- One of the questions that
you guys have submitted
that I love is, it's simple,
Mars, how can we help?
(mellow music)
In the short term, Mars is really about
getting the spaceship built.
That ship right now.
I think right now the biggest thing
that would be helpful is just
general support and encouragement.
Now once that has been built
and there's a means of
getting cargo and people
to and from Mars as well
as to and from moon,
and other places in the solar system,
then I think, that's really where
it's a matter of entrepreneurial
resources that are needed.
Because you've gotta build out
the entire base of industry,
everything that allows
human civilization to exist,
and anyone who, for the
early people that go to Mars,
it'll be far more dangerous,
I mean, really it kind reads like
Shackleton's ad for antarctic explorers,
it's like difficult, dangerous,
good chance you'll die,
and they will start off
building of course the
elementary infrastructure
and just the base
to create propellant, a power station,
glass domes in which to grow crops,
all of the fundamentals,
without which we would not survive.
I think Mars should
really have great bars.
(audience laughing)
The Mars Bar.
(audience laughing)
Sorry.
We'll be able to do short flights,
short sort of up and down flights,
probably sometime in the
first half of next year.
What's amazing about this ship,
assuming we can make (mumbles) work,
is that we can reduce the
cost, marginal cost per flight
dramatically by orders of magnitude
compared to where it is today.
A BFR for a flight
would actually cost less
than our Falcon One flight
did back in the day.
So that was about a five
or six million dollar
marginal cost per flight.
We're confident that it'll
be far less than that.
And that is what will enable the
creation of a permanent base on the moon
and a city on Mars.
Well at SpaceX, almost
all my time is spent on
engineering and design.
That's probably 80, 90%.
And then Gwynne Shotwell,
who's President and
Chief Operating Officer,
takes care of the business
operations of the company.
Which is what allows me to do that.
And yeah, I think in order
to make the right decision
you have to understand something.
If you don't understand something
at a detailed level, you
cannot make a decision.
Well in the case of SpaceX,
I just kept wondering why
were not making progress
towards sending people to Mars.
Why we didn't have a base on the moon.
Where are the space hotels
that were promised in 2001,
the movie.
(audience laughing)
It's like...
You know.
It just wasn't happening.
Year after year.
And as I got more and more into
what it would take to do that,
I looked at the fundamental
issues, actually,
the cost of access to space.
Rockets were super expensive.
And the cost per pound
or kilogram to orbit
had actually gone up
over the years, not done.
And it was like, okay
it wouldn't matter if
we are able to do this
philanthropic mission and it generates
a lot of will to go to Mars,
that's not gonna matter if there's no way.
So I started reading a
lot of books on rockets,
and a bit of sort of first
principles analysis of a rocket,
just broke down the materials
that are in a rocket,
what would it cost to buy those materials,
versus the price of the rocket.
And there's a gigantic
difference between the
material cost of the rocket and
finished cost of the rocket.
- How do you plan a
business where you know,
the rocket business, you
know some of these things
are gonna blow up on the launch pad.
How does that business plan work?
- I didn't really have a business plan.
(audience laughing)
For business time, almost
all of it is really
dedicated to SpaceX and Tesla.
It may sound like a lot
of different endeavors,
but it's overwhelmingly SpaceX and Tesla
in terms of time allocation.
In fact, the only public security
that I would have any kind is Tesla.
And then the next biggest is SpaceX.
And then The Boring Company,
kinda started more as a joke,
because that would be a
funny name for a company.
(audience laughing)
We put the zero in bring.
I mean it's sort of like
(laughing)
it doesn't make any sense.
(audience laughing)
I'm really quite close to,
I'm very close to the cutting edge in AI.
And it scares the hell outta me.
It's capable of vastly more
than almost anyone knows.
And the rate of
improvement is exponential.
You can see this in things like AlphaGo,
which went from, in the span
of maybe six to nine months,
it went from being unable to beat even
a reasonably good Go player,
to then beating the
European world champion,
who was ranked 600.
Then beating Lee Se-Dol, full five.
Being a world champion for many years.
Then beating the current world champion,
then beating everyone,
while playing simultaneously.
Then there was AlphaZero,
which crushed AlphaGo,
a hundred to zero.
And AlphaZero just
learned by playing itself.
It can play basically any game that you
put the rules in for.
Whatever rules you give it,
literally read the rules, play
the game, and be superior.
I think probably by end of next year,
self driving will encompass
essentially all modes of driving
and be at least 100 to
200% safer than a person.
By the end of next year.
Talking maybe 18 months from now.
So the rate of improvement
is really dramatic.
We have to figure out some way to ensure
that the advent of
digital super intelligence
is one that is symbiotic with humanity.
I think that's the single
biggest existential crisis
that we face, and the most pressing one.
I'm not normally an advocate
of regulation and oversight,
I mean think, one should generally
err on the side of
minimizing those things.
But this is a case where you have
a very serious danger to the public.
Therefore, there needs to be a public body
that has insight and then oversight
to confirm that everyone
is developing AI safely.
This is extremely important.
I think the danger of AI is
much greater than the
danger of nuclear warheads.
By a lot.
And nobody would suggest that we allow
anyone to just build nuclear
warheads if they want.
That would be insane.
And mark my words, AI is far
more dangerous than nukes.
If you know that there's likely to be,
but you don't know, but
there's likely to be
another dark ages which, it seems,
my guess is there probably
will be at some point.
I'm not predicting that we're
about to enter a dark ages,
but that there's some
probability that we will,
particularly if there's a third world war.
Then we wanna make sure that
there's enough of a seed of
human civilization somewhere else,
to bring civilization back.
I think sustainable energy
is also really important.
As tautological if it's not sustainable
it's unsustainable.
- And how close are we
to solving that problem?
- Well I think the core
technologies are there
with wind, solar, with batteries.
The fundamental problem is that there is
an unpriced externality
in the cost of C02.
The market economics works very well
if things are priced correctly.
But when things are not priced correctly
and something that has a
real cost has zero cost,
then that's where you get
distortions in the market that
inhibit the progress
of other technologies.
So essentially anything
that produces carbon,
puts carbon into the atmosphere,
which includes rockets, by the way,
I'm not excluding rockets from this,
there has to be a price.
You can start off with a low price,
and then depending upon whether that price
has any affect on the possibility
to C02 in the atmosphere,
you can adjust that price up or down.
But in the absence of a price,
we sort of pretend that
digging trillions of tons of
fossil fuels from deep under the earth
and putting it into the atmosphere,
we're pretending that that
has no probability of a bad outcome.
We don't talk that much about Starlink,
but essentially it's intended
to provide low latency,
high bandwidth internet
connectivity throughout the world.
There actually will not be
enough cognitive processing power
onboard the satellite system to
in any way be a Skynet thing.
I think most likely the form of government
on Mars would be somewhat
of a direct democracy
where you vote on issues,
were people vote directly on issues,
instead of going through
representative government.
When the United States was formed,
representative government
was the only thing that was
logistically feasible.
Because there was no way
for people to communicate instantly.
A lot of people didn't
even have really access to
mailboxes or, there wasn't even really,
the post office was very primitive.
A lot of people couldn't write.
So you had to have some form
of representative democracy
or things just wouldn't work at all.
But I think Mars mostly
likely it's gonna people,
everyone votes on every issue,
and that's how it goes.
There are a few things I'd recommend,
which is keep laws short.
Long laws, it's like,
that's something suspicious is going on
if there's long laws.
♪ Has the sweetest smile ♪
(audience laughing)
♪ Won't you stay a while ♪
(audience laughing)
♪ Come with me where
moonbeams hits the sky ♪
♪ Then you'll walk with me
along the by on by on by ♪
Okay all together now,
- My little buttercup.
♪ My little buttercup ♪
♪ Has the sweetest smile ♪
(audience laughing)
♪ Won't you stay a while ♪
- My little buttercup,
won't you stay a while.
♪ My little buttercup
won't you stay a while ♪
♪ Come with me where the
moonbeams meet the sky ♪
♪ And you and I will walk
the by on on by on by ♪
- Wow this is really winning.
(audience laughing)
(audience cheering)
