By William MacAskill
A professor of philosophy at Oxford University and the author of “What We Owe the Future,” from which this essay has been adapted.
Imagine living the life of every human being who has ever existed — in order of birth.
Your first life begins about 300,000 years ago in Africa. After living that life and dying, you travel back in time to be reincarnated as the second-ever person, born slightly later than the first, then the third-ever person, and so on.
One hundred billion (or so) lives later, you are the youngest person alive today. Your life has lasted somewhere in the ballpark of four trillion years. You have spent approximately 10 percent of it as a hunter-gatherer and 60 percent as a farmer, a full 20 percent raising children, and over 1 percent suffering from malaria or smallpox. You spent 1.5 billion years having sex and 250 million giving birth.
That’s your life so far — from the birth of Homo sapiens until the present.
But now imagine that you live all future lives, too. Your life, we hope, would be just beginning. Even if humanity lasts only as long as the typical mammal species (about one million years), and even if the world population falls to a tenth of its current size, 99.5 percent of your life would still be ahead of you. On the scale of a typical human life, you in the present would be just a few months old. The future is big.
I offer this thought experiment because morality, at its core, is about putting ourselves in others’ shoes and treating their interests as we do our own. When we do this at the full scale of human history, the future — where almost everyone lives and where almost all potential for joy and misery lies — comes to the fore.
If you knew you were going to live all these future lives, what would you hope we do in the present? How much carbon dioxide would you want us to emit into the atmosphere? How careful would you want us to be with new technologies that could destroy, or permanently derail, your future? How much attention would you want us to give to the impact of today’s actions on the long term?
These are some of the questions that motivate longtermism: the idea that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time.
Longtermism is about taking seriously just how big the future could be and how high the stakes are in shaping it. If humanity survives to even a fraction of its potential life span, then, strange as it may seem, we are the ancients: we live at the very beginning of history, in its most distant past. What we do now will affect untold numbers of future people. We need to act wisely.
It took me a long time to come around to longtermism. Over the past 12 years, I’ve been an advocate of effective altruism — the use of evidence and reason to help others as much as possible. In 2009, I co-founded an organization that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars to help pay for bed nets to protect families against malaria and medicine to cure children of intestinal worms, among other causes. These activities had a tangible impact. By contrast, the thought of trying to improve the lives of unknown future people initially left me cold.
But some simple ideas exerted a persistent force on my mind: Future people count. There could be a lot of them. And we can make their lives better. To help others as much as possible, we must think about the long-term impact of our actions.
The idea that future people count is common sense. Suppose that I drop a glass bottle while hiking. If I don’t clean it up, a child might cut herself on the shards. Does it matter when the child will cut herself — a week, or a decade, or a century from now? No. Harm is harm, whenever it occurs.
Future people, after all, are people. They will exist. They will have hopes and joys and pains and regrets, just like the rest of us. They just don’t exist yet.
But society tends to neglect the future in favor of the present. Future people are utterly disenfranchised. They can’t vote or lobby or run for public office, so politicians have scant incentive to think about them. They can’t tweet, or write articles, or march in the streets. They are the true silent majority. And though we can’t give political power to future people, we can at least give them fair consideration. We can renounce the tyranny of the present over the future and act as trustees for all of humanity, helping to create a flourishing world for the generations to come.
We face massive problems today, and the world is full of needless suffering, but in some ways we have made remarkable progress over the past few hundred years. Three hundred years ago, the average life expectancy was less than 40 years; today, it’s over 70. More than 80 percent of the world lived in extreme poverty; now just around 10 percent does. Women were, for the most part, unable to attend universities, and the feminist movement didn’t exist. No one lived in a democracy; now over half the world does. We’ve come a long way.
We have the power to encourage these positive trends. And we can reverse course on negative trends, too, like increases in carbon emissions and factory farming. We have the potential to build a world where everyone lives like the happiest people in the most well-off countries today.
And we could do better still — far better. Much of the progress we’ve made since 1700 would have been very difficult for people back then to anticipate. And that’s with only a three-century gap. Humanity could, theoretically, last for millions of centuries on Earth alone. If we anchor our sense of humanity’s potential to a fixed-up version of our present world, we risk dramatically underestimating just how good life in the future could be.
When I first began thinking about longtermism, my biggest reservation was practical. Even if future generations matter, what can we actually do to benefit them? But as I learned more about the history-shaping events that could occur in the near future, I realized that we might soon be approaching a critical juncture in the human story. Technological development is creating new threats and opportunities, putting the lives of future people on the line. Whether we get a future that’s beautiful and just, or flawed and dystopian, or whether civilization ends and we get no future at all — that depends, in significant part, on what we do today.
Some of the ways we affect the long-term future are familiar. We drive. We fly. We emit greenhouse gases that can remain in the atmosphere and impact the environment for hundreds of thousands of years.
But reducing fossil fuel use is not the only way to improve the long term. Other challenges are at least as important, and often radically more neglected.
Chief among these is the development of advanced artificial intelligence. According to leading economic models, advanced A.I. could greatly accelerate economic growth and technological progress. But equipped with A.I.-enabled capabilities, bad political actors could potentially increase and entrench their power. Our future could be a perpetual totalitarian dystopia.
Or we could lose control over the A.I. systems we’ve created. Once artificial intelligence far exceeds human intelligence, we could find ourselves with as little power over our future as chimpanzees have over theirs. Civilization could be governed by the A.I.’s aims and goals, which could be utterly alien and valueless from our perspective.
And we may not even make it to the development of advanced A.I. We still live under the shadow of 9,000 nuclear warheads, each far more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some experts put the chances of a third world war by 2070 at over 20 percent. An all-out nuclear war could cause the collapse of civilization, and we might never recover.
Advances in biotechnology could create weapons of even greater destructive power. Engineered viruses could be much more deadly than natural diseases because they could, in theory, be modified to have dangerous new properties: the lethality of Ebola and the contagiousness of measles. In the worst-case scenario, the release of an engineered bioweapon could kill billions, possibly beyond the point where humanity could recover. Our future would be permanently destroyed.
These are daunting challenges. In his book “The Precipice,” my colleague Toby Ord puts the probability of an existential catastrophe in the next century at one in six — roughly equivalent to playing Russian roulette. This is an unacceptable level of risk.
We aren’t helpless in the face of these challenges. Longtermism can inspire concrete actions, here and now. Constant monitoring of wastewater could ensure that we respond to any new viruses as soon as they arise. Developing and distributing advanced personal protective equipment would protect essential workers. Forms of far-ultraviolet lighting can safely sterilize a room; if proven safe and widely installed, this could prevent airborne pandemics while eliminating all respiratory diseases along the way.
On A.I. risk, too, there is much to do. We need the brightest technical minds to figure out what goes on under the hood of increasingly inscrutable A.I. systems, and to ensure they are helpful, harmless and honest. We need scholars and policymakers to design new governance systems to ensure that A.I. is developed for the benefit of all humankind. And we need courageous leaders to prevent new arms races and catastrophic wars between the great powers.
If we are careful and farsighted, we have the power to help build a better future for our great-grandchildren, and their great-grandchildren in turn — down through hundreds of generations. But positive change is not inevitable. It’s the result of long, hard work by thinkers and activists. No outside force will prevent civilization from stumbling into dystopia or oblivion. It’s on us.
Does longtermism imply that we must sacrifice the present on the altar of posterity? No. Just as caring more about our children doesn’t mean ignoring the interests of strangers, caring more about our contemporaries doesn’t mean ignoring the interests of our descendants.
In fact, as I’ve learned more about longtermism, I’ve realized that there is remarkable overlap between the best ways we can promote the common good for people living right now and for our posterity.
Every year millions of people, disproportionately in poor countries, die prematurely because fossil fuel burning pollutes the air with particulates that cause lung cancer, heart disease and respiratory infections. Moving off carbon is a win-win for both the near and the long term. The same holds for preventing pandemics, controlling artificial intelligence and decreasing the risk of nuclear war.
The idea that we could affect the long-term future, and that there could be so much at stake, might just seem too wild to be true. This is how things initially seemed to me. But I think this wildness comes not from the moral premises that underlie longtermism but from the fact that we live at such an unusual time.
Our era is undergoing an unprecedented amount of change. Currently, the world economy doubles in size about every 19 years. But before the Industrial Revolution, it took hundreds of years for the world economy to double; and for hundreds of thousands of years before that, growth rates were close to zero. What’s more, the current rate of growth cannot continue forever; within just 10,000 years, there would be a trillion civilizations’ worth of economic output for every reachable atom.
All this indicates that we are living through a unique and precarious chapter in humanity’s story. Out of the hundreds of thousands of years in humanity’s past — and the potentially billions of years in its future — we find ourselves living now, at a time of extraordinary change.
A time marked by thousands of nuclear warheads standing ready to fire. A time when we are rapidly burning fossil fuels, producing pollution that might last hundreds of thousands of years. A time when we can see catastrophes on the horizon — from engineered viruses to A.I.-enabled totalitarianism — and can act to prevent them.
To be alive at such a time is both an exceptional opportunity and a profound responsibility: We can be pivotal in steering the future onto a better trajectory. There’s no better time for a movement to stand up, not just for our generation or even our children’s generation, but for all the generations yet to come
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/05/opin ... 778d3e6de3
Interesting Visions/Predictions of the Future
Re: Interesting Visions/Predictions of the Future
Elon Musk’s Plan to Put a Million Earthlings on Mars in 20 Years
SpaceX employees are working on designs for a Martian city, including dome habitats and spacesuits, and researching whether humans can procreate off Earth. Mr. Musk has volunteered his sperm.
For more than two decades, Elon Musk has focused SpaceX, his rocket company, on his lifelong goal of reaching Mars.
Over the last year, he has also ramped up work on what will happen if he gets there.
Mr. Musk, 53, has directed SpaceX employees to drill into the design and details of a Martian city, according to five people with knowledge of the efforts and documents viewed by The New York Times. One team is drawing up plans for small dome habitats, including the materials that could be used to build them. Another is working on spacesuits to combat Mars’s hostile environment, while a medical team is researching whether humans can have children there. Mr. Musk has volunteered his sperm to help seed a colony, two people familiar with his comments said.
The initiatives, which are in their infancy, are a shift toward more concrete planning for life on Mars as Mr. Musk’s timeline has hastened. While he said in 2016 that it would take 40 to 100 years to have a self-sustaining civilization on the planet, Mr. Musk told SpaceX employees in April that he now expects one million people to be living there in about 20 years.
Image
Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, told the International Astronautical Congress in a 2016 presentation that a rocket built by the company might carry 100 passengers at a time to Mars.Credit...Refugio Ruiz/Associated Press
“There’s high urgency to making life multi-planetary,” he said, according to a publicly posted video of his remarks. “We’ve got to do it while civilization is so strong.”
Mr. Musk has long tried to defy the impossible and has often managed to beat tough odds. But his vision for life on Mars takes his seemingly limitless ambitions to their most extreme — and some might say absurdist — point. No one has ever set foot on the planet. NASA doesn’t expect to land humans on Mars until the 2040s. And if people get there, they will be greeted by a barren terrain, icy temperatures, dust storms, and air that is impossible to breathe.
Yet Mr. Musk is so wedded to the idea of creating a civilization on Mars — he once said he plans to die there — that it has propelled nearly every business endeavor he has undertaken on Earth. His vision for Mars underlies most of the six companies that he leads or owns, each of which could potentially contribute to an extraterrestrial colony, according to the documents and the people with knowledge of the efforts.
The Boring Company, a private tunneling venture founded by Mr. Musk, was started in part to ready equipment to burrow under Mars’s surface, two of the people said. Mr. Musk has told people that he bought X, the social media platform, partly to help test how a citizen-led government that rules by consensus might work on Mars. He has also said that he envisions residents on the planet will drive a version of the steel-paneled Cybertrucks made by Tesla, his electric vehicle company.
Image
Mr. Musk’s vision for Mars underlies most of the six companies that he leads or owns, including the Boring Company.Credit...Robyn Beck
Image
Mr. Musk imagines residents on Mars could drive a version of the Cybertruck, made by his electric vehicle company, Tesla.Credit...Agustin Marcarian/Reuters
Mr. Musk, who is worth about $270 billion, has publicly declared that he only accumulates assets — which include a roughly $47 billion Tesla pay package — to fund his plans for Mars.
“It’s a way to get humanity to Mars, because establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars will require a lot of resources,” he testified in court in 2022 about his Tesla pay.
Whether Mr. Musk can achieve his vision for a Martian colony in his lifetime is debatable.
“You can’t just land one million people on Mars,” said Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer who has known Mr. Musk for 20 years and wrote the book “The Case for Mars.” Any colonization of the planet would unfold over decades, he said.
Mr. Zubrin added that Mr. Musk is being particularly distracted from his Mars ambitions by his recent work on X. The tech billionaire often faces criticism for being spread too thin among the companies he runs.
While Mr. Musk has spoken about Mars for years and SpaceX released two basic drawings of a colony around 2018, many specifics and the company’s shift toward civilization planning haven’t previously been reported. Mr. Musk has largely kept the colonization plans quiet because SpaceX, under a $2.9 billion contract with NASA, must first send a rocket to the moon, two people with knowledge of the company said.
The Times interviewed more than 20 people close to Mr. Musk and SpaceX about the plans for a Martian city and reviewed internal documents, emails, social media posts and legal documents. Many of the people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.
Even they were skeptical that Mr. Musk would build a Martian city in his lifetime. Some of them said he was just trying to best Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder who envisions humans living in giant space stations throughout the solar system. Mr. Musk has laid out an aggressive timeline for Mars to make them work harder, others said. Drawings of the colony are sometimes referred to as a “hype package,” two of them said.
Image
A rendering by SpaceX of a proposed “Mars Base Alpha.”Credit...SpaceX
Mr. Musk and SpaceX didn’t respond to requests for comment. In a post on X after this article was published, Mr. Musk said he had not volunteered his sperm and that no one at SpaceX had been directed to work on a Martian city. “When people have asked to do so, I’ve said we need to focus on getting there first,” he wrote.
Saving Humanity
Mr. Musk has been fascinated by Mars since reading Isaac Asimov’s 1951 science fiction novel, “Foundation,” when he was 10. In the book, the protagonist builds a colony across a galaxy to save humanity from the fall of an interstellar empire.
“They find a planet far away from the galactic center and try to preserve human knowledge and civilization there while the center of the galaxy kind of falls apart,” Mr. Musk said in a 2013 interview for a science video.
In 2001, Mr. Musk tried buying a Russian rocket to reach Mars, said Jim Cantrell, a former SpaceX employee who visited Russia with him that year. But after three trips, the Russians refused to sell, and one official spit on Mr. Musk’s shoes, Mr. Cantrell said.
In 2002, Mr. Musk founded SpaceX, a privately held company in Hawthorne, Calif. It eventually created partly reusable rockets and landed government contracts, including with NASA. In recent years, it started Starlink, a satellite internet service that has expanded worldwide.
To reach Mars, SpaceX has built Starship, a nearly 400-foot reusable rocket. Starship’s immediate purpose is to take NASA astronauts to the moon, though it might later ferry residents to Mars and could also act as a small space station.
A future version of Starship may have a living space in its nose, three people familiar with the rocket said. Plans call for several floors of living quarters, with amenities like a running track and a movie theater, two of the people said. One drawing of Starship’s interior, a version of which Mr. Musk has posted on X, shows a violinist hovering in zero gravity as she plays for a crowd.
Image
A SpaceX rendering envisioning what life could be like for passengers aboard a future version of Starship.Credit...SpaceX
Starship may carry 100 passengers at a time to Mars, a journey that would happen about every two years, Mr. Musk told the International Astronautical Congress in a 2016 presentation. NASA has said a trip to Mars, located about 140 million miles from Earth, would take up to nine months.
In 2018, SpaceX engineers gathered with university researchers and others for a private meeting in Colorado to discuss the technology needed to survive on Mars, according to notes of the meeting obtained by The Times. Topics included harvesting ice to make water and selecting the right area on Mars to build a colony.
By last year, the latest versions of Starship had been built at Starbase, a SpaceX facility in Boca Chica, Texas. In June, Starship successfully returned from a test flight to space for the first time.
Colony Planning
Over the years, Mr. Musk has dropped hints about how he thinks people would live on Mars.
One theme revolves around the continuation of human life on the planet. Scientists haven’t determined whether people can have children in space. Mr. Musk has said children won’t be allowed on the first flights to Mars because of the dangers, though he expects them to live there eventually.
But Mr. Musk has a plan. In his 2013 interview for the science video, he said he hoped to create his own species on Mars, an idea that he has repeated over the years to SpaceX employees and others close to the company.
“I think it’s quite likely that we’d want to bioengineer new organisms that are better suited to living on Mars,” he said in the interview. “Humanity’s kind of done that over time, by sort of selective breeding.”
He also has a strategy for warmth. In a 2022 podcast interview, he said he would tackle the planet’s icy temperatures with a series of thermonuclear explosions that would warm the planet by creating artificial suns. Hundreds of solar panels, potentially built by Tesla, will help heat homes and create energy, three people familiar with his plans said.
Image
A SpaceX rendering of the proposed Mars colony includes a giant dome for communal living.Credit...SpaceX
Mr. Musk’s pronouncements have in recent months shifted into more concrete planning by SpaceX employees.
The industrial design team has been creating and updating renderings for a city, two people said. The colony will center on a giant dome for communal living, with smaller domes scattered around it. Discussions have lately focused on what materials to use for the domes. Mr. Musk is particularly concerned with making sure the city looks cool, two other people said.
One internal drawing obtained by The Times shows a family with young children standing in a dome neighborhood, gazing up at the stars.
In April, Mr. Musk told SpaceX employees that the Mars colony would be self-sustaining in case something happened to Earth and rockets couldn’t reach it anymore.
To achieve that, Mr. Musk plans to use Starship as sort of a Noah’s Ark, carrying plants and animals on the initial voyage, three people familiar with the plans said. Residents would then build greenhouses on Mars to grow food.
SpaceX has partnered with Impossible Foods, the plant-based alternative meat company, to provide food in SpaceX’s cafeterias, but also to test the products as a possible protein source for Mars, two of the people said.
Civilization Secured?
Image
Starship, a nearly 400-foot reusable rocket, docked at SpaceX’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas.Credit...Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
Like Mr. Musk, many of SpaceX’s more than 12,000 employees believe in life on another planet, according to the people familiar with the company and documents viewed by The Times. Workers sometimes wear “Occupy Mars” or “Rocket Parent” T-shirts to work and post suggestions for the Mars colony on an internal site. One recent idea was to build the city on the side of a giant crater.
Some employees working on the Mars plans are based in Boca Chica, while others from the Southern California office fly in on Mondays and leave on Fridays. Many work more than 100 hours a week.
The Boca Chica site has an industrial complex called Stargate, with an office that some liken to being in a Las Vegas casino because the lack of windows makes it hard to tell if it is day or night, three people said. A new office under construction there will have more windows, they said. Current and former employees said the Boca Chica site has sometimes lacked basic safety protocols, like caution tape around dangerous equipment.
SpaceX has grappled with a lawsuit and a complaint from the National Labor Relations Board related to eight former employees who said they were fired for complaining about Mr. Musk’s behavior and for making allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination at the company. SpaceX hasn’t responded to the lawsuit and has sued the N.L.R.B., claiming it acted unconstitutionally.
Still, some employees said it was worth working there to create a Mars colony.
In a recent goodbye email viewed by The Times, a female SpaceX manager who worked on the Mars program described “brutal” hours and conditions, especially for working parents. But she also said the company was “an astonishing place” and that she would “trade this experience for nothing.”
Image
Mr. Musk told SpaceX employees in April that he expected one million people to be living on Mars in about 20 years.Credit...Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images
Mr. Musk’s presence in Boca Chica has waned recently, people familiar with the company said. He visits about once a month, sometimes in the middle of the night for a few hours with his toddler son X Æ A-12, two of the people said, compared with at least once a week previously.
Yet his resolve for a Martian civilization appears unbowed.
In May, a NASA official said that the agency didn’t expect to land humans on Mars until the 2040s. That same month, Mr. Musk posted on X that it would take less than 10 years to send people there and that there would be a Martian city in about 20 years.
“For sure in 30, civilization secured,” he wrote.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/tech ... -mars.html
SpaceX employees are working on designs for a Martian city, including dome habitats and spacesuits, and researching whether humans can procreate off Earth. Mr. Musk has volunteered his sperm.
For more than two decades, Elon Musk has focused SpaceX, his rocket company, on his lifelong goal of reaching Mars.
Over the last year, he has also ramped up work on what will happen if he gets there.
Mr. Musk, 53, has directed SpaceX employees to drill into the design and details of a Martian city, according to five people with knowledge of the efforts and documents viewed by The New York Times. One team is drawing up plans for small dome habitats, including the materials that could be used to build them. Another is working on spacesuits to combat Mars’s hostile environment, while a medical team is researching whether humans can have children there. Mr. Musk has volunteered his sperm to help seed a colony, two people familiar with his comments said.
The initiatives, which are in their infancy, are a shift toward more concrete planning for life on Mars as Mr. Musk’s timeline has hastened. While he said in 2016 that it would take 40 to 100 years to have a self-sustaining civilization on the planet, Mr. Musk told SpaceX employees in April that he now expects one million people to be living there in about 20 years.
Image
Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, told the International Astronautical Congress in a 2016 presentation that a rocket built by the company might carry 100 passengers at a time to Mars.Credit...Refugio Ruiz/Associated Press
“There’s high urgency to making life multi-planetary,” he said, according to a publicly posted video of his remarks. “We’ve got to do it while civilization is so strong.”
Mr. Musk has long tried to defy the impossible and has often managed to beat tough odds. But his vision for life on Mars takes his seemingly limitless ambitions to their most extreme — and some might say absurdist — point. No one has ever set foot on the planet. NASA doesn’t expect to land humans on Mars until the 2040s. And if people get there, they will be greeted by a barren terrain, icy temperatures, dust storms, and air that is impossible to breathe.
Yet Mr. Musk is so wedded to the idea of creating a civilization on Mars — he once said he plans to die there — that it has propelled nearly every business endeavor he has undertaken on Earth. His vision for Mars underlies most of the six companies that he leads or owns, each of which could potentially contribute to an extraterrestrial colony, according to the documents and the people with knowledge of the efforts.
The Boring Company, a private tunneling venture founded by Mr. Musk, was started in part to ready equipment to burrow under Mars’s surface, two of the people said. Mr. Musk has told people that he bought X, the social media platform, partly to help test how a citizen-led government that rules by consensus might work on Mars. He has also said that he envisions residents on the planet will drive a version of the steel-paneled Cybertrucks made by Tesla, his electric vehicle company.
Image
Mr. Musk’s vision for Mars underlies most of the six companies that he leads or owns, including the Boring Company.Credit...Robyn Beck
Image
Mr. Musk imagines residents on Mars could drive a version of the Cybertruck, made by his electric vehicle company, Tesla.Credit...Agustin Marcarian/Reuters
Mr. Musk, who is worth about $270 billion, has publicly declared that he only accumulates assets — which include a roughly $47 billion Tesla pay package — to fund his plans for Mars.
“It’s a way to get humanity to Mars, because establishing a self-sustaining city on Mars will require a lot of resources,” he testified in court in 2022 about his Tesla pay.
Whether Mr. Musk can achieve his vision for a Martian colony in his lifetime is debatable.
“You can’t just land one million people on Mars,” said Robert Zubrin, an aerospace engineer who has known Mr. Musk for 20 years and wrote the book “The Case for Mars.” Any colonization of the planet would unfold over decades, he said.
Mr. Zubrin added that Mr. Musk is being particularly distracted from his Mars ambitions by his recent work on X. The tech billionaire often faces criticism for being spread too thin among the companies he runs.
While Mr. Musk has spoken about Mars for years and SpaceX released two basic drawings of a colony around 2018, many specifics and the company’s shift toward civilization planning haven’t previously been reported. Mr. Musk has largely kept the colonization plans quiet because SpaceX, under a $2.9 billion contract with NASA, must first send a rocket to the moon, two people with knowledge of the company said.
The Times interviewed more than 20 people close to Mr. Musk and SpaceX about the plans for a Martian city and reviewed internal documents, emails, social media posts and legal documents. Many of the people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had signed nondisclosure agreements.
Even they were skeptical that Mr. Musk would build a Martian city in his lifetime. Some of them said he was just trying to best Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder who envisions humans living in giant space stations throughout the solar system. Mr. Musk has laid out an aggressive timeline for Mars to make them work harder, others said. Drawings of the colony are sometimes referred to as a “hype package,” two of them said.
Image
A rendering by SpaceX of a proposed “Mars Base Alpha.”Credit...SpaceX
Mr. Musk and SpaceX didn’t respond to requests for comment. In a post on X after this article was published, Mr. Musk said he had not volunteered his sperm and that no one at SpaceX had been directed to work on a Martian city. “When people have asked to do so, I’ve said we need to focus on getting there first,” he wrote.
Saving Humanity
Mr. Musk has been fascinated by Mars since reading Isaac Asimov’s 1951 science fiction novel, “Foundation,” when he was 10. In the book, the protagonist builds a colony across a galaxy to save humanity from the fall of an interstellar empire.
“They find a planet far away from the galactic center and try to preserve human knowledge and civilization there while the center of the galaxy kind of falls apart,” Mr. Musk said in a 2013 interview for a science video.
In 2001, Mr. Musk tried buying a Russian rocket to reach Mars, said Jim Cantrell, a former SpaceX employee who visited Russia with him that year. But after three trips, the Russians refused to sell, and one official spit on Mr. Musk’s shoes, Mr. Cantrell said.
In 2002, Mr. Musk founded SpaceX, a privately held company in Hawthorne, Calif. It eventually created partly reusable rockets and landed government contracts, including with NASA. In recent years, it started Starlink, a satellite internet service that has expanded worldwide.
To reach Mars, SpaceX has built Starship, a nearly 400-foot reusable rocket. Starship’s immediate purpose is to take NASA astronauts to the moon, though it might later ferry residents to Mars and could also act as a small space station.
A future version of Starship may have a living space in its nose, three people familiar with the rocket said. Plans call for several floors of living quarters, with amenities like a running track and a movie theater, two of the people said. One drawing of Starship’s interior, a version of which Mr. Musk has posted on X, shows a violinist hovering in zero gravity as she plays for a crowd.
Image
A SpaceX rendering envisioning what life could be like for passengers aboard a future version of Starship.Credit...SpaceX
Starship may carry 100 passengers at a time to Mars, a journey that would happen about every two years, Mr. Musk told the International Astronautical Congress in a 2016 presentation. NASA has said a trip to Mars, located about 140 million miles from Earth, would take up to nine months.
In 2018, SpaceX engineers gathered with university researchers and others for a private meeting in Colorado to discuss the technology needed to survive on Mars, according to notes of the meeting obtained by The Times. Topics included harvesting ice to make water and selecting the right area on Mars to build a colony.
By last year, the latest versions of Starship had been built at Starbase, a SpaceX facility in Boca Chica, Texas. In June, Starship successfully returned from a test flight to space for the first time.
Colony Planning
Over the years, Mr. Musk has dropped hints about how he thinks people would live on Mars.
One theme revolves around the continuation of human life on the planet. Scientists haven’t determined whether people can have children in space. Mr. Musk has said children won’t be allowed on the first flights to Mars because of the dangers, though he expects them to live there eventually.
But Mr. Musk has a plan. In his 2013 interview for the science video, he said he hoped to create his own species on Mars, an idea that he has repeated over the years to SpaceX employees and others close to the company.
“I think it’s quite likely that we’d want to bioengineer new organisms that are better suited to living on Mars,” he said in the interview. “Humanity’s kind of done that over time, by sort of selective breeding.”
He also has a strategy for warmth. In a 2022 podcast interview, he said he would tackle the planet’s icy temperatures with a series of thermonuclear explosions that would warm the planet by creating artificial suns. Hundreds of solar panels, potentially built by Tesla, will help heat homes and create energy, three people familiar with his plans said.
Image
A SpaceX rendering of the proposed Mars colony includes a giant dome for communal living.Credit...SpaceX
Mr. Musk’s pronouncements have in recent months shifted into more concrete planning by SpaceX employees.
The industrial design team has been creating and updating renderings for a city, two people said. The colony will center on a giant dome for communal living, with smaller domes scattered around it. Discussions have lately focused on what materials to use for the domes. Mr. Musk is particularly concerned with making sure the city looks cool, two other people said.
One internal drawing obtained by The Times shows a family with young children standing in a dome neighborhood, gazing up at the stars.
In April, Mr. Musk told SpaceX employees that the Mars colony would be self-sustaining in case something happened to Earth and rockets couldn’t reach it anymore.
To achieve that, Mr. Musk plans to use Starship as sort of a Noah’s Ark, carrying plants and animals on the initial voyage, three people familiar with the plans said. Residents would then build greenhouses on Mars to grow food.
SpaceX has partnered with Impossible Foods, the plant-based alternative meat company, to provide food in SpaceX’s cafeterias, but also to test the products as a possible protein source for Mars, two of the people said.
Civilization Secured?
Image
Starship, a nearly 400-foot reusable rocket, docked at SpaceX’s facility in Boca Chica, Texas.Credit...Meridith Kohut for The New York Times
Like Mr. Musk, many of SpaceX’s more than 12,000 employees believe in life on another planet, according to the people familiar with the company and documents viewed by The Times. Workers sometimes wear “Occupy Mars” or “Rocket Parent” T-shirts to work and post suggestions for the Mars colony on an internal site. One recent idea was to build the city on the side of a giant crater.
Some employees working on the Mars plans are based in Boca Chica, while others from the Southern California office fly in on Mondays and leave on Fridays. Many work more than 100 hours a week.
The Boca Chica site has an industrial complex called Stargate, with an office that some liken to being in a Las Vegas casino because the lack of windows makes it hard to tell if it is day or night, three people said. A new office under construction there will have more windows, they said. Current and former employees said the Boca Chica site has sometimes lacked basic safety protocols, like caution tape around dangerous equipment.
SpaceX has grappled with a lawsuit and a complaint from the National Labor Relations Board related to eight former employees who said they were fired for complaining about Mr. Musk’s behavior and for making allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination at the company. SpaceX hasn’t responded to the lawsuit and has sued the N.L.R.B., claiming it acted unconstitutionally.
Still, some employees said it was worth working there to create a Mars colony.
In a recent goodbye email viewed by The Times, a female SpaceX manager who worked on the Mars program described “brutal” hours and conditions, especially for working parents. But she also said the company was “an astonishing place” and that she would “trade this experience for nothing.”
Image
Mr. Musk told SpaceX employees in April that he expected one million people to be living on Mars in about 20 years.Credit...Michael Gonzalez/Getty Images
Mr. Musk’s presence in Boca Chica has waned recently, people familiar with the company said. He visits about once a month, sometimes in the middle of the night for a few hours with his toddler son X Æ A-12, two of the people said, compared with at least once a week previously.
Yet his resolve for a Martian civilization appears unbowed.
In May, a NASA official said that the agency didn’t expect to land humans on Mars until the 2040s. That same month, Mr. Musk posted on X that it would take less than 10 years to send people there and that there would be a Martian city in about 20 years.
“For sure in 30, civilization secured,” he wrote.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/tech ... -mars.html
Re: Interesting Visions/Predictions of the Future
A Scientist Says Humans Will Reach the Singularity Within 21 Years
Ray Kurzweil predicts humans and AI will merge by 2045, boosting intelligence a millionfold with nanobots, bringing both hope and challenges for the future.
- Futurists have long debated the arrival of the singularity, when human and artificial intelligence will merge, a concept borrowed from the world of quantum physics.
- American computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil has long argued that the singularity would likely occur around the middle of the 21st century, and with the rise of AI, his predictions are gaining more credence.
- In his new book, The Singularity is Nearer, Kurzweil doubles down on those predictions and details how humanity’s intelligence will increase a millionfold via nanobots (among other things).
You don’t exactly become a world-renowned futurist by making safe predictions. And while some of these past predictions haven’t exactly come to pass (Back to the Future Part II, specifically), these ideas help expand our thoughts on what exactly the future might look like.
And no one makes futuristic predictions quite like Ray Kurzweil.
An American computer scientist-turned-futurist, Kurzweil has long believed that humanity is headed toward what’s known as “the singularity,” when man and machine merge. In 1999, Kurzweil theorized that artificial general intelligence would be achieved once humanity could achieve a technology capable of a trillion calculations per second, which he pegged to occur 2029. Experts at the time scoffed at the idea, figuring it’d be at least a century or more, but with Kurzweil’s timeline only a few years off—and talk of AGI spreading—that decades-old prediction is beginning to loom large.
Now in his new book published last month, The Singularity is Nearer (a play on his 2005 book of the same name minus an “er”), Kurzweil doubles down on these ideas in the modern era of artificial intelligence. Not only is he "sticking with [his] five years” prediction, as he recently said in a TED Talk, Kurzweil also believes that humans will achieve a millionfold intelligence by 2045, aided by brain interfaces formed with nanobots non-invasively inserted into our capillaries.
“We’re going to be a combination of our natural intelligence and our cybernetic intelligence,” Kurzweil said in an interview with The Guardian, “and it’s all going to be rolled into one. We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045, and it is going to deepen our awareness and consciousness.”
While this idea subscribes to a merger more akin to physical intervention to bridge the gap between man and machine, other philosophers and AI experts agree that some form of merger is likely inevitable, and in some ways, is already beginning. In July, Oxford’s Marcus du Sautoy and Nick Bostrom both expounded on the hopeful and harrowing possibilities of our AI future, and for both of them, a kind of synthesis appeared inevitable.
“I think that we are headed toward a hybrid future,” Sautoy told Popular Mechanics. “We still believe that we are the only beings with a high level of consciousness. This is part of the whole Copernican journey that we are not unique. We’re not at the center.”
Of course, this “Brave New World” of a hybrid AI-human existence brings with it a plethora of issues both political and personal. What will humans do for jobs? Could we possibly live forever? Would that change the very idea of what it means to be human?
Kurzweil, like many other futurists, are relatively optimistic on this front. In that same interview with The Guardian, Kurzweil highlights the idea of a Universal Basic Income as a necessity rather than a fringe idea currently supported in more progressive circles, and AI will bring unprecedented advancements in medicine, meaning the very idea of immortality isn’t out of the realm of possibility.
“In the early 2030s we can expect to reach longevity escape velocity where every year of life we lose through aging we get back from scientific progress,” Kurzweil told The Guardian. “And as we move past that, we’ll actually get back more years. It isn’t a solid guarantee of living forever—there are still accidents—but your probability of dying won’t increase year to year.”
Just like “Back to the Future Part II” predicted flying cars, so too could these technology-fueled utopias crumble to dust as these dates inch closer and closer. But 25 years ago, Kurzweil predicted we’d be rapidly approaching a major moment in humanity’s technological history at the tail end of this decade.
Currently, no evidence suggests the contrary.
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/technolo ... e108&ei=32
Ray Kurzweil predicts humans and AI will merge by 2045, boosting intelligence a millionfold with nanobots, bringing both hope and challenges for the future.
- Futurists have long debated the arrival of the singularity, when human and artificial intelligence will merge, a concept borrowed from the world of quantum physics.
- American computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil has long argued that the singularity would likely occur around the middle of the 21st century, and with the rise of AI, his predictions are gaining more credence.
- In his new book, The Singularity is Nearer, Kurzweil doubles down on those predictions and details how humanity’s intelligence will increase a millionfold via nanobots (among other things).
You don’t exactly become a world-renowned futurist by making safe predictions. And while some of these past predictions haven’t exactly come to pass (Back to the Future Part II, specifically), these ideas help expand our thoughts on what exactly the future might look like.
And no one makes futuristic predictions quite like Ray Kurzweil.
An American computer scientist-turned-futurist, Kurzweil has long believed that humanity is headed toward what’s known as “the singularity,” when man and machine merge. In 1999, Kurzweil theorized that artificial general intelligence would be achieved once humanity could achieve a technology capable of a trillion calculations per second, which he pegged to occur 2029. Experts at the time scoffed at the idea, figuring it’d be at least a century or more, but with Kurzweil’s timeline only a few years off—and talk of AGI spreading—that decades-old prediction is beginning to loom large.
Now in his new book published last month, The Singularity is Nearer (a play on his 2005 book of the same name minus an “er”), Kurzweil doubles down on these ideas in the modern era of artificial intelligence. Not only is he "sticking with [his] five years” prediction, as he recently said in a TED Talk, Kurzweil also believes that humans will achieve a millionfold intelligence by 2045, aided by brain interfaces formed with nanobots non-invasively inserted into our capillaries.
“We’re going to be a combination of our natural intelligence and our cybernetic intelligence,” Kurzweil said in an interview with The Guardian, “and it’s all going to be rolled into one. We are going to expand intelligence a millionfold by 2045, and it is going to deepen our awareness and consciousness.”
While this idea subscribes to a merger more akin to physical intervention to bridge the gap between man and machine, other philosophers and AI experts agree that some form of merger is likely inevitable, and in some ways, is already beginning. In July, Oxford’s Marcus du Sautoy and Nick Bostrom both expounded on the hopeful and harrowing possibilities of our AI future, and for both of them, a kind of synthesis appeared inevitable.
“I think that we are headed toward a hybrid future,” Sautoy told Popular Mechanics. “We still believe that we are the only beings with a high level of consciousness. This is part of the whole Copernican journey that we are not unique. We’re not at the center.”
Of course, this “Brave New World” of a hybrid AI-human existence brings with it a plethora of issues both political and personal. What will humans do for jobs? Could we possibly live forever? Would that change the very idea of what it means to be human?
Kurzweil, like many other futurists, are relatively optimistic on this front. In that same interview with The Guardian, Kurzweil highlights the idea of a Universal Basic Income as a necessity rather than a fringe idea currently supported in more progressive circles, and AI will bring unprecedented advancements in medicine, meaning the very idea of immortality isn’t out of the realm of possibility.
“In the early 2030s we can expect to reach longevity escape velocity where every year of life we lose through aging we get back from scientific progress,” Kurzweil told The Guardian. “And as we move past that, we’ll actually get back more years. It isn’t a solid guarantee of living forever—there are still accidents—but your probability of dying won’t increase year to year.”
Just like “Back to the Future Part II” predicted flying cars, so too could these technology-fueled utopias crumble to dust as these dates inch closer and closer. But 25 years ago, Kurzweil predicted we’d be rapidly approaching a major moment in humanity’s technological history at the tail end of this decade.
Currently, no evidence suggests the contrary.
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/technolo ... e108&ei=32