Sean Carroll: Space Travel is Crucially Important Long-Term | AI Podcast Clips
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00:00:02.580 | - Are you excited by the thing that Elon Musk
00:00:10.880 | is doing with SpaceX in general?
00:00:12.640 | Space, the idea of space exploration,
00:00:14.920 | even though you're, or your species is young and impatient?
00:00:18.640 | - Yeah, no, I do think that space travel
00:00:21.280 | is crucially important, long-term,
00:00:23.260 | even to other star systems.
00:00:25.800 | And I think that many people overestimate the difficulty
00:00:30.800 | because they say, look, if you travel 1% the speed of light
00:00:34.240 | to another star system, we'll be dead
00:00:35.760 | before we get there, right?
00:00:37.320 | And I think that it's much easier,
00:00:39.480 | and therefore, when they write their science fiction stories,
00:00:41.400 | they imagine we could go faster than the speed of light
00:00:42.880 | 'cause otherwise they're too impatient, right?
00:00:44.980 | We're not gonna go faster than the speed of light,
00:00:46.880 | but we could easily imagine that the human lifespan
00:00:49.300 | gets extended to thousands of years.
00:00:51.400 | And once you do that,
00:00:52.440 | then the stars are much closer, effectively, right?
00:00:54.480 | I mean, what's a hundred year trip, right?
00:00:56.560 | So I think that that's gonna be the future,
00:00:59.120 | the far future, not my lifetime once again,
00:01:02.000 | but baby steps.
00:01:03.640 | - Unless your lifetime gets extended.
00:01:05.720 | - Well, it's in a race against time, right?
00:01:07.720 | A friend of mine who actually thinks about these things
00:01:10.640 | said, you know, you and I are gonna die,
00:01:13.720 | but I don't know about our grandchildren.
00:01:16.320 | That's, I don't know, predicting the future is hard,
00:01:19.240 | but that's at least a plausible scenario.
00:01:21.200 | And so, yeah, no, I think that as we discussed earlier,
00:01:25.080 | there are threats to the earth,
00:01:27.400 | known and unknown, right?
00:01:30.040 | Having spread humanity and biology elsewhere
00:01:35.040 | is a really important long-term goal.
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