Dear Reader,

I just witnessed a space invasion. 

I was walking after dark, carrying my toddler daughter, to talk together and look at the stars and see if she might finally fall asleep.  Low on the northern horizon, I noticed a small band of white light.  At first, I thought it was a reflection off of a distant tower or antenna, but then it began to grow larger and brighter.  I realized it was moving toward me.

Within five minutes, it was straight overhead.  It was impossible to tell how high up it was, a few hundred feet or a few hundred miles.   But I could now see that it was not actually a solid band; it was dozens of individual lights, like a row of stars in a perfectly straight line.  The glowing array was enormous, and it moved steadily and silently across the sky.   

In such a moment, you want someone to talk with, someone to share it with.  Are you seeing this?  Am I having a hallucination?  And, if you’ve read enough old science-fiction stories: Are they trying to communicate with us?  Are they monitoring our terrestrial communications and beaming them back to their home planet?

My daughter, not yet two, who thus far only knows a handful of words, did her best to accommodate.  But while she is adept with concepts such as mamma, ouch, and taco, her proficiency with terrestrial and hallucination is somewhat transitional.  Someone else, of course, might instead have “shared” the moment in the official modern manner, that is, pulled out a smartphone and captured everything on video, appended some version of the above questions, and disseminated it to the citizens of Earth via Twitter.  I couldn’t do that, as I have no smartphone.  But if I had, one wonders what might have happened next. 

I’d like to think that Elon Musk would have Tweeted me back.  Mr. Musk is interested in things having to do with outer space.  And I’m sure he knows how nice it is when the new owner of a company responds personally to each customer message.  I can’t see Mark Zuckerburg taking the time to do that; he’s very busy in the Metaverse.  But Mr. Musk does not fit the usual mold of tech elites.  I’m not sure he fits the usual mold of anything.

That’s why the people in Big Tech and their support staff in Big Government are so concerned about his announced purchase.  “Mainstream” social media and communication channels have long been the domain of the Zuckerburgs and Nina Jankowiczs of the world.  Mr. Musk has invaded their space. 

He arrives there, in what he has called the “de facto public town square,” as a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist.”  Assuming the buyout does not fall through, he and his conquest will soon have to grapple with what exactly that means.  Twitter turning absolutist in an absolute sense of the word would cause the platform to simply collapse under the weight of spam and fraudulent vitamin ads.  I presume Musk does not plan to thus destroy his $44 billion side business.  Further, as Oliver Wendel Holmes shared in 1919, and as many people have subsequently re-Tweeted, you cannot yell “fire” in a crowded theater.   But then again, sometimes yelling “fire” in a crowded theater is a very sensible thing to do, particularly when there is a fire.

It thus gets complicated; it will not be absolutism.  In order to be more than just a moderate change or a change of moderator, Mr. Musk needs to make good on two key promises.  The first is that he will open-source the algorithms: moving Twitter’s inner machinations away from proprietary secrecy and toward public visibility, philosophically a bit more like web and email, and less like Facebook and TikTok.  The second is that he will aim to defeat robotic activity: unsavory groups employ “bot” armies to impersonate humans online and skew public discourse, drowning out the free speech of real humans. 

So if I had owned a smartphone, and if I had Tweeted with it, and if Elon Musk had Tweeted me back, I’d have Tweeted again to sincerely thank him for his commitment to free speech during these perilous times and to encourage him to remember those two promises.  If he can pull them off, then his invasion may indeed be of the liberation variety. 

But what then should we do with this newly codified right to speak freely in the electronic world?  We should use it to caution people about the dangers of the electronic world.  Elon Musk is smart, funny, and refreshingly unaffected by the woke winds that whirl about, but he is rushing headlong toward most of the things those old science fiction stories warned us about.  And he seems still to be working on finding a coherent worldview.  So if I still had his attention, next I would have employed my free Tweet-speech to voice some concerns.

Supporting their freedom of expression, Mr. Musk wrote: “Canadian truckers rule.”  And he may put them all out of business when Tesla’s driverless trucks invade their space.  A study published in Nature suggests the technology could disrupt five hundred thousand jobs.

Meanwhile, as he works to rid the Twitter world of bots, he’ll be working even harder to unleash them on the real world.  He has announced that Tesla’s new top priority is an A.I.-powered humanoid robot called “Optimus,” scheduled for production in 2023.  Four years ago, Mr. Musk warned that A.I. is more dangerous than nuclear weapons, and four years prior, he compared it to summoning a demon — you think you can control it but you can’t.   Now, Musk is doing the summoning, conjuring up A.I. creations from the digital realm to invade physical space. 

We’re suddenly supposed to be not concerned because he suddenly is not.  And because his robot is designed to only walk at five miles an hour so humans “can outrun it.”  Mr. Musk will forgive me if I am not immediately comforted by that image.

Incidentally, he also says that someday you may be able to download your memories and “personality” to these robots.  He sees this as our path to immortality. 

But if you prefer to pursue the cyborg lifestyle from the other direction, there are the brain implants.  They will start (via his company Neuralink) in the heads of patients with neurological impairments, for ostensibly very worthy reasons, but the hope is that everyone will eventually be able to directly connect.  This will at least have the advantage of reducing the steps required between a celebrity having an idea and the celebrity Tweeting that idea . . . and won’t that be interesting.  But just ponder it: a mechanized interface with our very thoughts.  I’m struggling to imagine a more egregious invasion of space. 

Driving it all, Mr. Musk is extremely concerned that if we humans don’t merge with A.I., then A.I. will replace us.   And I know they say “if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em.”  But wouldn’t a better option be not to build ‘em? 

That’s what I would say.  But, alas, as I mentioned I have no smartphone, and I don’t have a Twitter account.  So I took no videos and sent no Tweets.  My daughter and I just stood there, alone and together, as this celestial spectacle played out.  The lights moved gradually to the southeast, the direction of my house. 

As it turns out, they were indeed beaming our terrestrial communications back to their home planet — that being Earth.  A bit of subsequent research revealed that what I saw was a deployment of satellites in Elon Musk’s Starlink internet system.  They have been ascending this way, sixty at a time, causing frequent reports of alien invaders, as he pursues his goal of forty-two thousand satellites in the sky.

I’m not sure how that will work out. But regardless, here on the ground, I’m grateful to be in good company.  There are so many sincerely enjoyable people in the physical world.  And though ninety-four percent of the Earth’s population doesn’t use Twitter, we still find ways to share ourselves with one another.  For instance, near where I live, when in need of a “public square,” we’re blessed to have a public square.  It is not for sale.  In the summer there is a farmers’ market there, and in the winter children play there in the snow, and any time at all people can go there to talk and agree about things and disagree about things and protest things and celebrate things, all with the intimacy, richness, and honesty of immediate human contact. 

I’m also feeling particularly grateful to be in the good company of my daughter.  We take these walks together, and talk together, frequently.  Though her thoughts are still simple and little, I find it almost awe-inspiring to hear her speak them; she has grown to become a creature who can send her thoughts across the vast space between souls, that they might thus enter another human being.  That is what speech is, and that is why it is fiercely important that we protect it.  It is a gift given not of government or technocrats but of God, by which we step across the divide, by which we conquer the abyss between us.  We invade each other’s space just enough to remain our own selves and yet not remain alone in the universe. 

And my daughter can accomplish all of this without the aid of smartphones or robots or social media. 

Eventually, the lights looked to be just over my home, about a half-mile from where we stood.  And then, suddenly, they vanished. Their glow is reflective of the sun below the western horizon; I believe they must have moved into the shadow of the earth as they trekked east — they were gone even faster than they arrived.  But the brilliance of the original night sky remained. 

Sincerely,