Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Elon Musk
Podcast. This is a show where we discuss
the critical crossroads that shape SpaceX, Tesla X, The
Boring Company, and Neuralink. I'm your host, Will Walden.
These lights are bright. See Elon, you know, a lot of
times you say things me or you and they edit them.
So I noticed this panel description was A conversation
with Elon Musk. The real title of this panel was
How to Save the Human Race and other like topics, A
Conversation with Elon Musk. And so before we begin, Elon, I
thought we might want to go back in time 11 years when you were
sitting on this stage. That's hot water and this is
regular. You can take your choice.
Alright, Sounds good. OK.
So eleven years ago, Alan was talking about the things that
will have the biggest impact on the future of humanity that he
was thinking about in college. And so let's run that video of
11 almost 11 years ago to today. I guess, you know, when I was in
college that I I thought about things that would most affect
the future of humanity and, and there were three areas that I
thought would have the biggest impact and those were the
Internet, sustainable energy, of which solar power is the
production side and electric cars the consumption side.
And then humanity becoming a multi planet species.
And so we cut that short, but there was two others you talked
about. One was modifying the human
genome. Yeah, I'm just, I'm not saying
we should. I'm just saying that that's the
thing would really affect the. Future and next AI.
So a lot of people didn't weren't thinking about these
same five things when they were in school, particularly humanity
on multi planets at that time. Well, sci-fi was certainly
thinking about it, but, you know, I think at some point we
want to make science fiction, not fiction forever.
And yeah, so like, let's make life multiplanetary and be a
space paring civilization, be out there among the stars.
You know, I think there are things that like, you have to be
excited about the future life. Life cannot just be about
solving one problem after another.
They have to be things that that that really sort of move your
heart and that make you excited to wake up in the morning.
And I think being becoming a space bearing civilization is
one of those things. If you ask kids anywhere around
the world, like what is, what are some of the most inspiring
things you can ask like 5 year old, 6 year old anywhere in the
world and they're going to say, you know, space exploration is.
One of those. Things and and we want to make
sure that we we're we're you know that Apollo is not the
high. Watermark in.
Fact. You mentioned at one point that
that you wrote a letter offering to run.
The Apollo program, I believe. But I would have, you would have
done a fantastic job. But the, but the point is that
the, the Apollo program was something that was inspiring to
everyone around the world. And we, we don't want the Apollo
program to be the high watermark of, of human exploration.
And yeah, we want, I think you want to have some some sense
that the future is going to be better than the past, that we're
going to be out there going to other star systems.
And you know what? What you see in a science,
science fiction, non dystopian sci-fi story, of which there
aren't many, but like Star Trek I suppose.
Well, Speaking of Star Trek, a lot, you know when I think about
you. Let's look at sparks from Star
Trek here. Space.
The final frontier. These are the voyages of the
Starship Enterprise, your ongoing mission to explore
strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms and new
civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.
So when I think about you, I think about Spock and Captain
Kirk, and you're going to take us to places we've never gone
before. Yeah, that's the idea.
You know, if we if we send probes out there, we might, I
mean we might find the remains of long dead alien
civilizations. If physics is correct, the the
universe is about 13.8 billion years old.
Earth is about four and a half billion years old.
So but at 13.8 billion years, a civilization that even lasted a
million years is 3 digits past the decimal point.
And if you consider human civilization, I, I, I dated from
like the first writing. So that first writing was the
ancient Sumerians, archaic Greek Preak uniform around 5500 years
ago. So that is one millionth of
Earth's lifespan. That's how long writing has
existed. So if we were to last as a
civilization for a million years, that would be incredible.
And we would actually probably be in every part of the Galaxy.
So that this is, this causes me to to think that, well, where
are the aliens? It's the Fermi question.
You know, the, the great physicist, Italian physicist,
Enrico Fermi, he, he's like, where are they now?
A lot of people think there are aliens among us.
Well, there was that. It was that movie Men in Black.
Yes, yes, yes. Told us they're among us.
And Elvis really went back to his own planet.
Yeah. Well, I mean, really, a lot of
people think there are aliens, but I get asked that a lot.
And for some reason, a lot of the same people who think there
are aliens among us didn't think, we don't think we went to
the moon, which I'm like, think about that for a second, you
know, so, but I, I, I think I would, I mean, if I've not seen
any evidence of aliens and SpaceX with the Starling
constellation has roughly 6000 satellites.
And, and not once have we had to maneuver around the UFO.
OK, so, so we were like, hey, what's that?
Is that an alien has occurred Never.
So, so I'm like, OK, I don't see any evidence of aliens and I'll
look at it. And if somebody has evidence of
aliens in a, in a, you know, that's not just a fuzzy BLOB,
then I'd love to see it, love to hear about it.
And but I don't think there is. So which is actually reason for
concern because you could if, if any civilization in the Milky
Way, in our Galaxy were to last for a million years, even with a
speed of travel that's far below the speed of light, you know,
like a few percent of speed of light, they could easily have
explored and colonized the whole Galaxy.
So, so they haven't. So why not?
I think the the the answer might be, or perhaps probably is that
that civilization is precarious and rare, and that we you should
really think of human civilization as being like a
tiny candle in a vast darkness, and we should do everything
possible to show that that candle does not go out.
Well, Ron, I thought one of the interesting things for the
people on X viewing this session and the people in the audience
here is that maybe I'd give you a few of your quotes and you can
comment on them. OK, let's start with this one.
Free speech, freedom of speech is the bedrock of democracy.
Without it, America ends. Yes, it's it's obviously not
possible to have democratic elections if people do not have
access to the information that would allow them to make the
right decision on a candidate or a party.
So if, if speech is constrained in a fundamental way, you, you,
you just can't expect people to make the, the right decision or
an informed decision because they are prevented from being
informed. I think it's, it's, it's very a
foundation element. It's, you know, if they're like,
why, why is free speech free of speech?
The 1st Amendment is because people came from countries where
if you spoke freely, you would be imprisoned or killed.
That was why they were like, you know what, we should make sure
that we got that one. I Remember Remember that time
when they tried to try to kill us back at the other country
just just for saying we didn't like a political candidate.
Well, let's, let's, let's make sure that's OK in America.
So, and so actually in a lot of parts of the world, you know,
you can't really say most parts of the world, you can't really
say what you want to say without some bad consequences.
So as long as people forget, like why is the Constitution
there? The Constitution there is to
protect the, the people from the government.
So like, if if they're it's to make it hard to change things,
that's why the Constitution exists.
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