08/11/2022
"Confining myself to my chosen sphere, I believe that the mastery of electrical forces was as great and beneficial an achievement as the Century has witnessed. As to the immediate future my thoughts are dominated by two ideas, one of which is already realized, while the other is on the eve of accomplishment. The art of governing the movements and performances of distant automatons, enabling machines to act as creatures endowed with a mind, will demonstrate to the leading nations the futility of armaments and impracticability of the present life destroying implements of war and will lead to more permanent peaceful relations, in harmony with the humanitarian spirit and enlightenment of the age; while the art of transmitting electrical energy through the natural media, without the use of leading wires, over vast distances, from great centers, as Niagara, will open up inexhaustible resourses of wealth and power and, by rendering immense amounts of the energy of the sun available to the wants of man, will perhaps make it possible for him to produce similar wonderful changes and transformations on the surface of our globe as are, to all evidence, now being wrought by intelligent beings on a neighbouring planet."
–Nikola Tesla
Colorado Springs, Dec. 8, 1899.
(From Tesla’s Colorado Springs Notes in response to note from I. Hawthorne forwarded to "The North American" newspaper in Philadelphia, PA.)