¶ The Grand Vision: Galactic Civilization
Latest interview of Elon Musk.
We have a profoundly important announcement to make, which is the most epic chip building exercised in history by far.
This is really going to take things to the next level.
So, yeah, a level probably people aren't even contemplating right now. This is not in the OUTCOLI is a sort of an out of context problem. It's not in their context. So we're going to adjust the context by a few orders of ninet tude. Here it's a joint effort. I'm pressing the button, but the button's not working. We're starting
¶ Scaling Power Beyond Earth's Limits
to be a galactic galactic civilization. So I think the future that everyone, well most people, I think would agree is the most exciting is one where we are out there among the stars, where we are not forever confined to one planet, that we become a multi planet species, like the best science science fiction that you've ever read, you know, Star Trek or in Banks or Asimov or Heinlen, And we want.
To make that real.
Yeah, not just fiction, turn science to fiction to science fact. That's the glorious, exciting future that I certainly look forward to, and it's worth considering sort of like, how would you rate civilizations. You know, there's so there was a physicist, I think it was Russian in the sixties, Karta chef. He thought about, at a high level, how would you consider any given civilization, and he said, well, if you're type one, you're using most of the energy of your planet.
And we actually still have quite a ways to go to be properly a type one. We're still using a tiny fraction of the Sun's energy that reaches our planet. Let's see here we are, but the Earth only receives about half a billionth of the Sun's energy.
So the Sun is truly enormous.
The Sun is a ninety nine point eight percent of all masts in the Solar System. So sometimes people will ask me like what about you know, other power sources of power on Earth, Like what about fusion on Earth? Well, that is unfortunately very small, because the Sun is ninety nine point eight percent of mass in the Solar System, and Jupiter is about point one percent, and Earth is in the miscellaneous category.
We are. I think it's called saying.
I think might have said Earth is is like a tiny dust mote in a vast darkness, very very small.
The Sun is enormous.
So the way to actually scale civilization is to scale power in space.
This is necessarily true because we actually capture such.
A tiny amount of the Sun's energy on Earth, because we're just this tiny dust mode. Another way to think of it is roughly like electricity production on Earth of whole of civilization is only about a trillionth of the Sun's energy, which means if you increase civilizational power output by a million you would still only be a millionth of the Sun's energy. I mean, it's all inspiring to consider that just how tiny we are in the grand
scheme of things. And yeah, we often get sort of caught up in the sort of these sort of squabbles on Earth that are really very sort of minor things in when you consider the grandness of the universe, and so I think it's it is important actually to consider the grandness of the universe and what we can do that is much greater than what we've done before, as opposed to worry about sort of small squabbles on Earth type of thing.
Not much point in that.
Yeah, we want to be a civilization that expands to the galaxy with spaceships that anyone can go anywhere they want.
That would be epic and have a.
City on the Moon's cities on Mars, populate the Solar System, and send spaceships to other star systems. That sounds like the best possible future. So to do that we need to harness the power of the zone and so a terrifab.
¶ TERAFAB: A Multi-Company Collaboration
While it is enormous, a terror wad of compute. Forer year is enormous by our sort of civilizational standards, it is still just one step along the way of being even a cotdtership. You're still have a long way to go to even be a coardship two level civilization, and you're not even registering as a cordtership three. So it's a very big thing by current human standards, but it still small in the grand scheme, and it's very difficult
for humans. So to accomplish this very difficult goal really requires a combination of efforts of SpaceX, XAI and Tesla working together to create this epic Terrify project. And Tesla and XAI and SpaceX have all done amazing things that people did not think would be done before.
So there's the gig of Giga Texas bad here, there's you know.
The Optimists robot that's being built, there's a global supercharging network.
There's really quite a lot.
And it wasn't that long ago when people thought electric cars would wouldn't amount to anything, and they were. There were basically no electric cars for sale when when Tesla started and people said it was impossible, and now tells us making two million electric cars a year. And then Xai, although it's a new company now part of SpaceX, has also booked the first gigaway scale compute cluster, which in record time. Jensen Wrong from a video said he's never
seen anything built so fast in his life before. So it's a great compliment from from in video. And then SpaceX. Uh, well, I guess you can read it for yourself. Well you already know. I mean the reusable rockets. People said that reusable rockets weren't possible, and even if you did do them, they weren't be economically feasible. So we did them, and then we made them economically feasible, and now we've landed over five hundred times. And then we did the Falcon
Heavy and now we're doing Starship. And Starship is a critical piece of the puzzle because in order to scale compute and scale power, you have to go to space, which means that you need massive payload to space.
And Starship will enable that. So let's gives you sort of just a sense of scale.
We've got some optimists there, optimists for scale, and optimist is about five to eleven, so it gives you a sense of the size of the Starship V three rocket. Stasha V four will be much longer. Actually, the Stasha V four will make Starship three look kind of short. So we'll expand with Sasha V three to two hundreds
of payload to orbit from one hundred tons. We'll start with V three and then you can see that just the that's just a rough approximation of the the AI, the mini version of the AI SAD, so that's roughly one hundred kilo whites. It's showing the solar panels and the radiator to scale. So for some reason there's been a bizarre debate about radiators in space. It's safe to say SpaceX knows how to do heat rejection in space with ten thousand satellites, and over might know a thing
or two. So you can see the radiator is actually quite small relative to the solar panels, and we'll call it the mini sad.
Since that's just one hundred kilo.
Whites, we expect future satellites to probably go to the megawatt range.
So in order to get to the terra watt.
Of compute per year, you need about ten million tons two over per year, and at a HydroD killer what's per ton. So we're confident this is feasible, like no new physics or impossible things are required to get there. So I'm confident that actually that SpaceX will get to ten million tons toward per year, and then we're building up to a terrawatt of solar, so that solves the will solve the solar problem the power generation, So then the key missing ingredient is therefore a terrawat of compute.
¶ Building the Advanced TERAFAB for Chips
So this announcement is about solving the key missing ingredient. To give you a sense of what we're talking about, the current output of AI compute is roughly twenty gigawats per year. This chart explains why we need to build the terror fat because all of the rest of the output from Earth is about two percent of what we need. So if you add up all the fabs on Earth combined, they're only about two percent of what we need. For
the Terra wid project or TERRAFAB project. So you know, we certainly want our existing supply chain to be clear. We're very grateful to our existing supply chain to Samsung, TSMC, Micron and others, and we would like them to expand as.
Quickly as they can, and we will buy all of their chips. I have said these.
Exact words to them, but there's there's a maximum rate at which they're comfortable expanding.
But that rate is much less than we would like.
And so we we either build the terrafab or we don't have the chips, and we need the chips, so well build tear fab. And we're signing off with an Advanced Technology fab here in Austin, and.
I believe Governor Abbott is in the audience.
I'd like to thank Governor Abbott and the State of Texas for the support. So in the Advanced Technology Fab, we will have all of the equipment necessary to make a chip of any kind logical memory, and we will also have all of the equipment necessary to make the lithography masks. So in a single building we can create a lithography mask, make the chip, test the chip, make another mask, and have an incredibly fast recurse of loop
for improving the chip design. To the best of my knowledge, this doesn't exist anywhere in the world where you've got everything necessary to build logic memory and do packaging and test it and then do the masks, improve the masks, and just keep looping it.
So we're not just going to do conventional compute in this.
I think there's some very interesting new physics that is potentially that I actually I'm confident will work.
It's just a question of one.
So this is going to we're really going to push the limit of physics and compute, and we're going to try a bunch of wild and crazy things, which you can do if you've got that fast iteration move that. I can't emphasize enough the importance of being able to make a chip tested and then make and then change the design.
Do another one, and have that in a single building.
I think that our recursive improvement with that situation is probably an order of magnitude better than anything else in
¶ Optimizing Chips for Space and Robots
the world. So broadly speaking, we expect to make two two kinds of CHIRP, so one will be optimized for edge and inference, so that'll be used primarily in optimists and in the cars, but especially an optimists because I expect the robots, humanoid robots to be made ten to
one hundred times more than the volume of cars. So you know, if vehicle production vical production growth is about one hundred million vehicles a year, and I expect humanoid robot production to be somewhere between a billion and ten billion years a year.
So it's a lot.
So yeah, tells is going to make a very significant percentage of those is our goal. And then we need a high power chip that is designed for space that takes into account the more difficult environment in space where you've got high power energy ions photons, you had electron build up, it's a hostile environment in space. So you want to design the chip, you want to optimize it for space, and you also want to generally run it a little hotter than you would normally run a chip
on Earth to minimize the radiator mass. So they're just a bunch of constraints that you designed something differently in space than you went on the ground.
And for the space compute, my.
Guess is that is the vast majority of the compute because your power constrained on Earth. Why I think it's probably one hundred to two hundred gigawa's a year of terrestrial chips, and probably on the order of a tarrawat of ships in space, just because of power distraints on the ground. Is probably that's probably how it ends up. Space has this advantage that it's always sunny, it's very nice. So I actually think that the cost of AI and deploying AI in space will drop below the cost of
terrestrial AI much sooner than most people expect. I think it may be only two or three years before it is actually lower cost to send AI chips to space than it is on the ground because in space you don't need much in the way of batteries because if it's always sonny and the solar power, you're going to get at least five or more times the solar power you get in space versus the ground, because you don't have atmospheric attenuation or a day night cycle or seasonality,
and you're always normal to the Sun, so you're really maximizing the.
Solar power at that point.
And the space solar actually costs less than terrestrial solo because you don't need heavy glass or framing to protect it from extreme weather events. So as soon as the cost to orbit drops to a low number, it immediately makes extremely compelling sense to put AI in space.
It becomes a no brainer. Basically.
Moreover, as you go to space, you get increased economies of scale and things get easier over time, Whereas as you try to put more and more power on the ground, you run out of space and you start using up the easy spots, and then you get next level numbie. Nobody wants the thing in their backyard. So then so actually increasing power on Earth has becomes harder over time and more extensive over time, but in space it becomes actually cheaper.
¶ Future Abundance: Moon Mass Drivers and Beyond
And easier over time. These are very important points.
What you just saw there was because of course you're asking what's on your mind is, well, what do you do after a terrorfab?
Don't think small? Well yeah, good point.
So we you know, how do you get to a cattawat is the obvious next question, and you get there by having an electromagnetic mass driver on the moon with robots with optimize and obviously lots of humans, and.
With that you can send a petalwat. You can create a pedalwat of compute and send that.
To deep space, because on the moon has no atmosphere and has one six Earth gravity, so you can you don't need rockets on the Moon. You can literally accelerated to escapablocity from this surface, and that dramatically drops the costs once again of harnessing power and enables you to go a thousand times bigger than I tell a what.
So, for sure, in the.
Future, I want to see I want to just live long enough to see the mass driver on the Moon, because that's going to be incredibly epic. That should hopefully get us to a millionth of the Sun's energy at least humbling to think about that, but a million for the Sun's energy would be a million times bigger than its economy, So it's good from that perspective. And then yeah, you expand beyond that to the planet, to the other
stars and create the most exciting possible future. Then that I can imagine this looks a bit like the opening an Idiocracy with the mic judge unluckying an age of amazing amount. So yeah, obviously the elements of that are sustainable energy, space travel and an R A I and
robotics that bring amazing abundance to everyone. And it's really the it's really the only path to amazing abundance is a I R, A I and robotics, Which is not to say it can't go wrong hopefully, you know, but I think it'll probably go right, and it will be a future that you that you love, and.
It's the best future I can think of at least.
And then we go beyond the Moon, beyond Mars, and we sail through the rings of Saturn. They wouldn't it be amazing if you could buy a trip to Saturn. Frankly, if you just have a trip to Saturn, I think you fas would just be free in the future.
It sounds nuts, but.
You know, if you've got an AI robotics economy that is anywhere close to a million times the size of the current Earth economy, literally any need you possibly want can be met.
If you can think of it, you can have it.
So I think in Banks in his culture books has it pretty much right where there actually isn't money in the future and there is abundance for everyone. If you can think of it, you can have it. That's it, which means anyone could have a trip to Saturn. It won't be you know, just a few people. If you
want it, you can have it. Yeah, join us on this journey and help us design incredible chips and make incredible ships and build a terror wat of ships, a terra awadi of solar and tell million tons to over it per year.
Thank you, thanks for listening. See you in the next episode.