multiplanetary species

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pages: 304 words: 89,879

Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, inflight wifi, intermodal, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mercator projection, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, Virgin Galactic

“It was like having two children,” Musk said. “I could not bring myself to let one of the companies die.” In Musk’s worldview, he could not let either venture go. Tesla was needed to save Earth from climate change, helping to break humans from their fossil fuel addiction. And SpaceX would offer a backup plan by making humanity a multiplanetary species. He split his money between the two companies. Amid these bleak financial times, SpaceX had one final card to play. In 2006, NASA had come through with critical funding for the company after the failure of the first Falcon 1, betting that SpaceX would eventually figure out how to reach orbit.

His argument for reuse is simple: If an airline discarded a 747 jet after every transcontinental flight, passengers would have to pay $1 million for a ticket. Similarly, if every rocket flown into space drops into the ocean, space will remain cost prohibitive for all but a few wealthy nations and a few exclusive astronauts. To make humanity a multiplanetary species, Musk sought to lower the cost of getting into space and flying onward to other worlds. The early returns on the reuse experiment were, nonetheless, sobering. “We were very naive at the time, but the expectation was that we would throw a parachute on this thing and recover it,” Musk said.

And when they did that, the Department of Defense realized that they could either be a part of that, or they could be left behind.” So many people like Chinnery felt burned out by their years at SpaceX because Musk pushed them relentlessly. His schedules were invariably aggressive. Time was money. This window to reach Mars and make humanity a multiplanetary species, Musk fears, may not remain open forever. And Musk’s own lifetime was finite. This brutal devotion to speed got results. The first Falcon 1 launch attempt came a mere three years and ten months after Musk started SpaceX. The company reached “space” in four years and ten months. It made orbit in six years and four months.


pages: 390 words: 108,171

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, private spaceflight, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tech billionaire, TED Talk, traumatic brain injury, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, zero-sum game

“When I was a kid I found the slideshows kind of tedious, but maybe it stuck in some way. Now I’d like to see the slideshow. But as a kid I was, like, ‘I want to go play with my friends. Why are you showing me these slides of the desert?’” In founding SpaceX, Musk believed that in addition to trying to make humans a multiplanetary species—with the ultimate goal of sending people to Mars—he saw space travel as the greatest adventure ever, even greater than the quixotic searches for the Lost City. Although there was, as he said, the “defensive reason” to go to Mars to colonize another planet—so that humanity would have another place to go in case anything happened to Earth—this was not what inspired him to go to Mars.

Now Elon—always the one name—was the new face of the American space program, the embodiment of exploration, a modern-day amalgam of JFK and Neil Armstrong, with 10 million Twitter followers. The press room in Guadalajara was overflowing with reporters who had come from all over the world for this long-awaited speech, titled “Making Humans a Multiplanetary Species,” in which Musk would, finally, lay out his plan to colonize Mars. In the months leading up to Guadalajara, he disclosed some of the details, telling the Washington Post that he intended to build a transportation system to the Red Planet like the railroads that traversed the United States, with the goal of the first humans landing on Mars in 2025.

After the launch, an emotional Musk called it “an incredible milestone in the history of space,” one that SpaceX had been working toward for fifteen years. This, he said, would be what would ultimately lower the cost of spaceflight, perhaps by a factor of a hundred or more—“the key to opening up space, and becoming a spacefaring civilization, a multiplanetary species and having the future be incredibly exciting and inspiring.” AS IT RECOVERED from its explosion and moved through 2017, SpaceX screamed ahead, full force, racing through its backlog of seventy missions, worth some $10 billion. With six thousand employees, it at one point flew back-to-back missions within forty-eight hours, as it gobbled up a larger share of the international launch market.


pages: 319 words: 100,984

The Moon: A History for the Future by Oliver Morton

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, Dava Sobel, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, private spaceflight, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nordhaus, UNCLOS, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer who in 1998 founded the Mars Society, sees the settlement that the society advocates as a way—perhaps the only way—to regain a cultural vigour he thinks was lost with the closing of the American frontier at the end of the 19th century. Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and, as I write, probably the world’s most talked-about entrepreneur, sees Mars as a hedge against existential all-eggs-in-the-same-basket disasters. In a messy mix of cosmic compassion and messianic self-belief, Mr Musk is set on making humanity a multiplanetary species, and Mars—eventually, a terraformed Mars—is the first step on that road. Its mixture of mystique, new challenges and science has ensured that whenever the US government sets out long-term space plans, human feet on the sands of Mars are always in the mix. They were there in the Space Exploration Initiative proposed by George H.

Something has to happen next, and a ship of artists from around the world is no worse an idea than any other, and better than quite a few. MR MAEZAWA’S TRIP IS TO BE PROVIDED BY ELON MUSK. MR Musk has, in the past, been somewhat sniffy about space tourism. When he founded his company SpaceX in 2003 it was to do real things: to launch satellites, to sell services, to reinvent the human condition by making Homo sapiens a multiplanetary species. Package holidays for plutocrats were not part of the plan. As a provider of practical services to industry and government, SpaceX has succeeded beyond almost all expectation. In the ten years since September 2008, when, at its fourth attempt, SpaceX finally launched its first satellite, the company has gone from triumph to triumph.

Tumlinson with Medlicott (2005) brings together many reasons and plans for the Return; helium 3 is discussed in Spudis (1996); Dennis Wingo makes the case for platinum from the Moon in Wingo (2004); the National Academy of Sciences (2007) and the Lunar Exploration Analysis Group (2016) set out the scientific rationale. The idea of America as a second creation is explored in Nye (2003). CHAPTER VI The quotation from the Saturday Review is from Barnouw (1970). For Elon Musk’s achievements and character, see Vance (2015), and for what was the latest version of his infrastructure for a multiplanetary species (but will probably be superseded by the time you read this), see Musk (2018). Robert Zubrin’s Moon proposal is Zubrin (2018). Miller et al (2015) is a fascinating analysis of a public-private Return to the Moon. CHAPTER VII A version of the BOLAS idea is described in Stubbs et al (2018); the charms of Rima Bode are described in Spudis and Richards (2018).


pages: 370 words: 129,096

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

addicted to oil, Burning Man, clean tech, digital map, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, money market fund, multiplanetary species, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pneumatic tube, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

The planet has been heated up and transformed to suit humans. Musk fully intends to try and make this happen. Turning humans into space colonizers is his stated life’s purpose. “I would like to die thinking that humanity has a bright future,” he said. “If we can solve sustainable energy and be well on our way to becoming a multiplanetary species with a self-sustaining civilization on another planet—to cope with a worst-case scenario happening and extinguishing human consciousness—then,” and here he paused for a moment, “I think that would be really good.” If some of the things that Musk says and does sound absurd, that’s because on one level they very much are.

Fearing one of his enemies was trying to orchestrate an elaborate setup, Cantrell told Musk to meet him at the Salt Lake City airport, where he would rent a conference room near the Delta lounge. “I wanted him to meet me behind security so he couldn’t pack a gun,” Cantrell said. When the meeting finally took place, Musk and Cantrell hit it off. Musk rolled out his “humans need to become a multiplanetary species” speech, and Cantrell said that if Musk was really serious, he’d be willing to go to Russia—again—and help buy a rocket. In late October 2001, Musk, Cantrell, and Adeo Ressi, Musk’s friend from college, boarded a commercial flight to Moscow. Ressi had been playing the role of Musk’s guardian and trying to ascertain whether his best friend had started to lose his mind.

These are people who in childhood exhibit exceptional intellectual depth and max out IQ tests. It’s not uncommon for these children to look out into the world and find flaws—glitches in the system—and construct logical paths in their minds to fix them. For Musk, the call to ensure that mankind is a multiplanetary species partly stems from a life richly influenced by science fiction and technology. Equally it’s a moral imperative that dates back to his childhood. In some form, this has forever been his mandate. Each facet of Musk’s life might be an attempt to soothe a type of existential depression that seems to gnaw at his every fiber.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Think how incredible and dynamic that civilization will be.” And even though there’s a heathy rivalry here, Elon Musk doesn’t disagree: “History is going to bifurcate along two directions: One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event… the alternative is to become a spacefaring civilization and a multiplanetary species. I think the future is vastly more exciting and interesting if we’re a spacefaring civilization and a multi-planet species, than if we’re not.” Born in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk sold his first computer company at age twelve. After earning a degree from Wharton, then dropping out of Stanford’s PhD program, he repeated his software success with first a $307 million sale of Zip2, next a $1.5 billion sale of PayPal.

Finally, with what he considered sufficient resources to make a difference, Musk set out to pursue what he considered the two missions most critical to our survival: breaking our fossil fuel addiction with a thriving solar economy—i.e., his work with Tesla and Solar Cities—and making humanity a multiplanetary species. But unlike Bezos’s lunar launch point for this migration, Musk’s obsession has always been Mars. In 2001, a year before the sale of PayPal, Musk came up with the idea of sending a plant—plant seeds, really—to Mars. In his “Mars Oasis” project, his spaceship would include a sealed chamber with an Earth-like atmosphere, a healthy collection of seeds, and a nutrient gel to speed their growth.


pages: 389 words: 112,319

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

“We sleep easy knowing that next year’s software will be better than this year’s,” Musk explains, but “rockets’ [cost] actually gets progressively worse every year.”2 Musk wasn’t the first to spot this trend. But he was among the first to do something about it. He launched SpaceX—short for Space Exploration Technologies—with the audacious goal of colonizing Mars and making humanity a multiplanetary species. But Musk’s deep pockets weren’t enough to buy rockets on the American or the Russian market. He pitched venture capitalists, but they were a hard bunch to convince. “Space is pretty far out of the comfort zone of just about every VC on Earth,” Musk explained. He refused to let his friends invest, because he believed the company had only a 10 percent chance of success.

Aerospace consultant Jim Cantrell, recalling their initial encounters, thought Musk was out of his mind.52 When Musk first began thinking about a Mars mission, he called Cantrell out of the blue, introduced himself as an internet billionaire, and told Cantrell about his plans to create a “multiplanetary species.” Musk offered to fly his private jet to Cantrell’s house, but Cantrell said no. “Tell you the truth,” Cantrell recalls, “I wanted to meet him in a place where he couldn’t bring a weapon.” So they met at an airport lounge in Salt Lake City. As wild as Musk’s vision sounded, it was too tantalizing.


pages: 562 words: 201,502

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

Cantrell was driving in Utah with the top down on his convertible, “so all I could make out was that some guy named Ian Musk was saying that he was an internet millionaire and needed to talk to me,” he later told Esquire. When Cantrell got home and was able to call him back, Musk explained his vision. “I want to change mankind’s outlook on being a multiplanetary species,” he said. “Can we meet this weekend?” Cantrell had been leading a cloak-and-dagger life because of his dealings with Russian authorities, so he wanted to meet in a safe place without guns. He suggested they meet at the Delta Air Lines club at the Salt Lake City airport. Musk brought Ressi, and they came up with a plan to go to Russia to see if they could buy some launch slots or rockets. 15 Rocket Man SpaceX, 2002 With Adeo Ressi at a rocket facility and a dinner with Russians in Moscow Russia The lunch in the back room of a drab Moscow restaurant consisted of small bites of food interspersed with large shots of vodka.

“Dude, why don’t you fucking just give up on one of these two things?” he asked. “If SpaceX speaks to your heart, throw Tesla away.” “No,” Musk said, “that would be another notch in the signpost of ‘Electric cars don’t work,’ and we’d never get to sustainable energy.” Nor could he abandon SpaceX. “We might then never be a multiplanetary species.” The more people pressed him to choose, the more he resisted. “For me emotionally, this was like, you got two kids and you’re running out of food,” he says. “You can give half to each kid, in which case they might both die, or give all the food to one kid and increase the chance that at least one kid survives.

“I don’t think from a cognitive standpoint it’s nearly as hard as SpaceX or Tesla,” he said. “It’s not like getting to Mars. It’s not as hard as changing the entire industrial base of Earth to sustainable energy.” Yes, but why? Musk had founded SpaceX, he liked to say, to increase the chances for the survival of human consciousness by making us a multiplanetary species. The grand rationale for Tesla and SolarCity was to lead the way to a sustainable energy future. Optimus and Neuralink were launched to create human-machine interfaces that would protect us from evil artificial intelligence. And Twitter? “At first I thought it didn’t fit into my primary large missions,” he told me in April.


Moon Rush: The New Space Race by Leonard David

agricultural Revolution, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, dark pattern, data acquisition, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mars Society, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, Virgin Galactic

If they had gone to space, how would the world have looked today?” He believes that trips to the Moon can be a part of everyone’s future. “I will be heading to the Moon,” Maezawa says—“just a little earlier than everyone else.” Musk’s “Moon Base Alpha” is part of his master plan for Mars colonization. He envisions us as a multiplanetary species in the not-too-distant future, traveling via a SpaceX fleet labeled the Interplanetary Transport System. “We should have a lunar base by now,” Musk recently said, speaking during a meeting of the International Astronautical Congress in Adelaide, Australia. “What the hell is going on?” He has reiterated his plans to send people to the Moon and Mars and reinforced his commitment to build and fly a fully reusable two-stage rocket capable of heaving 150 metric tons into low Earth orbit, a booster far larger than the Apollo-era Saturn V launcher.


pages: 231 words: 72,656

A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Colonization of Mars, Copley Medal, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Lao Tzu, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

This, together with the search for extraterrestrial life (which is also assumed to depend on water), explains why so much effort is being put into locating and understanding the distribution of water on other bodies in the solar system. Some scientists even believe that colonizing Mars is necessary to ensure the continued survival of humanity. Only by becoming a "multiplanetary species," they argue, can we truly guard against the possibility of being wiped out by war, disease, or a mass extinction caused by an asteroid or comet crashing into the Earth. But that will depend on finding supplies of water on other worlds. Water was the first drink to steer the course of human history; now, after ten thousand years, it seems to be back in the driving seat.


pages: 324 words: 80,217

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

At a certain point, we’ll clear the bottleneck, and it will become clear that our era was a necessary prelude to renewed acceleration—eventually giving us self-driving cars courtesy of a finally profitable Uber, a Mars colony courtesy of the Elon Musk–Jeff Bezos space race, and radical life extension courtesy of Google’s longevity lab or some other zillionaire who can’t imagine shuffling off this mortal coil. All of this could happen on a scale that would be world altering without having the truly utopian scenarios come to pass. Terraforming Mars and becoming a multiplanetary species may be unattainable for now—but just going to Mars would be a bigger leap for mankind than anything we’ve accomplished since Neil Armstrong. The hard problem of consciousness probably isn’t solvable by brain scans and increases in processing power, and so you and I probably won’t actually be uploading our very selves to the cloud—but that doesn’t mean that forms of artificial intelligence can’t radically transform the economy and render many if not most human forms of labor obsolete.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

Ironically, space is only beginning to be conquered now that it is being privatized, with companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic. They are not going for moonshots but for experimenting, improvising, adjusting and, through incremental improvements, constantly finding new methods and sources of revenue; step by step they are reducing the cost of turning humanity into a multiplanetary species. Each launch of NASA’s Space Launch System, SLS, designed to take us back to the moon, is projected to cost $2 billion. When NASA’s boss suggested in 2019 that it would be quicker and cheaper using SpaceX’s technology instead (projected at $10 million per launch), he got a good lashing by US politicians and had to back down.


pages: 328 words: 96,141

Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race by Tim Fernholz

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K

“The reason I joined the company, one of the key differentiators of our culture, is intense mission focus,” Brian Bjelde, the company’s head of human resources, told me. In August 2003, Bjelde was the seventh employee at the company, and the program manager for the Falcon 1. “Elon founded this company to revolutionize access to space, with the ultimate goal of making humankind a multiplanetary species. There are a lot of people in the industry today that can rally behind that mission . . . and the focus is on Mars.” But the Falcon 1 was not designed to go straight to Mars. It was simply a first step toward the Red Planet. “It was to figure out the basics of rocketry,” Musk told me of the project.


pages: 398 words: 105,032

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything by Kelly Weinersmith, Zach Weinersmith

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, connected car, CRISPR, data science, disinformation, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Google Glasses, hydraulic fracturing, industrial robot, information asymmetry, ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, market design, megaproject, megastructure, microbiome, moral hazard, multiplanetary species, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, personalized medicine, placebo effect, printed gun, Project Plowshare, QR code, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, Skype, space junk, stem cell, synthetic biology, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic

This is what really excites Mr. Faber: “I eventually got bored with racing solar cars, and hang gliding and windsurfing and such, and decided that the biggest benefit I could create for humanity, the most important thing that was going to happen in my lifetime was moving humanity off Earth and becoming a multiplanetary species or an interplanetary species.” We, uh . . . we’re also totally bored with racing and windsurfing, which is why we are sitting in this office editing this document . . . for humanity. SECTION 2 Stuff, Soonish 4. Fusion Power It Powers the Sun, and That’s Nice, but Can It Run My Toaster?


pages: 376 words: 110,796

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight by Chris Dubbs, Emeline Paat-dahlstrom, Charles D. Walker

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Dennis Tito, desegregation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Elon Musk, high net worth, Iridium satellite, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, private spaceflight, restrictive zoning, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, technoutopianism, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, young professional

That's kind of silly. My interest in space stems from thinking about what are the important problems facing humanity and life itself. The extension of life to multiple planets seems to be actually the most important thing that we could possibly do." The next big step for mankind is to be a multiplanetary species, and Musk thinks he's got the talent and the money to make it happen in our lifetime. Unlike most visionaries, Musk is more sobered by looking back at the challenges already met, than looking forward at those to come. During the interview, he described the difficult process of rocket development.