We have made the ships that sail the sea of space.
The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars. There was a time when the stars seemed an impenetrable mystery. Today, we have begun to understand them.
According to the geological records, earth has been around for around 4.5 billion years, although it was mostly molten magma for about half a billion years... The sun is gradually getting hotter and bigger, and over time, even in the absence of global warming — the man-made stuff — the sun will expand and it will overheat the earth. My guess is probably... there is only several hundred million years left.... Basically, if it took an extra 10% longer for conscious life to evolve on earth, it wouldn't evolve at all, because it would have been incinerated by the sun. ... It appears that consciousness is a very rare and precious thing, and we should take whatever steps we can to preserve the light of consciousness, and the window has been open; only now after four and a half billion years is that window open, that's a long time to wait ... I'm pretty optimistic by nature, but there's some chance that window will not be open for long, I think we should become a multi-planet civilization while that window is open, and if we do the I think probable outcome for Earth is even better, because then you know Mars could help Earth one day.
Sometimes I think how lucky we are to live in this time, the first moment in human history when we are in fact, visiting other worlds and engaging in a deep reconnaissance of the cosmos.
The voyager record is a message in a bottle cast into the cosmic ocean.
One [path] is that we stay on Earth forever and then there will be an inevitable extinction event. The alternative is to become a space faring civilization, and a multi-planetary species.
I like to be involved in things that change the world. The Internet did, and space will probably be more responsible for changing the world than anything else. If humanity can expand beyond the Earth, obviously that's where the future is.
If we can build something that is capable of taking people and equipment to Mars, such that it can service a transportation infrastructure for humanity becoming a multi- planet species - which I think is a very, very important objective - then I would consider the mission of SpaceX successful, at that point.
We are used to things improving every year; we are used to having a better cell phone next year than this year; a better lap top. We are even used to some basic things, like we expect more from your car in next year’s model than last year’s model. But this is not the case in space; reliability and cost - those are the fundamental parameters of transportation - have not improved.
I would like to die on Mars; just not on impact.
Only by breaking through to new paradigms of space travel will more than a handful of us ever get to Mars and make it a potentially livable place.
I think there is a strong humanitarian argument for making life multi-planetary in order to safeguard the existence of humanity in the event that something catastrophic were to happen.
You can’t show up at Mars in something the size of a rowboat. What if there are Martians? It would be so embarrassing.
It’s so insane the way rockets work today. It would be like if you got a plane and the way you get to your destination is you bail out with a parachute over the city in question and your plane crash lands somewhere. That’s how rockets work today—with the exception of Falcon 9. This is completely bonkers.
Something will happen to Earth eventually, it’s just a question of time. Eventually the sun will expand and destroy all life on Earth, so we do need to move at some point, or at least be a multi-planet species. [...] You have to ask the question: do we want to be a space-flying civilisation and a multi-planet species or not? [...] It's a question of what percentage of resources should we devote to such an endeavour? I think if you say 1 per cent of resources, that's probably a reasonable amount.
Every time humanity moves into a new domain—the oceans or the air or space—we go, ‘Wow, this is enormous and really empty, we can throw as much garbage here as we want, and it’ll never fill up, right?’ Then pretty soon we go, ‘Oops, that wasn’t quite true.’ And we’re reaching that point in space.
There is no stronger case for the motivational power of real science than the discoveries that come from the Hubble Space Telescope as it unravels the mysteries of the universe.
We have made the ships that sail the sea of space.
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