I want to explain why I think space is really important, and what about space. If you don’t mind me exploring that issue a little bit, you break it down and say: “Why is it important that life becomes multi-planetary?” Why go anywhere, right?
I believe in building things up from a rational framework of logic, and so you start with, sort of, how do you decide that anything is important? I guess you should look at the nature of importance itself. I think the lens of history is a helpful guide. The lens of history is a helpful way to distinguish more from less important in that things that may seem important in the moment, aren't that important in the grand scheme - over time. The further out you zoom the more you can distinguish less important from the more important. If you look at things over a broad span of time, things that are less important kind of fall away. The important milestones remain and the less important ones disappear.
If you look at things from the broadest possible span of time, at the whole 4.5 billion year history of Earth, and say what are the milestones in the evolution of life itself? If you think about the really big milestones, and that means going beyond the colloquial concerns of humanity. Primitive life, I think, started around 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago. Initially there was single celled life, and then there was multicellular life, there was differentiation into plants and animals, then things acquired skeletons, and that allowed the transition from the oceans to land, and then we had the development of mammals and consciousness, those are sort of the big things. There's probably about ten or twelve really big milestones in the history of life itself. I think on that list would fit life going from one planet to multiple planets. I think it's one of the most significant things that will occur in the history of life itself. I think it's at least as important as life going from the oceans to land, and arguably more important, because at least oceans to land can be a gradual affair, if it gets uncomfortable you can hop back into the ocean. Now if there’s something that is important enough to arguably fit on the scale of evolution of life itself, it’s fair to say that it should be considered important.
The human consciousness has not been around very long from a evolutionary standpoint. It's worth noting that civilization in terms of having writing has been around for 10,000 years, and that's being generous. History is going to bifurcate along two directions. I think there are really two fundamental paths. One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event. We’ll be one of perhaps many single planet species that never went anywhere. Eventually something terrible happened, and that caused the end of that civilization. Or we’re going to be the multi-planet species that is out there among the stars. That's the thing that makes all the difference in the world, because eventually there will be something that happens on Earth. Either as a result of something humanity does, or as a result of something natural like a giant asteroid hitting us or something, that civilization - life as we know it - could be destroyed. I don't have an immediate doomsday prophecy, but it's just history, eventually there will be some doomsday event. That's pretty obvious from the fossil record, it's just a question of when. There's clear evidence for life being destroyed, multiple times, in the fossil record. We don't need to guess that this is something that can occur, it already has occurred. The Permian Extinction being a particularly interesting one, as I think that destroyed between 90 to 95% of all species on Earth, which doesn't tell the full story as most of the remaining species were fungi. So, unless you're a mushroom, you're out of luck.
The Sun is also gradually expanding, and in roughly 500 million years, maybe 1 billion years at the outside, the oceans will boil and there will be no meaningful life on Earth. Maybe some chemo tropes or ultra high temperature bacteria or something, but nothing that can make a spaceship. If you think about the 500 million years it's only about a 10% increase in the lifespan of the Earth. If humanity had taken an extra 10% longer to get here, we would not have gotten here at all. Civilization has been around for such a very short period of time that these time scales seem like very long, but on an evolutionary time scale, they're very short. A million years on an evolutionary time scale is really not much, and Earth's been around for four and a half billion years, so that's a very tiny, tiny amount of time, really. It’s really somewhat of a tenuous existence that civilization and consciousness as we know has been on Earth, and we face dangers that the dinosaurs didn't face. We could do ourselves in.
I'm actually fairly optimistic about the future of Earth. I am more optimistic than Stephen Hawking or Martin Rees the Astronomer Royal. He thinks it's quite likely that civilization will end this century. He's at the Royal Society, so he's a smart guy, I hope he's wrong. I personally am more optimistic about civilization.
I did say multi planetary, so it's not from the standpoint of let's have one planet but somewhere else. We want to have multiple planets. If you can imagine some, I hesitate to use the word "utopian society" in the future, but say what is the future you want? What is the future that you would say that be a good one? Than I think you want have a future where we are a space faring civilization, A multi planet species, we are out there exploring the stars. I think that would be great.
To the best of our knowledge life exists only on Earth, so if we don't at some point propagate beyond Earth, then if there's some calamity that befalls life here, that will extinguish it. One can think of it from a standpoint of life insurance. I mean something bad is bound to happen if you give it enough time. For all we know that might be the extinguishment of life itself.
I think it is consciousness which makes this the next step. You really need consciousness to design vehicles that can transport life over hundreds of millions of miles of irradiated space, to an environment that they did not evolve to exist in. It would be very convenient of course if there was another planet just like Earth nearby, but that's unlikely, and as it turns out not the case. There’s no way for life to just, by dint of natural selection, just sort of get over to Mars and survive. I think given the immense difficulty of that, you actually need consciousness to have developed in order to achieve that goal. I can't see anyway that life could just evolve in a Darwinian fashion to go across hundreds of millions of miles of irradiated space to an environment that is completely different to Earth, and still live.
You really need consciousness in order to design a mechanism of making that journey. It feels to me that this little light appeared suddenly on Earth after 4 1/2 billion years. It's hard to say how often that does happen, maybe it's quite rare. In fact it would appear to be quite rare, or they are very good at hiding. If it's a very rare thing, then we should take whatever actions we can to ensure its long-term survival. Life is a terrible thing to waste.
So far nobody has found any direct signs of life from other worlds. We have not detected anything. Hopefully we do, and hopefully it's not a warship coming towards us. The telescopes are indicating that there is a huge number of planets out there that are similar to Earth, so it seems likely that there is at least primitive life, like single celled life, bacteria and that kind of thing. Then there is a much smaller number that would have sophisticated life, like plants or animals. Then a much much tinier number that would have life that we can talk to, and that number might be zero in our region of the Galaxy. We haven't seen any direct signs of communication from any nearby Solar systems. I think there is quite a high chance of microbial life, then as you get more advanced in life there is less and less likelihood of sophisticated life.
It's not just that there has to be intelligent life that evolved somewhere, but that that life has to last for a long time for us to exist at the same time as that.
There is this great question called the Fermi paradox like: where are the aliens? If there are so many planets out there, and the universe is almost 14 billion years old, why aren't the aliens everywhere? This is one of the most perplexing questions, because you could basically bicycle to Alpha Centauri in a few hundred thousand years meaning at bicycle speed. In a hundred billion years even at a very slow speed you could completely blanket the Galaxy, so why not, where are they? If there are super intelligent aliens out there they’re probably already observing us, that would seem quite likely, and we just are not smart enough to realize it. Maybe they’re among us, I don’t know. Some people think I’m an alien. Not true, not true, of course I’d say that, wouldn’t I?
Anyway to the best of our knowledge life exists only on Earth. There's a good argument that it exists elsewhere but we see no sign of it, and for the first time in history of Earth the window of possibility has opened for us to extend life to another planet. Personally I think that would really be one of the most important things that we could possibly achieve, because a multi-planet version of humanity's future is going to last a lot longer. We'll propagate civilization in the future far longer if we're a multi-planet species than if we're a single planet species. It’s like planetary redundancy, backing up the biosphere. We've got all of our eggs in one basket here. We should try to protect that basket and do everything we can. It just seems like the right thing to do
Then the next question is should we do it now, or should we wait for some point in the future? I think the wise move is to do it now, because the window of technology for this is open, and it's the first time that window's been open. Earth's been around for 4.5 billion years and civilization about 10.000 years and it's only now that we have this little - this little window has just cracked open where it's possible for life to extend beyond Earth and so - I think it's sort of sensible to take advantage of that window while it's open. Hopefully it will be open for a long time, but it could be open for a short time, and so we should take action. I certainly hope that the window will be open forever, but it may also close. I don't know if our technology level will keep going or subside. I think it's easy to take for granted that it is going to stay above that level, and if it does fall below that, would it return who knows? People are mistaken when they think that technology just automatically improves. It does not automatically improve. It only improves if a lot of people work very hard to make it better, and actually it will I think by itself degrade. If you look at the history of technology in various civilizations - if you look at, say, ancient Egypt where they were able to build these incredible giant pyramids, and then they forgot how to build the pyramids, and then they couldn't read hieroglyphics. You look at say Roman civilization, they were able to build these incredible aqueducts and roads, and then they forgot how to do that. They had indoor plumbing, and they forgot how to do indoor plumbing. There's clearly been a cycle with technology. Hopefully, that's an upward sloping sine wave that continues on to be really great in the future, but maybe it doesn't. Maybe there's some bad thing that happens.
I think it is important for us to take advantage of the window while it is open and to establish life on another planet in the Solar System, just in case something goes wrong and knocks the technology level below where it is possible to travel to another planet. Can you can imagine if human civilization continued at anything remotely like the current pace of technology advancement for a million years? Where would we be? I think we're either extinct or on a lot of planets. Those are the two options.
I don't want to give the wrong impression that I think we're all about to die. I think things will most likely be okay for a long time on Earth. Not for sure, but, most likely. Even if it's 99% likely, a 1% chance is still worth spending a fair bit of effort to back up the biosphere, and achieve planetary redundancy. To be clear this is not about everyone moving to Mars. It's about becoming multi planetary. I think Earth is going to be a good place for a long time, but the probable lifespan of human civilization will be much greater if we are a multi planetary species.
If one could make a reasonable argument that something is important enough to fit on the scale of evolution, then it's important, and maybe worth a bit of our resources. If we think it's worth buying life insurance on an individual level, then perhaps it's worth spending something on life insurance for life as we know it, and arguably that expenditure should be greater than zero. Then we can just get to the question of what is an appropriate expenditure for life insurance? I’m not talking about a huge portion, but perhaps we can bound it quite easily by saying it's not as important as, say, health care, but it's more important than let's say, cosmetics. You want it to be some sort of number that is much less than what we spend on health care, but maybe more than what we spend on lipstick. I like lipstick, it's not like I've got anything against it. I think lipstick’s very important, but you know, lipstick or colony on Mars? people may have a different opinion. Maybe .2 or .3 percent of our GDP, something like that is warranted. I think most people would say, okay, that's not so bad.
That’s kinda the thing that I think is important that we give a little bit of our mind-space towards. For less than 1% of our resources we could buy life insurance for life, collectively, and I think that would be a good thing to do.
Now that is the defensive argument, but it's not actually the reason that gets me most fired up. I just think there have to be reasons that you get up in the morning, and you want to live. Like, why do you want to live? What's the point? What inspires you? What do you love about the future? Life has to be more than just about solving problems, it can't be that all you do every day is just wake up and solve one miserable problem after the other. There has to be inspiring and exciting events that make life worth living in the first place. The thing that gets me the most excited about it is that I just think it's the grandest adventure I could possibly imagine. It's the most exciting thing, I couldn't think of anything more exciting, more fun, more inspiring for the future than to have a base on Mars. I think it'll be really great. It will be incredibly difficult, and probably lots of people will die, and terrible and great things will happen along the way, just as happened in the formation of the United States, but it will be one of those things that is incredibly inspiring, and we must have inspiring things in the world. Things that are exciting and inspiring and make you want the future to happen, I love that. I think that would make for a very exciting future. We could start off by establishing on Mars and eventually spread out to the rest of the Solar System and start sending ships to other star systems. Once we've got a large base on Mars, and a lot of travel between the planets, that's a great forcing function for the improvement of space transport technology. I think we'll see rapid improvement and all sorts of inventions that we just can't envision today.
There are bad things that humanity does, and there are good things, and this is one of the good things. There have to be things that inspire you, to be proud to be a member of humanity. The Apollo program is certainly an example of that. Only a handful of people went to the Moon, and yet, actually, we all went to the Moon. We went with them vicariously. We shared in that adventure. I don't think anyone would say that was a bad idea. That was great. You know, we need more of those things, at least we need some of those things. Even if someone is in a completely different industry, and a completely different walk of life, it's still something that's going to make you feel good about the world, and that's the other reason why I think we should try to do these great things.
This is different from Apollo, this is really about minimizing existential risk, and protecting live in ensuring that the light of consciousness is not extinguished, and having a tremendous sense of adventure. I'm sure it'll make it more awesome to be a human.