Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Elon Musk Podcast. This is a show where we discuss the critical crossroads, the Shape, SpaceX, Tesla X, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. I'm your host, Will Walden. Yeah, I mean, if if anyone here has been through the legal immigration process, I I mean, I've been been through it. It's only gotten worse since 911.
And with COVID, it's, it's a, it's, it's a sort of Kafka, Kafka esque, very long, bizarre process to immigrate legally to the USI mean, I have friends of mine who, you know, they, they can't get their, their wife to have a green card. It's like insane. So on the other hand, it's you, you can hop across the border in the South trivially. It's just like very easy. I went to the border myself just to see like what's going on? Is this real or like, is this
propaganda or real? And so I just went there and I'm like, oh, it is real. OK. This is crazy. You know, we've got situations where people are pouring across the the border like it's World War Z and I'm like, it just doesn't seem healthy. So I'm like, are we checking anyone here or like, what's going on? And, you know, we don't. This is not say that. I mean, I'm a big believer in immigration, but to have unvetted immigration at large
scale is a recipe for disaster. So I'm in favor of greatly expediting legal immigration, but but having a secure southern border. So there's there's some betting of who comes into the United States. I think this is just sensible. All right, let's let's now link, star link to education. We're basically building the Internet in space. Why it matters? Starlink is a massive enabler for people in remote locations
to learn anything. You can learn almost anything for free on the Internet right now. For example, MIT has all of its lessons online. That's if you have Internet. If you don't, you're limited to books. It might be the number one technology that improves people's standard of living around the world. Starlink. Yeah, absolutely. So once you have access to the Internet, you have access to all the world's information.
But if you don't have access to the Internet or it's too expensive or low bandwidth, then you you cannot access the MIT lessons, you can't access all the information and you can't sell the goods and services that you produce. So Internet connectivity, I think is I think it might be certainly a candidate for one of the things that would do more to lift people out of poverty, out of poverty than anything else.
Because they can now sell their goods and services, they can learn anything and but without connectivity, they cannot. So I think, I think, I think Starling will actually like like move the GDP of countries like it's going to be that kind of thing because what is what is GDP as a, as a function of average productivity per person. And so if there's a technology that improves productivity per person, you would expect to see that actually reflected in the gross domestic product?
All right, civilization is fragile. I think it is. We should always regard civilization as fragile. Yeah, There is not an inevitable upward trajectory. A lot of civilizations have risen and fallen in recent years. Yes, I I suspect most people in this room have actually read history, but if you haven't, I strongly recommend it.
It sounds obvious, but you know, there's, there's been, but so many civilizations that have risen and fallen, many that we just don't have much of a record of, you know, like I mentioned, the ancient Sumerians, like their language was forgotten for a long time until it was finally decoded only in the last, I don't know, 2-3 hundred years, but like it's not 1800 and something right in the 1800s, I think, but it's been very
recent. Like so for several thousand years, nobody understood what those tablets meant. And because there were the ruins of a long dead civilization and there are many long dead civilizations, at some point our civilization will come to an end too. We just don't want it to be anytime soon. So. Well, you've been quoted a number of times, Elon, on You'd like to die on Mars, but not on landing. Yes, yes, I was.
I was asked that in an interview if I wanted to die on Mars, but then I considered the corner case of dying on impact. And I'm like, except for that case, you know, you got to consider the various corner cases. So I mean, if I'm going to, if you're going to die somewhere, might as well be Mars. I'd like to explore for a bit before, you know, dying. But yeah, I think we want to be a multi planet civilization and like I think. I don't know if that's the. Response from.
The audience let's let's talk about that just for one second, then we're going to take some questions from. The I mean, I could accomplish this actually this year if I if I was willing to die on impact. The fundamental invention that is necessary for humanity to become a multi planet species is rapidly reusable, reliable rockets. Yeah, I was trying to sound like a pirate RRRRR. But yeah, rapidly reusable, reliable rockets.
So Space Pirates for the win. All right, here's some questions from the Audience Salon. Which one would you like to pick here? Well, I guess let me let me let me just touch upon why I think making life multiplanetary is important, because I think it's one of the things that gets us past one of the Fermi great filters. So in, in trying to sort of explain why do we not see aliens, there are various explanations for why we don't
see aliens. Like what stopped those civilizations from from expanding beyond their solar system and, and, and, and what were the what were the sort of sometimes called like Fermi filters? Well, if you don't become a multi planet civilization, then you're then you're simply waiting around until you, you die from a self-inflicted wound or from some natural disaster like the dinosaurs. You get hit by a big meteorite
or something like that. The eventually something like that's going to happen if and if you wait a lot around long enough, the sun will expand to to engulf Earth and will be incinerated. So that that for sure is going to happen. Now that'll we've, we've got a we've got some time before that happens. There are more near term risks, but we want to try to get past the Fermi filter of being a single planet civilization. Now this is going to this is all set.
This is going to be somewhat cerebral to many people listening. But I mean, if but like, I think this is pretty, this is actually very important. We want to get past the Fermi filter of a single planet civilization. The point is not to to move from Earth to another planet and let Earth die. That's not what I'm saying at all. I want to be a multi planet civilization so that we have planetary redundancy such that no single event can end can be
the end of our civilization. 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
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