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What do you make of AI? What do you think? I love it. Yeah, I love it. But it's been here for a while. It really spooked people when it started writing your term paper and composing your painting and your set design. That whole other category of people got spooked by that. Meanwhile, AI has been harnessed and is being fully used in my field and in most of the physical sciences. It's doing work. If you can do the work, I can go to the Bahamas and let it do the work. We have telescopes coming online that could not exist without the intervention of AI to access the data, reduce the data, analyze the data, and make a decision about whether it should go back to the thing that had just observed, because that was weird compared to the last time it was observed. This is the Vera Rubin telescope that I'm literally describing now. So we're living with it. What it means is it'll have to up the game of people who say they are creative. What I mean by that is I can say ChatGPT, take this picture of us and paint this scene in the style of Van Gogh, and it'll come back. The colors will be just right. It'll have the swirly lines. It'll be perfect. If Van Gogh were standing there, that's what Van Gogh would have painted. If I say, "ChatGPT, paint us in the style of no artist who has ever lived," I don't know what it's going to give us, but it'll probably suck. True creativity is not aping what has happened before and making adjustments. True creativity, yes, you always build on others. I'm not in denial of that. But true creativity takes leaps that most people don't even know can be taken. So that gap, I think, is what AI in the arts world is going to force creative people to reach for. Otherwise, you're replaced by a simple request in the input line of a large language model or an art generator.
I was just wondering, if I watch Cosmos in 30 or 40 years' time, or let's say 100 years' time, whether this is the moment where humans and computers in the story of humanity become one and intertwine. If you think about things like Neuralink, which Elon is working on, when he first made that company, all of the narrative he put out there was about us being able to interface with AI. So we'd need something like a brain-chip computer interface. More recently, it's been about people who are paraplegic and disabled, and helping blind people see. But I think that's a socially acceptable way to advance the technology. In his early work, he said super intelligence is going to arrive and we're going to need a way to keep up, where we have better latency with the technology. I'm wondering if that's what we're seeing now. Yeah. Super intelligence, if that happens, then it becomes our overlord and we become its pet. Okay. That sounds pretty scary, but don't we treat our pets better than we treat other humans in the world? Think about it. The pet is kept warm and fed and happy. Would you do that for a homeless person in the street, a person of your own species? Probably not. So if we're the pet of the super intelligence, what about the chicken? How bad could it be? When we were younger we had chickens, and I watched my Nigerian mother chase that chicken around the garden, grab it, pull its head off, and cook it. Wow. Okay. Yeah. You're worried it's going to do that to us, so we run around. Not all my pets made it. Not all the pets survive. It depends on whether it needs us to be alive or dead. We have to be relevant to it in some way. Maybe we'll be its entertainment. Until then, I don't know that this is some special moment. I do a lot of reading of history, and throughout history, on most occasions, especially in the era of the Industrial Revolution, people think they're living in a special moment. So I'm not going to be the guy who says today is special, because everyone has thought they were in a special moment.
And what do you think is the probability of me getting to another planet in my lifetime? Zero. Zero. Really? Yeah. You want to know why? Yes, please. It's just zero. I thought SpaceX was going to go to Mars. I have an unorthodox view on this, so you don't have to believe me. But my read of history tells me that we only do big expensive things if there's a geopolitical reason for it, either an economic reason or a defense reason, not just because it's the next thing to do. When we went to the moon, you have to realize that on May 25, 1961, President Kennedy, six weeks after Yuri Gagarin flew around the Earth in orbit, and when we didn't yet have a ship that wouldn't blow up on the launch pad that could carry humans, called a joint session of Congress and said, "If the events of recent weeks," and I'm paraphrasing, "are any indication of the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, then we need to show the world the path of freedom over the path of tyranny." It was a battle cry against communism and the godless Russians, the whole Soviet Union. We were losing a technological race, and that battle cry is what prompted Congress to write the check. Later on he said, "We'll put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth," and, oh, let's hold hands, that's so beautiful. No one ever spent scads of money just because it was a cool thing to do. That has never happened, ever. So we went to the moon, and people forgetting why we went to the moon say, "While we're on the moon, at this rate we'll be on Mars by 1985. That'll be the next ambitious goal." No, because we didn't just go to the moon because that was the next thing to do. We went to beat the Russians. When we got to the moon and looked over our shoulder and the Russians weren't there, we canceled the Apollo program in 1970 and 1972. We haven't been back to the moon in 53 years. We canceled it. Apollo 18 was ready to fly. It's now in captivity in Huntsville, Alabama, in a museum, on its side. It's fascinating to walk the full length of it, all rocket-flight-ready parts. It never flew. We ended at Apollo 17. We didn't go to Mars because we didn't have geopolitical reasons to do so, neither economic nor defense reasons. Historically, people explored and did expensive things for the glory of God and royalty: the pyramids, the honor of royalty, church and cathedral building. All of these activities were for the glory of power, deity, and royalty. None of that happens today. We're past that. The power of kings and gods doesn't drive it anymore. Nobody dislodges major capital resources of a nation in the interest of a god or a king anymore. It's secular, and secular means it's money or it's war, because you feel threatened. So we're going back to the moon now, with Project Artemis. Did you ever stop to ask why? Why didn't we stay on the moon after 1972? Why didn't we go back in 1980, 1990, 2000, or 2010? All of a sudden, let's go back to the moon. Wouldn't that be cool? Do you know when Artemis began, in the late teens? Right about when China said, "We're going to put taikonauts on the moon." Taikonauts. Chinese astronauts. That's when we said, let's go back to the moon. What a good idea. We did it because we're a little spooked by a friendly foe around the world who might get the glory of that exercise, and once again, it's a godless country. Communism is godless by design and by construct. So here we are going back to the moon. What motivation do we have to go to Mars? Are there oil wells there? Are there diamond mines? We're not going to Mars. We just aren't, unless China says it wants to put military bases on Mars. Then we'd be on Mars in 10 months: one month to design, build, and fund the thing, and nine months to get there. It takes a geopolitical force to operate that way. By the way, NASA doesn't have a rocket that will get us to Mars. They think they do, but they don't really have one yet. So it's time to say, "Well, does anybody have a rocket?" Elon says, "I have a rocket." So if Elon's rocket goes to Mars, it's not because he sends it there. It's because taxpayers sent it there. He could go there as a vanity project, but there's no business case. He could fly to Mars, team up with Jeff Bezos, and they could send people to Mars, but it's not a business case. If you were an investor in his company, you would not agree to do that. But he doesn't need investors because he's very wealthy. He could do it on his own. Are you going to Mars as a tourist? Is that a business case? It's a trillion dollars to get to Mars. The first one would be a trillion dollars, the second a little less. I don't see that happening. About a trillion dollars.
Yeah. If Earth were a schoolroom globe, with your fist, show me where you think the moon is. This is Earth. Take your fist and put it at the distance the moon is. Your fist is about the right size compared to the globe. Okay, right there. Not too bad. It's 30 feet away. It's in the next room. Okay, 30 feet away. That's the moon. Let's keep going. How far away from Earth did the Bezos and Branson rockets go? Not far: the thickness of two dimes above the surface of the Earth. How far away is Mars? It's a mile away from here, from this Earth. It's a mile away. It's in Central Park. The moon is 30 feet away, Mars is a mile away. It's a trillion dollars to Mars. How long does it take? Nine months, if you have to wait until the planets are configured so that when you travel, you arrive where Mars will be when you get there. That's a minimum energy orbit. If you had filling stations along the way, you could fill up with fuel and get there as fast as you wanted, but a minimum energy orbit takes about nine months. To come back, you have to wait until it's configured again, a few years later. So a round trip to Mars is three to five years easily. There's no economic case. I'm not saying we don't know how to get to Mars. We have a SUV-sized rover there now, discovering potential evidence of life from a billion years ago. It's not that we don't know how to get to Mars. This isn't a technological statement I'm making. It's a practical one. So my read of history tells me no.
I thought you were also going to add that even if Elon wanted to do it as a vanity project, because he makes all this money and manages to use Starlink as a way to fund it, the problem is Elon is going to die. He's going to die in the next couple of decades, which means the vanity element, which comes from his childhood, when he wanted to explore the stars because he read that book, has 30, 40, or 50 years left on it. Well, that would make him want to hurry, wouldn't it? Yeah. Plus he said, "I don't want to die on Earth. I want to die on Mars." I'm paraphrasing, but that's the idea. That's a goal, sure. But don't tell me it's a business case. I can see a tourist case, going into orbit and possibly visiting the moon. It's three days there and three days back, a week's vacation you would take. I would save up five or ten years of vacation money. If that was what it would take to go to the moon for one week, it would be a really fun bucket list item for me.
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