Speaker 1: Which is a great segue. Optimists is I think going
to be the greatest product in the history of humanity.
What's the progress like and how much of your how
many of your cycles are going specifically to Optimists. What's
the timeline? I think you're on version three maybe four?
Tell us everything?
Speaker 2: Well, yeah, everything will gonna take a long time. We've
got time.
Speaker 3: We're finalizing the design of Optimist version three, and.
Speaker 2: That really is going to be a very re multiple robot.
Speaker 3: It will have the essentially the manual dexterity of a
human It's meaning a very complex hand the an AI
mind that can navigate and comprehend reality, and we made
in very high volume. Those are the three things that
I'm missing, Like if you see any other robotics company,
they're missing those three things. Those are the three really
hard things.
Speaker 2: And I spend Actually, at this point.
Speaker 3: It might be more of my mental cycles than anything
anything else, any other single thing on Optimis. That's that
that's solving pool real world AI all of the electro
mechanical issues of Optimists, the supply chain and production challenges
of it, because there is no supply chain that exists
for humanoid robots, so it has to be we have
to recreate it from scratch, and which requires doing a
lot of vertical integration. None of the actuators in Optimism
are available from an existing supply chain. But I think
it is accurate to say that if successful, Optimus will
be the biggest product ever and the.
Speaker 1: Cost of it at scale twenty thirty forty thousand dollars
a robot. What do you think the first wave of
them will cost and when will we be able to
buy one to work on the ranch?
Speaker 3: I think that the Martinmall cost of production once you
hit a million units per year is probably around the
twenty thousand dollars range. It so of depends on how
much you spend on the AI chip in the robot
to achieve a lot of efficiencies in the actuators. There
are twenty six actuators per arm, like twenty six like motors,
gearboxes and par electronics.
Speaker 2: So, but the AI chip will be pretty expensive.
Speaker 3: But like that, that might be like five, five or
six thousand dollars of the of the bill of materials,
maybe more.
Speaker 2: And so but I think at volume.
Speaker 3: At a million units a year, the production cost is
probably in the order of twenty thousand dollars maybe twenty
five something like that, and it price will be as
a function of demand.
Speaker 4: Lelon, can you maybe explain to everybody why the hand
is so important to get right and why you know,
the actuator design is so unique, and you know why
it's so difficult, why nobody makes it, and why you
have to start there almost to build the rest of
the robot properly.
Speaker 3: It turns out human hands are incredibly that they've evolved
to to be this incredibly sophisticated machine like that. Your
hand is no actually a remarkable thing. It's look look
closely at your hands and and think of all the
things you can do with your hands, which is a lot.
Speaker 2: Just thinking about something. Your hands a very versatile instrument.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can give them a high five.
Speaker 2: Very versatile.
Speaker 3: You know, you can swing a baseball bat, you can
thread needles, you put thread in a needle, you can
play the cannon with violin. You know, you could disassemble
or assemble a car. The hands are incredibly versatile instruments.
And most of the muscles of the hand are actually
in the forearm, so your hand is kind of like
a like a like it's like a puppet like it's
mostly a puppet.
Speaker 2: The muscle.
Speaker 3: The muscles are coming from the forearm and they're pulling
the tendons, which are you know, also human tendon desizing
or human human tendent evolution is incredibly good.
Speaker 2: So you've got this web of tendons. You've got I
think I think that.
Speaker 3: Human hand is something like depending on how you counted,
twenty seven or twenty eight degrees of freedom per you know,
in the hand, it's uh, it's amazing. So in order
to create a robot that can be a generalized, uh, humanoid,
you must solve the hand hands problem.
Speaker 2: And we had just got hands, knees, hands, and so is.
Speaker 4: It like when you were first building Tesla where the
supply chain doesn't exist, So now you have to go
out and find folks to work with and you know,
build all this vertical integration, get support.
Speaker 2: Is it?
Speaker 4: Is it literally like it's just nowhere to be found
and you're going to have to build all of this
stuff up.
Speaker 3: Yes, we could not actually buy the actuators for any
amount of money. They simply didn't exist, even though there
are ten twenty thousand electric.
Speaker 2: Motors out there.
Speaker 3: Versus sizes and shapes, we've had to design every electric motor,
gearbox and the controlling electronics from scratch, basically from physics
post principles.
Speaker 1: The good news is you've got a lot of experience
with factories over the last couple of decades. So how
challenging is this versus cyber truck, Model YDEL, gigafactory, you
know the Yeah, the Faberge egg known as the Model X.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, it's harder than any any of those things.
Speaker 1: Okay, yeah much hart significantly am Yes.
Speaker 2: Well, there not hot starships harder.
Speaker 1: Okay, So somewhere between a Model X and a starship.
Speaker 5: Is it is the what's harder the hardware or the software?
Speaker 3: Right now we're struggling with the the final design of
the hardware. Like I said, it's really primarily the hand,
not to just dismiss the rest of the robot. Rest
of it's also important, but that the hands are hands
and inclusive of the forum, are a majority of the
engineering difficulty of the entire robot.
Speaker 6: And then let's let's assume you get past the hardware challenges.
How much do you sort of get for free based
on all the progress that's happening with l ll ms.
Will you know we'll consumers just be able to interact
with this. Talk to the robot, ask you to do
things and we'll understand.
Speaker 2: And so yeah, yeah, no problem.
Speaker 1: You're spending a lot of time with Annie. I know
noticed online not that long.
Speaker 3: Maybe I went a little over the top promoting rock Imagine.
Speaker 1: Well, but in all seriousness, those characters and these robots
that seems to be you know, like maybe.
Speaker 2: They you could get the embodiments of ani as.
Speaker 7: Yeah, why the human form factor? Elon, you could make
something that's maybe better than a human, or maybe simpler
than a human to do specific tasks, and maybe better
than a human to do more things than a human
can do. How do you decide to make it just
like a human?
Speaker 3: Well, if you wanted to do all the things that
a human can do, it turns out you need a
humanoid robot. So if you wanted to do a subset,
that's much easier. But it turns out humans evolved to
the shape and capabilities that we have for good reasons.
That actually is that there is like this value to
having quiet you four fingers in the thumb, and even
the pinky actually is quite useful.
Speaker 2: Tows are much more question walk but.
Speaker 5: Well also humans.
Speaker 6: Humans have designed the world as well, so we designed
it for us. Exactly if we could make a humanoid robot,
it'll be immediately backwards compatible with what we've.
Speaker 5: Built the world for.
Speaker 4: There's another there's another part of the robot. So there's
the l l MS, there's the actuation in the hands,
but also there's the the silicon that runs it, and
there was you know dojo. I think you you posted
on x A I five and AI six and it
just seemed like you were incredibly excited about the direction
in which the silicon layer was also going. Can you
tell us about that and what that is? And what what?
Speaker 5: What are we?
Speaker 4: What are we building here? What is being built? Is
it a complement to everything that exists in the world,
Is it a potential long term competitor?
Speaker 3: What is it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So.
Speaker 3: At Tesla, we basically had two different chip programs, one
Dojo and one UH dojo on the training side, and
then over call you know AI or it's just our
inference jib that the AI Force is currently shipping in
all vehicles and we're finalizing finalizing the design of AI five,
which will be an immense jump from AI four by
some metrics, the improvement in AI five will be forty
times better.
Speaker 2: Than AI four times. And and this is because we
work so closely at a.
Speaker 3: Very fine grade level on the AI software and the
AI hardware, so we know exactly where the limiting factors are,
and so effectively the AI hardware and software teams are
co designing the chip.
Speaker 4: So forty x improvement in the silicon I think then,
as it as everybody here in the audience experience is
it is that just an almost like an order of
magnitude increase in the quality of FSD and the safety
that you experience as a Tesla driver, and then the
quality of the robot. Like word, is it all manifest
when you, you know, bring it up and actually get
it into production.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's be precise.
Speaker 3: The forty x is on if you said, like compared
to the worst limitation on AI four, which is running
the softmax operation. Yeah, we currently have to run softmax
in around forty steps in emulation mode, whereas that will
just be done in a.
Speaker 2: Few steps natively in AI five.
Speaker 3: A five trip will also be easily handled mixed precision models,
so you don't have it'll dynamically handle mixed there's a
bunch of sort of technical stuff that AIF I will
do a lot better in terms of nominal sort of
raw compute. It's it's eight times more compute, about nine
times more memory, roughly five times more memory boundwidth. So
but because we're addressing some core limitations in AI four,
you multiply that by that that eight x compute improvement
via another five x improvement because of optimization at at
a very fine grain silicon level of things that are
currently suboptimal in.
Speaker 2: AI four, that's where you get the forty x improvement
you had. Keep going.
Speaker 3: So now that said, I am confident that the current
chips AI A four chips that are in the cars
will achieve self dry having safety that is at least
two to three times that of human and and maybe
even ten x. And the software that will be released
for that is coming out over the next few months,
so version fourteen will be the biggest upgrade until the
software stance version twelve. We are increasing the parameter account
by an order magnitude. The there's there's there's a lot
of reinforcement learning that's been used. As we were there,
There's like you can think of AI sort of as
a way of compressing reality, and some of those compression
steps we were too lossy, and we address the lostiness
in the compression steps. So these are all software updates
that will that will go out. So just over there updates.
Speaker 2: Your car has got to feel like it is sentient
by the end of the year.
Speaker 1: It feels that way already, to be honest, I saw
in the trades that you spent about seventeen billion dollars
on some spectrum and that. Yeah, so some couch change
to enable your satellites and the Starlink network to connect
directly with phones. What will that look like in a
year or two? Are we going to drop our Verizon
account and just expand our Starlink account. We're kind of
hoping because Verizon kind of sucks.
Speaker 5: How many of you on a Starlink phone?
Speaker 1: Who wants a Starlink phone? Is it technically possible?
Speaker 7: I know you can't see it, but it's everyone.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely A right cool. So this is a kind
of a long term thing.
Speaker 3: It will allow SpaceX to deliver high band with connectivity
directly from the satellites to the phones, but there are
hardware changes that need to happen in the phone so
since these.
Speaker 2: Frequencies aren't supported in current.
Speaker 3: Phones, the chipset has to be modified to add these frequencies,
and that probably.
Speaker 2: Is a two year time frame.
Speaker 3: So the phones that are able to use the spectrum
that was acquired probably start shipping.
Speaker 2: In around two years.
Speaker 3: And then we also need to build the satellites that
are going to communicate on those frequencies. So in parallel
building the satellites and working with the handset makers to
add these frequencies to the phones, and then the satellites
and the phones will then handshake very well to achieve
high bound with connectivity. But the net effect is that
you should be able to watch videos anywhere on your phone.
Speaker 2: Wow, and it's.
Speaker 1: Going to be crazy.
Speaker 5: What do these do? These frequencies?
Speaker 6: Would they work indoors inside buildings, you know, like like
that phone currently does?
Speaker 5: Okay, and so.
Speaker 3: Will you be able to have basically like if you
if you if you're in a building with it with
it like a thick metal roof, then no, but.
Speaker 5: The same the same types of normal normal homes.
Speaker 4: Yes, yes, Elon, is your vision for this that instead
of you know, having an AT and T account or
and then roaming when you're in the UK or you're
in India. It's just we could have one direct deal
with starlink. It works all over the world eventually, not today,
but at some point. Is that the end goal that
basically we don't need a regional carrier, we have a
global carrier and that would be you.
Speaker 2: Uh, that would be one of the options.
Speaker 3: To be clear, We're not going to put the other
carriers out of business. They're still going to be around
because they own a lot of spectrum. So, uh, there's
a but. But yes, you'll you should be able to
have a Starlink like you have like you have an
A T and T or the mobile Bride and whatever
you should you could have a you know account with
stallink that works with your you know, starlink h antenna
at home, uh, for your Wi Fi as well as
on your phone. And yeah, it would be a comprehensive
solution for high bandwidth at home and for high end
with Director sell.
Speaker 7: Could you buy some carriers to have more spectrum, maybe
five Hoverrizon.
Speaker 2: Not out of the question. I suppose that may happen.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about let's talk about Starship. You just had
a really what appeared to be a phenomenal launch. How
close is it to you know, being predictable and ready
to go in a commercial setting.
Speaker 2: I think we'll recover the ship next year.
Speaker 3: We've got one more launch of the Stallink version two to.
Speaker 2: Stack, but there's only one one booster and ship left
that's in the version two design.
Speaker 3: And then thereafter it's it's version three, which is a
gigantic upgrade because that's got Raptor three and pretty much.
Speaker 2: Everything changes on the rocket with version three.
Speaker 3: So version three you might have some initial tieving pains
because it's such a radical redesign, but it's it's capable
of over one hundred tons to of it fully reusable,
and I think it's I think I think.
Speaker 2: Unless we have unless we have some very.
Speaker 3: Major setbacks, SpaceX will demonstrate full reusability next year, catching
both the booster and the ship and being able to
deliver over one hundred tons to a useful orbit.
Speaker 1: What is the best rocket in the world do now
in terms of page to space.
Speaker 3: Well, in terms of uh sort of commercial rockets, this
this Falcon Heavy, which we'll do in with with with
side booster reuse, we'll do about forty tons.
Speaker 1: So this is five times bigger.
Speaker 3: Yeah, well two and a half times bigger. But but
starsha would be full reuse, full reusability, got it? Okay, Hey,
everything comes back.
Speaker 7: Elan after after the explosion that happened with the failed launch,
there was a lot.
Speaker 2: Of sorry which which failed, the more.
Speaker 7: Recent one, the more recent with the starship hat with
the big boom, yeah, and the big boom, the and
and there's a lot of There was a lot of
proclamations that there's going to be environmental and f a
A and all these other sorts. The recovery back to
the launch pad again was incredible fast. How did you
get back so fast? Not just technically and work wise,
but just like regulatory clearance wise, because they said there
were gonna be all these questions and reviews and so on.
How did you guys manage that?
Speaker 3: Well, there were a lot of questions and reviews. We
got through them all. And credit to the SpaceX team.
They worked incredibly hard and they got the next sugar
and booster tested and on the pad and plan and used.
Speaker 2: Credit to the SpaceX team.
Speaker 3: Very proud of them for doing doing such a job,
a great job recovering, I mean, creating a fully reusable
OpenAL rocket is one of the hottest engineering problems ever.
Certainly you know, a candidate for most difficult interineering project ever.
Speaker 2: You know, it's on the podium at least.
Speaker 3: So it's a that that's been the goal of SpaceX
from the beginning, from two thousand too, and here we.
Speaker 2: Are twenty three years later.
Speaker 3: So it's a long journey and with a super talent
like by far, I think the most talented group of
rocket engineers that's ever been assembled, and we're finally next year,
I think.
Speaker 2: We'll be able to achieve full reusability.
Speaker 4: On what are the big technical blockers that you're focused
on there between now and that full reusability? Are there
some showstoppers where you're just kind of literally just obsessing
over trying to figure out still or is it more
about getting through a side of a laundry list of
your learnings and just integrating it into the next launch.
Speaker 3: Well, well, for full reusability of the ship, there's still
a lot of work that.
Speaker 2: Remains on the heat shield. So no one's ever made.
Speaker 3: A fully reusable opal heat shield like the Shuttle heat
shield had to go through nine months of repair after
every flight, right, so no one has ever made a.
Speaker 2: Fully reusable overal heat shield and is.
Speaker 4: That a material science problem or is that an engineering
problem or both?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it's a material science engineering problem. So
it's but we really are uh looking at the fundamental.
Speaker 2: Physics here again physics post.
Speaker 3: Principles and trying to figure out how do we make
something that is you know, it can withstand the heat,
is very light, doesn't transmit.
Speaker 2: The heat to the primary primary structure.
Speaker 1: And.
Speaker 2: Integrity is holdile, stay on and they don't crack. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 3: And then as you ascend, if you hit some rain,
the tiles don't dissolve and rain. There's there's a lot
of different issues, and then you really need to know
that these tiles are working. You can't you know, go
through this laborious inspection. So it really needs to be
where you know, these these tens of thousands of tiles
all work and don't need to be repurbished or checked
one by one.
Speaker 2: That was the case with the shuttle.
Speaker 4: Can we maybe switch now, think, I mean, who who
else were you talked about Tesla? Then you go to
SpaceX Yeah, now I'd like to ask you some questions
about rock and x AI. You want to just give
us an update. I think you you kind of talked
about where the next gen model is and you said
something incredible. I still don't think people really understand it,
which is, you know, there's going to be a next
training run where you expect, you know, not to start
from the you know, common web and common crawl, where
you expected an enormous amount of synthetic data. Just tell
us about how the evolution of GROC is going and
this innovation and why it's so important.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So we're running a lot of using a lot
of inference, compute and reasoning to look at all of
the source data, which is really the corpus of human knowledge,
and then thinking about each piece of information and then
adding what adding what's missing, and correcting, correcting mistakes and
removing falsehoods from the from that training data. So it's
it's if you take data Wikipedia as an example, but
this really applies to the books, PDFs, the websites, every
form of information. The GROC is using heavy amounts of
inference can put to say to look at, as an example,
a Wikipedia page and say, what is true postially true
or false.
Speaker 2: Or missing in this page?
Speaker 3: Now rewrite the page to correct the remove the false foods,
correct the half truths, and add the missing context.
Speaker 6: Well, elong, by the way, could you just publish that?
Could we create like a Grockipedia?
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, especially for our bio pages, which a disaster.
Speaker 6: Wikipedia is so biased and it's it's a constant war.
You know, if something gets corrected five minutes later, there'll
be an army of people trying to I mean, it's
become hyper partisan and there's hyperperactivists.
Speaker 5: All over it.
Speaker 6: So if you do fix, for example, Wikipedia is a
source of truth, it'd be great to publish that just
so the world has.
Speaker 3: It all right, I'll about that, so total team about that,
like grock Fedia or whatever.
Speaker 2: Let's here's the grock Fedia.
Speaker 3: Version interesting and then just have it out there.
Speaker 5: Where in terms of people here like it?
Speaker 4: Uh?
Speaker 6: In terms of training, Grock five, you're you're scaling up
your supercluster in Colossus in Memphis.
Speaker 5: Second one, Yeah, could you give us an update on that?
Speaker 6: And then also as part of that, where are we
in the scaling laws? If you scale a bigger cluster,
do you get a more powerful AI model?
Speaker 5: Is there a point of diminishing returns? Or like how
much more.
Speaker 6: Compute if you throw twice as much compute at it,
do you get a ten better model?
Speaker 5: Do you get one hundred percent better model?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 5: Is it log linear?
Speaker 4: What?
Speaker 5: What? I guess? How much more juice is there left
in scaling hardware?
Speaker 6: Do you think?
Speaker 3: I think, I think there's a natural logarithmic function associated
with the amount of cute. So then like say, for auguments,
take like panex more compute will double the intelligence. Maybe
that's that might be a rough rule of thumb, but
you know that still means that you know, you go
from hundred IQ to hundred i Q still pretty pretty
big deal. So I and I think I think we'll
see intelligence continue to scale all the way up to
where you know, most of the power of the sun
is hardness for compute, and then ultimately most of the
power of the galaxy, you know, sort of Kardashev two
quartus show three scale compute. So I guess I want
to think about official intelligence not as sort of this.
Speaker 2: You know, a destination that you reach, but.
Speaker 3: Really as part of the overall escalation of intelligence.
Speaker 2: That that that we are aware of.
Speaker 3: You know, human intelligence is also scaled, as you have
as the population has increased and we've been able to
store more and more information. Human intelligence is scale now
human Because of population declines and low growth rate, human
intelligence is somewhat plateauing and will actually decline. And my
guess is that I think that we might have AI
smarter than any single human at anything as soon as
next year wow, and then probably within five, like I say,
twenty thirty. Probably AI is smarter than the some gold humans.
Speaker 7: Do you think do you think humans are on the
decline because the AI is evolving? Do you think there's
this evolution of the ecosystem on Earth that's out our
way that we don't really understand the structure of what's
going on, but.
Speaker 2: Maybe yeah, maybe we implicitly know that it's coming.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, I hope the birth rates soon around.
I'm I'm a big proponent of increased birth rate.
Speaker 1: Obviously, Well you doing anything about it or no?
Speaker 2: A good example.
Speaker 7: You know, we had a.
Speaker 1: Big conversation at this conference we didn't expect, which is
suicidal empathy the West. This declining birth rate. I noticed
you've been pretty active about it.
Speaker 7: And open borders and open borders the Tucker talk. Could
all three of those be the same thing?
Speaker 6: It seems like, there's a number of symptoms of the
West being suicidal, the most obvious one being the birth
rate is not a replacement level. So obviously if that
continues and definitely then the West will literally not.
Speaker 5: Reproduce enough to replace itself. But there's other things too.
Speaker 6: There's the fact that the borders were totally opened to
the point where Western culture, the social fabrics started to
come apart. And you see this especially in Europe where
they're you know, the indigenous cultures of the UK or
France or Germany or starting to potentially be taken over
by by cultures of people who are brought in and
aren't assimilating. You have crime where you know, we have
this case on social media right now, this young woman,
Irena who's just killed in a senseless way on a subway,
which is horrific enough in and of itself, but then
in addition to that, the elite media just for whatever
reason just refused to cover it like it didn't exist.
So you have this issue of crime that's not being
addressed or even no knowledge.
Speaker 1: And no acknowledgment of this, Like it's almost like we're
trying to deny the reality of the spiral and this.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so you have the you have all these data
points that seemed to suggest that the West is suicidal
or doesn't you know, doesn't seem to want to defend
itself or propagated itself. Look, I think everyone in this
room thinks that life is awesome, right, I mean it's
pretty great.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 6: And when when Alex Karp was here earlier today defending
the West, that got some of the loudest applause at
the conference. So, uh, I guess we probably don't really
understand what's going on.
Speaker 2: We don't really.
Speaker 7: Yeah, what's your take elon because you know, what's your
take on the suicide of the West?
Speaker 1: Yeah, what's what's.
Speaker 2: I'm very worried about it. Yeah, I'm very worried about it.
You know. I think there's the.
Speaker 3: Let's just say that the actions of the West are
indistinguishable from suicide.
Speaker 2: It's so, but it's.
Speaker 3: Look, at least in America, there's there's there's generally a
sense of optimism. But when's the last time you told
someone from Europe who lives in Europe who's optimistic?
Speaker 2: Not for a while, no decades, like even one. It's rare.
Speaker 3: So I think unless people have a sense of optimism
and purpose about the future.
Speaker 2: They so suicide might be just what.
Speaker 3: Happens, like like like having a child is an act
of optimism about the future.
Speaker 2: So uh, if you're not optimistic.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So I think we need to maybe give people
a sense of optimism and excitement about the future. And
I believe that the future will be better than the
past and they'll be more interested in having kids.
Speaker 7: Did religion play a role in the past? Elanta? Yeah,
kind of play Kate and make folks feel that way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think so.
Speaker 3: Nature abhors a vacuum, and if you take away religion,
then I think you actually you you get something in
this place which is actually worse than what was there before.
I mean it's like destructive basically, you get you get
like the white work mind virus pulling, filling the whole
that religion used to have, taking the place.
Speaker 2: Of of of religion. You get these dystopian, de facto
religions that that are that are very very self destructive.
Speaker 3: So I think perhaps some some sort of revival of religion,
or at least what we need is is some coherent
philosophy that people can get excited about, you know, I mean,
for me, it's a philosophy of curiosity. I'm curious about
the nature of universe, and I want to go out there,
and I want humanity to be out there exploring the stars.
Speaker 2: That maybe meeting alien civilizations.
Speaker 3: Uh maybe in some cases we see the ruins of
elongate alien civilization, but they were they were very strong
for ten million years, you know, the kind of stuff
that you see in Star Trek, in a non dystopian
and sci fi book or or movie or show. And
so I'm just to have a I have a philosophy
of curiosity of like, I just want to know what's
going on. And in order to know what's going on,
we must have and an increase in the in the
scope and scale of consciousness. We must we must expand
as consciousness, we must grow, we must grow humanity, and
we must extend humanity in order to comprehend and to
understand the universe.
Speaker 2: Even what what.
Speaker 3: Question should we should ask about? The answer that is
the universe?
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Doug Douglas adams book The Hitchhrackers Guys in the Galaxy
is actually a deep book on philosophy disguised as humor.
And what the point he was trying to make in
that book was that the questions are the really the
hard part. The answer is the universe, like the answer
is everything you see around you. But but but what
are the questions that we.
Speaker 2: Don't know to ask?
Speaker 1: Ye?
Speaker 3: Now some of the questions I guess I do know.
I'd like to know is the standard model of physics correct?
About the origins of the universe? Are we actually thirty
twenty ellion years old? How does the universe end? Does
end an heat death or in some other way, you know,
a black hole.
Speaker 2: We might be Can you talk about the whole sort
of simulation question? Are we assimulation? Maybe?
Speaker 1: Where does the Where do you think we find the
answer first in AI or in the stars? Because you're
pursuing both obviously.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know if I hope more people can
get behind a philosophy of curiosity because I think it's
very exciting. Yeah, and and and and inherently optimistic, like
because there's there's this amazing, amazing sense.
Speaker 2: Of wonder about the nature of the universe.
Speaker 3: And when you just when you uncover some secrets to
the universe, that's amazing, and you're like a whole world
of understanding is opened up. I mean we used to
not even know where all the continents were. You know,
used to be like just the map would be, there'd
be dragons, and like all we know is that when
they sailed in that direction, they didn't come back. I
mean the moon base, that's that's all they knew.
Speaker 1: I kind of feel like the moon base, or just
going to the Moon for real this time would be
a big step in the right direction. You still have
the Moon planned, what's the status of that? Is that
still on the agenda?
Speaker 3: Yea, yea, I think having I think we want to
try to reach new heights as a civilization, so I
think that's it's fine to go to the Moon, but
we should go to the Moon in order to establish
a lunar base, like a lunar research base. I mean,
there are parts of the Moon that are perhaps older
than parts of Earth, and we might understand more about
the nature of the universe if we had a science
base on the Moon, that would be very cool. And
then we obviously want to go beyond the Moon to Mars,
and well they self sustaining city on Mars. I do
think that that there is a folk in the road
of human destiny where if we can establish a self
sustaining city on Mars, with the key test being if
the resupply ships from Earth stopped coming for any reason,
does Mars continue to prosper or.
Speaker 2: Does it die out.
Speaker 3: At the point at which Mars is able to asper
and grow on its own, the probable lifespan of consciousness
is dramatically greater because we are no longer dependent on
everything going right on Earth. You know, there's there's always
some possibility of self annihilation on Earth with the World
War three, or or supervirus or or or a media
or like extinct. But you know that destroyed the dinosaurs.
We know from the fossil record that there have been
many massive mass extinction events. So the question that I
sort of always wondering about is will civilization can Will
the civilizational arc continue to ascend such that we can
make Mars self sustaining before the civil civilizational arc descends,
because the window of opportunity to make life faulty planetary
exists now for the first time in the four and
a half billion year history of Earth.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you'll also assume that we get there and you're there.
You know, you would be the elder statesman, you'd have
the moral authority of Mars. How do you run Mars?
Speaker 3: H But there's this point that I think I want
to just emphasize again, that's that's that's more important than
the form of governance on Mars or who's there in
the early days. What really matters is that Mars is
self sustaining, that we are truly a multi planet species
and such such that we've achieved planetary redundancy, so that
if if something, obviously we should do everything possible to
make sure life on Earth is great. But there's always
some risk that of an annihilation event on Earth, like
I said, self annihilation or some natural disaster and UH,
and so the probable lifespan of consciousness increases dramatically as
soon as UH, as soon as we are a multiplanet species,
with the key test being can Mars survive if the
resupply ships stop coming. So it's getting like the first
missions to Mars are not that important. What matters is
can you get sufficient tonnage to Mars such that Mars
can prosper on its own, And that means it has
to have all of the ingredients of civilization. It's not
just that you need to build, for example, a chip factory,
on Mars or ship fab on Mars, but you need
the ability ability to apps.
Speaker 4: Do you have a sense of the time scale, Like,
let's assume Starship is at a state starting in you know,
twenty twenty six, then there's going to be a bunch
of testing. Obviously there's going to be a bunch of
early testing. We only have certain launch windows, so there's
a bunch of time constraints. Is this a fifty year
thing in your mind? Is it one hundred and fifty
year thing? Is it something that is for our generation
or is it our children's generation? Where do you see
that point? If it's optimally possible, you know, things go
and break our way.
Speaker 2: I think it can be done in thirty years.
Speaker 3: If it provided there's an exponential increase in the in
the tonnage to Mars with each success of MAAS transfer windows,
which is every two years, So every two years the
planets aligned and you can you can transfer to Mars.
So I think in roughly fifteen, but maybe as few
as ten, but I saw ten to fifteen ish mass
transfer windows. If you're seeing exponential increases in the tonnage
to Mars with each mass transfer window, then it should
be possible to make more self sustaining in about quote
roughly twenty five years.
Speaker 1: Amazing.
Speaker 2: That's incredible.
Speaker 1: All right, ladies and gentlemen, Elon Musk, we'll see you
when we're back in town. We miss you, see you
in person, that's time. Thank you, brother,