Elon Musk on Mars & multiplanetary life
Musk argues life must become multiplanetary because staying on one planet makes eventual annihilation certain, and because a future among the stars is what makes life inspiring. He stresses that becoming spacefaring is not inevitable and that the window to do it may close, and expects enough mass on Mars within about 30 years to make it self-sustaining.
10 points · 7 appearances · 2017–2026
How the view evolved
Becoming a spacefaring civilization is not inevitable → Go multiplanetary while the window is open
In 2017 he warned that spacefaring was not inevitable and that the trend in human spaceflight was "down to nothing"; by 2023 he described a window that is open for the first time in Earth's history and urged using it while it lasts.
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2017–2026
“And I would say that is, that forms the basis of my philosophy, which is that we don't know the meaning of life, but the more we can expand the scope and scale of consciousness, digital and biological, the more we're able to understand what questions to ask about the answer that is the universe. So I have a philosophy of curiosity.”
2017–2025
“Well, I think it's helpful. The tools of physics are very powerful and can be applied, I think to almost any, really any arena in life. It's really just critical thinking. For something important you need to reason from first principles and think about things in the limit one direction or the other.”
2020–2026 · changed view
“If an AI cannot figure out new physics, it's clearly not equal to humans, let alone nor has surpassed humans, 'cause humans have figured out new physics.”
2024–2026
“Well, you can really think of the economy as digital and physical intelligence. So what we have right now advancing very rapidly is digital intelligence. Obviously with AI, that is, it seems almost with every passing week there are more AI breakthroughs. It can do something amazing that it couldn't do before. But it's still somewhat confined to the digital realm. It doesn't have end effectors. You need the end effectors in the form of humanoid robotics. Human, you need a basically a lots of bots, in a nutshell. You need lots of bots. And then you can go from intelligence manifesting itself only digitally to shaping atoms. And you say, what is an economy? An economy is the production of goods and provision of services. And if you have vast numbers of robots with vast amounts of digital intelligence, you have a sort of a quasi infinite economy. So this is really, the future is going to be very, very different from the past. There's no analogy or metaphor that I think illustrates the magnitude of change that we're going to experience here.”