Does Elon Musk Think He's Noah? Why He's Comparing SpaceX Rocket To The Ark

Tesla Inc TSLA and Twitter CEO Elon Musk took to his newly acquired social media platform on Monday to reference religion, this time posting an image by Japanese artist Shigeru Komatsuzaki from 1968 entitled 'Space Ark.'

Presumably, Musk posted the image, which depicts a futuristic multi-planetary version of Noah's Arc, to liken it to SpaceX's Mars-bound rocket named Starship. Musk's posting of the artwork implies that if life ever became inhabitable on Mars, his space exploration company could save Earth's creatures by transporting them to a more hospitable destination. It's not the first time Musk has melted religion and science together.

Looking Back At Musk's Tweets On Religion

After a 10-day hiatus from Twitter this summer, Musk returned in early July, and in a July 27 tweet, he added religion to his list of motivations for making humans a multi-planetary species.

“Surely God would want us to see creation?” he asked after stating, “A new philosophy of the future is needed.”

Musk, who believes the Earth’s population is in a state of collapse, wants to bring at least 1 million humans to live on Mars in order to create a self-sufficient society and has predicted that humans will colonize Mars as early as 2029.

Why It Matters: Musk’s ongoing references to religion appear to be targeted at a large segment of the global population, who hold religion as their deepest belief. In the past, instead of, or in addition to a belief in spirituality, Musk has considered a new philosophy, which he's dubbed “curiosity about the Universe,” to be required in the future.

Musk, who by all indications is agnostic, wrote that the exploration of the universe and the prospect of humans becoming a multi-planetary and eventually interstellar species “is compatible with existing religions.”

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The Irony: Musk has stated that his quest for humans to inhabit Mars is genuine, and not aimed at generating publicity. On July 25 he suggested he would starve the media, which Musk declared to be “a click-seeking machine dressed up as a truth-seeking machine.”

“Will try my best to be heads down focused on doing useful things for civilization,” he said after writing that “The amount of attention on me has gone supernova, which super sucks. Unfortunately, even trivial articles about me generate a lot of clicks.”

Quite obviously, Musk knows when he makes a decision to tweet about religion that it will generate debate and garner attention. After all, countless wars have been fought over religious belief systems and by Wednesday evening, multiple disputes had erupted under Musk’s thread.

As for clicks, at press time, the social media superstar who has declared that religion and science cannot co-exist had received about 352,000 likes for his post of Komatsuzaki's artwork.

Photo: cometa geo via Shutterstock