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. Hey, thank you so much for listening today. I really do appreciate your support. If you could take a second and hit the subscribe or the follow button on whatever podcast platform that you're listening on right now, I greatly appreciate it.
It helps out the show tremendously and you'll never miss an episode. And each episode is about 10 minutes or less to get you caught up quickly. And please, if you want to support the show even more, go to patreon.com/stage Zero and please take care of yourselves and each other and I'll see you tomorrow.