But no one in the television show is as extreme as Elon, who want to escape to other planets. “I really believe it is a matter of when and not if, and that when is probably a lot sooner than most of us are comfortable thinking about,” Elon said. “Things have happened quickly. It took us millions of years to evolve into what we are, but in the last 60 years, with atomic weaponry, we’ve created the potential to extinguish ourselves. And if it’s not us, it will inevitably be something else. If not a meteorite in the relative short term, then the expansion of the Sun’s corona. It will happen.”49 He added a number of other threats with the ability to extinct life on Earth. They include an engineered virus unleashed by terrorists, an inadvertent creation of a micro black hole, or a yet unknown technology.61 To save mankind from these catastrophes, we need to begin living on other planets.
When we have begun living on other planets, it will be a so-called “epochal moment.” These are not moments in the history of mankind, these are the life’s turning points. Curing cancer will be a moment in the history of mankind, but from a broader perspective, no one will remember when we found the cure for cancer. “People think of curing AIDS or cancer as being very important, and they are – within the context of humanity,” Elon said. “But curing all forms of cancer would improve the average life span by only two to three years. That’s it.”
The first epochal moment was the advent of the single-celled organism, the second was the emergence of multi-celled life, the third was plants and animals, the fourth was the move onto land, the fifth was the mammals, and the sixth was the consciousness. The seventh epochal moment will happen when we begin living on other planets. “A million years from now, when most of what we see is forgotten, the point at which humans were no longer limited to one planet will be remembered,” Elon said. “It’s important enough to be on the scale of life itself, and therefore goes beyond the parochial concerns of humanity. We’re all focused on our little things that are of concern to humanity itself.”49,287
Isaac Asimov, who said, “I definitely believe that humanity’s destiny will be found in expansion beyond our planet’s surface,” shares these ideas. Asimov also talked about what he called real changes, like nuclear power and the jet plane, and compared it with changes that are more trivial. “What difference did it make to the people of the ancient world that Alexander the Great conquered the Persian Empire?” he asked. “Obviously, that event made some difference to a lot of individuals. But if you look at humanity in general, you’ll see that life went on pretty much as it had before the conquest.”455
The big question is why we should begin living on other planets when we still have problems here on Earth. We tend to be negative to the world. It’s easy since the Earth is in a mess with never ending civil wars, dictators with nuclear weapons, and people who can’t find clean water. But remember that Elon is a big fan of facts and they say that the world is becoming a better and better place to live in. We are just not seeing it. “If anyone thinks they’d rather be in a different part of history, they’re probably not a very good student of history,” Elon said. “Life sucked in the old days. People knew very little, and you were likely to die at a young age of some horrible disease. You’d probably have no teeth by now.”117
In an interview, Elon referred to the article A History of Violence by Steven Pinker. The article reveals that the world has become a better place to live in. According to Pinker’s research, the murder rate has declined from 24 homicides per 100 000 Englishmen in the 14th century to 0.6 by the early 1960s. The number of battle deaths in interstate wars has declined from more than 65 000 per year in the 1950s to less than 2000 per year.303
Hans Rosling, who is a Swedish medical doctor and public speaker, has shown that we have preconceived conceptions about the global health. In a survey, he asked several questions about our world’s health. One of the questions was, “What do you think is the life expectancy in the world as a whole today?” 24 percent answered 50 years, 54 percent answered 60 years, and 22 percent answered 70 years. What do you think? The correct answer is 70 years. Another question was, “What percentage of adults in the world today can read and write?” The correct answer is 80 percent, but only 22 percent of the polled chose that answer.444
The reason why we are more negative to the world than we should be is simple: We read newspapers both offline and online and watch the news on television. “The daily news media tends to focus on the worst thing occurring in the world at any given point,” Elon said. “It should be called ‘What is the worst thing on Earth today?’ There is something in the human psyche that tends to place a weight on negative stuff, more than positive.”357
Rolf Dobelli released the report Avoid News – Towards a Healthy News Diet. The idea behind the report is that human beings are still cavemen. Our brains are optimized for our original hunter-gatherer environment where we lived in small groups with limited sources of information. We now live in a world where news is available in abundance, and we can’t handle it. Dobelli argued that news media focus on the visible. While they display whatever information that include dramatic stories and pictures, they ignore the less dramatic stories, even if that material is more important. They show when an airplane has crashed, but we don’t hear anything about our bodies increased resistance to antibiotics, which is much more dangerous but doesn’t feature any dramatic pictures.304 It’s not strange that journalists have a saying: “If it bleeds, it leads.”
What’s often forgotten is what we may discover when we begin living on other planets. The cure for cancer? The solution to the food crises around the world? “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man. I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us,” the former US President, John F Kennedy, explained in a famous speech from 1962.19
Elon has similar ideas as Kennedy. “If we are able to establish life on another planet, it requires us to learn a lot about climate and maintaining a climate equilibrium,” he said. “So there’s a huge amount we would have to learn in trying to establish life in a hostile environment and that we then could translate back to Earth.”358
Several new ideas are the result from unexpectedness. While Alexander Graham Bell tried to invent a hearing aid when he invented the telephone, Christopher Columbus discovered America when he tried to find the shortest passage to India. Alexander Fleming discovered the medical virtues of penicillin when the mold infiltrated a sample he had left by an open window.
Steve Wozniak, who co-founded Apple, argued that technology always moves us forward. “I realize that when engineers create something there is often an argument that the creation could be used for bad or good. Like the atomic bomb,” he said. “Inside my head – and this is what has really stayed with me – I came to the view that basically, yes, technology is good and not bad. People argue about this all the time, but I have no doubts about it at all. I believe technology moves us forward. Always.”17