Elon Musk - People Don't Realize What's Coming! - YouTube

the universe appears to be 13.8 billion years old

earth is like 4.5 billion years old in another  half billion years or so the sun will expand  

and probably evaporate the oceans and make life  impossible on earth which means that if it had  

taken consciousness 10 percent longer to evolve it  would never evolved at all it's attempting longer

and i wonder i wonder how many dead one planet  civilizations there are out there in the cosmos  

that never made it to the other  planet and ultimately extinguish  

themselves or were destroyed by  external factors probably a few

look again at that dot that's here that's home  that's us on it everyone you love everyone  

you know everyone you've ever heard of every  human being who ever was lived out their lives  

the aggregate of our joy and suffering thousands  of confident religions ideologies and economic  

doctrines every hunter and forager every hero and  coward every creator and destroyer of civilization  

every king and peasant every young couple in  love every mother and father hopeful child  

inventor and explorer every teacher of  morals every corrupt politician every  

superstar every supreme leader every saint and  sinner in the history of our species live there  

on a mode of dust suspended in a sunbeam our  planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping  

cosmic dark in our obscurity in all this vastness  there is no hint that help will come from  

elsewhere to save us from ourselves the earth is  the only world known so far to harbor life there  

is nowhere else at least in the near future to  which our species could migrate this is not true

they're really two fundamental paths history is  going to bifurcate along two directions one one  

one path is we stay on earth forever um and then  there will be some eventual extinction event um  

i don't have an immediate doomsday prophecy but  there's it's eventually history suggests there  

will be some some juicy event the alternative  is to become a space spring civilization and a  

multi-planet species which i hope you would agree  that is the right way to go we should be concerned  

about demographic implosion so if you look at  countries like japan most of europe china and you  

look at the birth rates and a lot of those places  is only at about half of the sustaining rates when  

you have an inverted demographic pyramid so  if you like look at the department you've got  

aged creation 60 year olds 50 year olds 40 year  olds 20 year olds you know sort of a demographic  

pyramid right um and in some countries it's sort  of it's like an upside down permit so it'll sort  

of fall over so it will not will not stand what  we'll actually have in those countries is a very  

high dependency ratio where the number of people  who are retired is is very high relative to the  

number of people who are net producers and so you  cannot the the social safety net will not hold  

we didn't evolve for this because we sort of  evolved to just always procreate and it wasn't  

birth control or anything right just like how  about babies it's like puff of course and like  

hopefully some of them was five that would be that  was like all of you in history until very recently  

and now it's uh you know you've got cases like  japan where adult diapers outsell baby diapers  

europe's in a similar situation china is headed  the same way because you know they've had the  

one child policy and then even though they've  relieved the one child policy the social norm  

has become to have an average of one kid  so even when they relieved that requirement  

it didn't change you could you can imagine  like people was gonna say well what about  

immigration it's like okay look there's  one and a half billion people in china  

where is china going to get 700 million new  people okay that's like three indonesians  

it's like this doesn't work the full gravity  of this will it is not well understood but  

will become severe sphere issue in the next few  decades so civilization here on earth could end  

with a bang or a whimper um but it could also  be like a whole series of things like so like  

what killed the dinosaurs well it wasn't just one  thing you know it was like a whole bunch of things  

happened in a row if they could have taken any one  of those things they had like three things happen  

and no dinosaurs if the species is going  to survive we kind of have to escape it's  

mostly about the species i mean there's been some  real doozies of like massive meteors and super  

volcanoes and the continents moved all over the  place and earth's been a snowball and super hot

if you read like the geological history of  earth it's like very long and complicated  

um so and then there have been so many extinction  events not like just a few galactic time scale  

even with sub-light travel you could absolutely  colonize the whole galaxy even some of the  

neighboring galaxies could you colonize the galaxy  in a million years absolutely the entire galaxy  

why do we need to build a city on mars with  a million people on it yeah i think it's  

important to have um a future that is inspiring  and appealing i mean i just think that they're  

like there have been reasons that you get  up in the morning and you want to live  

like why do you want to live what what's the  point what what inspires you what what do you  

love about the future and if we're not  out there if the future does not include  

being out there among the stars uh and  being a multi-planet species i find that  

it's incredibly depressing if that's  not the future that we're going to have  

if you look at the progress in space in 1969  we were able to send somebody to the moon  

1969 um then we had the space shuttle the space  shuttle could only take people to low earth orbit  

then the space shuttle retired and the  united states could take no one to orbit  

but so that's the trend is like down to  nothing this is not if you have a mistake and  

when they think that technology just automatically  improves it does not automatically improve  

it it only improves if a lot of people work  very hard to make it better and actually it  

will i think it by itself degrade actually you  look at great civilizations like ancient egypt  

and they're able to make the pyramids and they  forgot how to do that and the romans they built  

these incredible aqueducts they forgot how to  do it do you think there is a meaning to life

well i think arguably the meaning of life  is to understand the nature of the universe  

and figure out what the meaning of life is so  

uh like i said i think we don't quite  know the right questions to ask and if we  

but if we learn more about the universe if we  expand the scope and scale of consciousness  

then we are better able to ask the questions  about the answer that is the invoice i think the  

being a multi-planet species and being  out there among the stars is important for  

the long-term survival of humanity and uh that's  one reason kind of like life insurance for life  

collectively life as we know it but then the part  that i find personally most motivating is that  

it creates a sense of adventure and it  makes people excited about the future  

um and if you consider two futures one  where uh we are forever confined to earth  

until eventually something terrible happens  or another future where we are out there  

on many planets maybe even going beyond the  solar system i think that second version is  

incredibly exciting and inspiring and there  need to be reasons to get up in the morning  

you know life can't just be about solving problems  otherwise what's the point the value of beauty and  

inspiration is very much underrated no question  um but i want to be clear i like i'm not trying  

to be anyone's savior uh that is not the i'm just  trying to think about the future and not be sad