Excerpt from a short YouTube podcast clip (AI Podcast Clips) featuring Sean Carroll and others discussing space exploration. Speakers debate SpaceX/Elon Musk’s efforts, assert that space travel is crucial long-term (including to other star systems), and argue that extending human lifespan to centuries or thousands of years would make interstellar trips feasible even at sublight speeds. They also note spreading humanity/biology off Earth as a hedge against planetary threats.
Foreign. Are you excited by the thing that Elon Musk is doing with SpaceX in general space, but the idea of space exploration, even though you're or your species is young.
And impatient? Yeah, no, I do think that space travel is crucially important long term, even to other star systems. And I think that many people overestimate the difficulty because they say, look, if you travel 1% the speed of light to another star system, we'll be dead before we get there. Right. And I think that it's much easier. And therefore when they write their science fiction stories, they imagine we go faster than the speed of light because otherwise they're too impatient. Right. We're not going to go faster than the speed of light, but we could easily imagine that the human lifespan gets extended to thousands of years and once you do that, then the stars are much closer, effectively. Right. What's a hundred year trip? Right. So I think that that's going to be the future, the far future. Not, not my lifetime once again, but baby steps. And unless.
Your lifetime gets extended.
Well, it's in a race against time. Right. A friend of mine who actually thinks about these things said, you know, you and I are going to die, but I don't know about our grandchildren. That's, that's, I don't know. Predicting the future is hard, but that's at least a plausible scenario. And so, yeah, no, I think that as we discussed earlier, earlier, there are threats to the Earth, known and unknown. Right. Having spread humanity and biology elsewhere is a.
