Spectacular success in battle, combined with his humanity as a commander and his scandalous private life, raised Nelson to godlike status in his lifetime, and after his death at Trafalgar in 1805, he was enshrined in popular myth and iconography.
Edwin Cameron, the gay South African judge who was found to be HIV-positive, and became a prominent campaigner against Aids, later explained: "A message from this man of saintlike, in some ways almost godlike, stature, would have been effective.
The word "genius" has been horrifically devalued of late, not least by the NME Awards, having bestowed the 2006 "Godlike Genius" title upon Ian bloody Brown.
In contrast, Ikea's much-maligned products are the godlike geniuses of the self-assembly universe: simple, logical and virtually impossible to fit together the wrong way round.
This makes Mr Mohammed sound almost godlike, or at least superhuman, like the X-Men's Magneto: so powerful he must be kept alone in a multibillion-dollar, specially designed cell and guarded by hundreds.
That could lead to an "intelligence explosion", in which a machine arrives at a state where it is as far beyond humans as humans are beyond ants.For some, that is an attractive prospect, as such godlike machines would be much better able than humans to run human affairs.
Geophysicists, for example, might dream of being able to give the odd nudge to the rocky tectonic plates that form the earth's surface, in order to find out how things like mountains and volcanoes are created but such godlike powers are likely to elude them for the time being.
Mr Elizalde did his godlike best, getting President Marcos to make the jungle inhabited by the tribe a reserve barred to loggers and farmers.
