Musk credits Asimov’s books for spurring his thinking about the future (so much so that SpaceX launched Asimov’s Foundation trilogy aboard the Falcon Heavy vehicle in February 2018). In the Foundation series, a visionary named Hari Seldon foresees dark ages lurking for humankind and devises a plan to colonize distant planets. “The lesson I drew from that,” Musk says, is that humans should “prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one.”
