the universe appears to be 13.8 billion
years old
earth
is like 4.5 billion years old
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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
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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
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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