agriculture and he simply repeated:

“Top minds.”

Elon Musk then said they were out of time.  He made his way to the edge of the pool and, with his back to the mob, he spread his arms wide for balance and walked across the heavy water to the other side.

Original Source: https://www.solarquotes.com.au/blog/elon-musk-resilience-day/