The Melancholy of the Skies and the Commerce of the Stars

Welcome to our salon of eras. I am Alberto Santos Dumont, speaking to you just weeks after my 14-bis lifted from the grounds of Paris in this glorious year of 1906. Yet today, my guest and I look upon the distant horizon of 2026. Thomas Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park, joins me. My heart is heavy, Thomas. I looked up from my childhood home of Cabangu and saw the sky as a vast, borderless ocean meant to unite humanity in peace. But the dispatches from 2026 speak of NATO funding deep strike weapons and stitching together space fleets. They are placing borders and armaments in the very heavens. How do you view this militarization of the infinite?

Greetings, Dumont. You romanticize the sky too much. I see grids, networks, and profit. You weep over space fleets, but I look at this Apple suing OpenAI over trade secrets. That is the real world, my friend. In Menlo Park, we know a patent is only as good as your willingness to defend it in court. If former engineers steal your hardware designs to build their artificial intelligence machines, you crush them. As for the FCC banning those Chinese DJI flying machines? That is just good business sense. You protect your domestic investments from foreign interlopers. The sky is just another marketplace waiting to be electrified and regulated.

You speak of crushing competitors and protecting markets as if it were a virtue, Mr. Edison. It deeply troubles my spirit. When I flew the 14-bis over the Bois de Boulogne, I wished only to elevate humanity, not to create new avenues for warfare and commerce. I read that these military alliances are drawing invisible borders in the cosmos itself. Is there no realm left that we might simply observe with wonder, rather than conquer? Even their European space industry now profits more from Earth observation than telecommunications. They look down upon us from the stars not with awe, but with the cold calculation of merchants and generals.

Wonder does not pay the bills, Dumont. It takes dollars to build a dynamo, and it takes dollars to launch a space fleet. That European report is exactly what I mean by progress. They found a practical application for looking down from the heavens. Data is the new electricity. If observing the earth makes money, you build the machines to do it. Theory and wonder are garbage without a market to sustain them. I spent hours testing thousands of filaments for a single lightbulb. You think I did that for poetry? I did it to light up New York and own the grid.

But what of the soul of the creator? Consider this news of the company Meta pausing their machine-brained image tool because they took the art of the public without permission. They sought to generate images from the labor of independent creators. Even you, with your fierce defense of patents, must see the tragedy here. The machine is fed the dreams of the people, only to spit out a cheap, automated imitation. They steal the very essence of human creation to feed an artificial mind. Where is the elegance, where is the honor in such a transaction?

Elegance is for tailors and Parisian socialites. I call it a failure of the legal department. If you want to use another man's work, you buy him out or you out-invent him. Meta got sloppy. They tried to take the shortcut without securing the rights. I fought Westinghouse for years over alternating current, and it was brutal, but we knew the rules of the game. These modern tech companies want the monopoly without doing the sweat equity of a thousand failed experiments. If you cannot protect your intellectual property, you deserve to lose it.

Perhaps we shall never agree on the purpose of invention. Yet I cannot help but feel a profound premonitory melancholy. They have filled the air with unpiloted drones, restricted by governments as if the wind itself carries a passport. I dreamed the airplane would bind the nations together in fraternity, erasing the lines drawn on maps. Instead, they build invisible walls in the clouds and sue each other over the scraps of innovation. Tell me, Mr. Edison, looking at this year 2026, do you feel we inventors have served humanity, or merely given them sharper tools for their endless squabbles?

We gave them light, motion, and power. What they do with it is their own damn fault. I measure success by the illumination of a city block and the ticker tape of a stock exchange. If they want to squabble over drones, artificial intelligence, and space lasers, somebody still has to manufacture the parts. That means jobs, industry, and progress. The future is just a larger laboratory, Dumont. You can either weep over the poetry of a sunset, or you can figure out how to sell the lightbulb that replaces it. I choose the lightbulb every time. Good day to you.