Earth is the cradle of humanity. We cannot stay in the cradle forever.
It is time to go forth, be out there among the stars. Expand the scope and scale of human consciousness.975
The big picture isn’t just to back up the hard drive of humanity, but to grow humanity into a true multiplanetary species. Let’s establish a regular cargo route to Mars. With the economic driver of interplanetary commerce, there will be resources and incentives to massively improve space transport technology, and then things will go to a whole new level.976
Starship is not suitable for going to another star system, but it is a general solution for transport anywhere inside the solar system. Once we have a propellant depot on Mars, we can travel to the asteroid belt, the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and ultimately anywhere in the solar system. This is huge.977
When space travel becomes as common as air travel, the future of civilization will be assured.
One way to look at the progress of civilization is the percentage completion of each Kardashev level. Kardashev level one is harnessing all the energy of a planet. In my opinion, we’ve only harnessed maybe 1 or 2 percent of Earth’s energy. So we’ve got a long way to go to complete Kardashev level one.
Kardashev level two is complete when we’ve harnessed all the energy of the sun. That would be—I don’t know—a billion times more energy than Earth? Maybe closer to a trillion.
Then, Kardashev level three would be all the energy of a galaxy. We’re pretty far from that. So we’re at the very, very early stage of the intelligence big bang.978
If we can establish a Mars colony, we can almost certainly colonize the whole solar system. We’ll go to the moons of Jupiter, at least some of the outer ones, probably Titan on Saturn, and the asteroids. Once we have an Earth-to-Mars economy as a forcing function, we’ll cover the whole solar system.979
We have to make Mars work. If we’re going to have any chance of sending stuff to other star systems, we need to be laser-focused on Mars. That’s our next step.980
On a galactic time scale, even with slower-than-light travel, we could colonize the whole galaxy. Even some of the neighboring galaxies. If we get a million years, even with no new physics, could we colonize the galaxy? Absolutely. The entire galaxy.981
You are the magicians of the twenty-first century; don’t let anything hold you back.
Imagination is the limit.
Go out there and create some magic.982