The Economist Ideas Economy: Innovation (Berkeley) March 23, 2011 Interviewed by The Economist's Vijay Vaitheeswaran, Musk explains SpaceX's long-term goal of making life multiplanetary through the lens of history. Only this 2.5-minute excerpt survives: the full interview was behind FORA.tv's paywall and is lost. The conference ran March 23–24, 2011; the exact day of Musk's session is uncertain.
Interviewed by The Economist's Vijay Vaitheeswaran, Musk explains SpaceX's long-term goal of making life multiplanetary through the lens of history. Only this 2.5-minute excerpt survives: the full interview was behind FORA.tv's paywall and is lost. The conference ran March 23–24, 2011; the exact day of Musk's session is uncertain.
Full interview wanted. Only this excerpt survives. Have the full recording, or know where to find it?
Contact me Transcript The long term goal of SpaceX is perhaps not a very commercial sounding goal at all, which is it's to really build the technologies necessary to make life multi planetary. So the most important thing that we need to invent.
Oh, I just, it's just because I think that's an important thing to do.
Is it, is it because you want to, you know, propagate humans as a species were so great, or is it from a pessimistic view of humanity that we're going to screw up this planet, let's have a hedge by colonizing other planets?
Sorry to answer more seriously, if you consider the nature of importance itself and say, how do you tell it? Anything is important. Well, the lens of history is a helpful guide here. And the more you zoom out, the more you can distinguish the things that are important over a great span of time. The truly important things versus things that may seem important in the moment but are forgotten once that moment has passed. And if you look at the evolution of life itself and you say, okay, what are the major milestones? It's obviously the advent of single celled life, multicellular life, differentiation of plants and animals, life going from the oceans to land, mammals consciousness, you know, those are sort of maybe six to 10 major ones on that scale, but I think on that scale would also fit life becoming multiplanetary. It would be at least as important as life going from the oceans to land. Arguably a more important and more difficult step because you've got to go over hundreds of miles of, you know, irradiated space versus just going from the ocean onto the beach. It's like a little smaller hop. So this is what motivates you? This was the vision? Yeah, it's kind of, this is the first time in the 4 billion year history of Earth that it's been possible, albeit extremely difficult, possible for life to become multi planetary. Now that window may be open for a long time and I'm actually fairly optimistic about the future of Earth. So I'm not someone who thinks that Earth is doomed and that doom is imminent. I actually think that the most likely outcome is that humanity will last for a long time, by human standards, at least another 10,000 years, which is the length of human civilization to date.