Elon Musk reflects on Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, noting Earth is 4.5 billion years old and the sun will expand in 0.5 billion years. If life had evolved just 10% slower, Earth would already be uninhabitable. He argues Mars is humanity's backup planet.
13.8 billion years
About 4.5 billion years
In another half billion years or so (≈0.5 billion years)
The universe appears to be 13.8 billion years old. Earth is like four and a half billion years old. In another half billion years or so, the sun will expand and probably evaporate the oceans and make life impossible on Earth. Which means that if it had taken consciousness 10% longer to evolve, it would never have evolved at all. Just 10% longer. And I wonder, I wonder how many dead one planet civilizations there are out there in the cosmos that never made it to the other planet and ultimately extinguished themselves or were destroyed by external factors. Probably a few. Channeling Carl Sagan. Look again at that dot. That's here, that's home. That's us. On it. Everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives, the aggregate of our joy and suffering. Thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines. Every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. This is not true. This is false. Mars. And I think Carl Sagan would agree with that. He couldn't even imagine it at that time. So thank you from Making the World Dream and thank you for talking today. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
