Elon Musk Talks About Colonizing the Galaxy

How much time before there's regular travel back and forth to Mars? Roughly. Like a real civilization on Mars. Well, I think it's going to take a while to build a real civilization. The real threshold that really matters is... ...for getting past the great filter. Do we have enough resources on Mars such that if the spaceships from Earth stop coming... You can survive. So, you can only be dismissing one little thing. You'd be like, you're on a long sea voyage and the only thing you're missing is vitamin C. It's only a matter of time. And there's going to be curtains. So, you've got to have all the things necessary to sustain civilization on Mars. And the reason that the shifts from Earth stop coming could be World War III... ...or it could be due to a slow decline of civilization. So, civilization here on Earth could end with a bang or a whimper. Or natural disasters. Yeah. Yeah, that would be up in the bang category. It could also be a whole series of things. Like, what killed the dinosaurs? Well, it wasn't just one thing. It was like a whole bunch of things happened in a row. While they could have taken any one of those things, they had like three things happen. And no dinosaurs. Which is kind of amazing that crocodiles are still here. Yeah. Those fuckers. They're resilient. Crocodiles, they live on decayed meat. They love rotten meat. And so, in any kind of disastrous situation, there's a lot of dead creatures. And the crocodiles love it. So, that's why they're around. Crocodiles and bugs and mushrooms. And shrews. Shrews, yeah. Which is why we're here. Yeah, exactly. Great, great, great, great, great grandparents were shrews. What a strange thing to come from. So, there's hope. There's hope for all you rodents out there. Yeah. One day you can go to Mars. Just keep doing your homework. Absolutely. So, there'll be, you say the great filter. What did you mean by that? Well, so, there's something called like the Fermi Paradox of like, where are the aliens? Yeah. So, where are the aliens? And I think it was Carl Sagan that said like, there either are a lot of aliens or none. And the, either they're equally terrifying. If there are a lot of aliens, well, I mean, the invasion ship slash, you know, bug infestation, just, you know, like. Starship trooper style? Well, yeah, I mean, it's like an alien civilization might just view us as like a bug infestation. Right. You know, it's like, hey, we left that planet, it was fine. Now it's got a bunch of bugs. Just go fumigate it, you know. Like, we'd fumigate a house. That's certainly impossible. And then, but if there are no aliens, well, could it be that all civilizations are just destroyed before they become interstellar? You know, so, and I want to be clear, like, to the best of my knowledge, there is no evidence for alien life on Earth. That alien, there's no evidence for alien life. There's no direct evidence for alien life. No. You know, and if somebody says, oh, what about this alien for, you know, sighting or whatever, I'm like, listen, it's got to be at least as good as a 7-Eleven or ATM cam. Okay. It's like, if somebody's got at least like an iPhone one level camera, like something, you know, the problem with that is it's just too easy to fake things today, too. Yeah, sure. I look at least try hard in there and faking. Are you familiar with Commander David Frevers' account of the Tic Tac UFO that he encountered off of the coast of San Diego? You know Lex, Lex Friedman? Yeah. Lex Friedman interviewed him on his podcast, and I interviewed him as well. And if you ever get a chance to listen to Lex's conversation with him, it's really excellent. But this guy is a naval fighter pilot, and he talked about this thing that they tracked on radar that went from more than 60,000 feet above sea level to one foot in less than a second, shaped like a Tic Tac, no visible sign of propulsion, blocked radar, actively jammed their tracking systems, and then went to their predetermined point that they were supposed to, that the fighter jet was supposed to scramble to, went to it 30 miles away in, you know, a couple seconds. I have no idea how it did it. They don't know what it is. And these guys that were working for the Navy off the coast said they encountered them several times. They didn't know what they were. They didn't know what to do. And they just did not know. Did they just fly over or something? They do. They have video of it. Okay. They have video of it. They have, there's, you ever see the New York Times article that came out in 2017 about this stuff? I don't know. No? Yeah. There was a New York Times article in 2017 that was detailing this, and there's a couple other, there's a couple other different sightings that were very similar. That's right. They were trying to figure out what these things were and why. And it was also in the COVID relief package that the CIA was supposed to release. Yeah. The politicians are trying to figure out what all this shit is. Listen. And so they tried to get them to release all the information they have within 180 days. Honestly, I think I would know if there were aliens. I would hope so. That's why I'm asking you. No. I'd be jumping on that. Like, be like... You should watch that conversation with Lex. Sure. Like, here's the thing. Do you think that they would want us to know, or do you think they would just be observing and making sure we don't blow ourselves up? I don't know, man. They're real. Would you be in a real civilization? They sure are subtle. I mean, if they wanted us to know, obviously they could just, you know, show up and walk down Main Street, you know. Like, hey, I'm an alien. Check me out, you know. He has my spaceship. I just land in the middle of Times Square. I'd be like, okay. Or hover over downtown L.A. Yeah. We'd be like, okay, we believe you. So whatever, they are very subtle. Very subtle with aliens. How often do you think about it? Zero. Zero? Even though you're thinking about interplanetary travel, you don't really think about aliens. No. I mean, if they show up, I'm like, great. Okay. Now this isn't your information. But we... What an interesting way of putting it. This is new information. This is new information. Like, where are you guys up till now? Yeah. So anyway, listen, if I see some evidence for aliens, I'll be like, I'll be the first to be like, ah, aliens, you know. Right. Then you'll investigate. But until then, you think it's kind of a waste of time? Yeah. Yeah. It definitely seems like a waste of time if nothing's happened so far. You think about all the people that have been researching aliens for their whole life, and they have very little to show for it. Well, you know, there's... Other than cool stories. Yeah. I mean, we have archaeologists going all over the world looking at things. You know, where there's this... People... Like, if we were to find something like, let's say, like a cube of titanium, just like a one inch cube of titanium, see, in the middle of the pyramid, I'd be like, aliens for sure. There's no way they could have made titanium back then. No. There's no way. That's hard. That's all. One little... Didn't even need a computer. Like, a computer would be like, hey, wow, computers, they didn't have computers back then, so it must be aliens. But even just, like, some advanced metallurgy. Anything. Like, we can say anything like that. Right. Nothing like that that we could point to that we can't do. Everything that we found archaeologically is consistent with the time... The technology they had at that time. Archaeologically. Yeah. Yeah. So you're just talking about old stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Just throughout history. It's not like... Yeah. Like, aliens, there'd be something buried somewhere, I think. We haven't seen anything. So... Anyway. I mean, maybe there are aliens, but they're very subtle. If there are, they're just very... They're being pretty shy. So... As far as we can tell, there's none. So, nor are we seeing signals from any other solar system or anything like that. So... Now, and the thing is that on a galactic time scale, even with sub-light travel, you could absolutely colonize the whole galaxy. Even some of the neighboring galaxies. So if you gave, if you said a million years with, and say, there's no new physics, could you colonize the galaxy in a million years? Absolutely. The entire galaxy. So you would start with Mars, build bases on Mars, then use Mars to jump off to all these other planets, set up places there, and over thousands of years, easily? Yeah. Just kind of like, you know, software one solar system to the next, and yeah. That... It seems like that's imperative. Like, that has to happen if the human civilization's gonna survive. Because our planet is just... We're too subject to natural disasters and our own folly, and if the species is gonna survive, we kind of have to escape. It's mostly about the species. I mean, there have been some real doozies of, like, massive meteors and super volcanoes and 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. So... And then there have been so many extinction events. Not, like, just a few. Yeah. I mean, the Permian extinction event, that was a real rough one, where it's, like, well over 90% of all species died out. And that doesn't tell the whole story, because a huge chunk of the remaining species were fungi and, you know, like, sponges and stuff like that, you know. Like, are you a sponge? Okay. You're probably doing okay. They're still around. Are you a mushroom? Do you like being in the dark and feasting on dead plant and animal matter? Okay. But if you're, like, a human, you're screwed.