Elon Musk: Making Humanity Multiplanetary Is Life Insurance for Civilization

Elon Musk: Becoming multiplanet would be like buying life insurance for life collectively.

“The future of humanity will fundamentally bifurcate along the lines of either single-planet species or multiplanet species. A multiplanet version of humanity's future is going to last a lot longer. We will propagate civilization into the future far longer if we are a multiplanet species than if we are a single-planet species.

It's like planetary redundancy, backing up the biosphere. We've got all of our eggs in one basket here. We should do everything we can to protect that basket.

But there are some risks that are just extremely difficult to mitigate, and some that we will ultimately not be able to mitigate. So it just seems like the right thing to do.

Should we do it now, or should we wait for some point in the future? I think the wise move is to do it now because the window of technology for this is open, and it's the first time that window has been open in the 4.5-billion-year history of Earth. That's a long time.

I certainly hope that the window will be open forever. But it may also close.

If you look at the history of technology in various civilizations, if you look at Ancient Egypt, where they were able to build these incredible giant pyramids, and then they forgot how to build the pyramids, and then they couldn't read hieroglyphics.

Or you look at Roman civilization, they were able to build these incredible aqueducts and roads, and then they forgot how to do that. They had indoor plumbing, then they forgot how to do indoor plumbing.

There's clearly been a cycle with technology. Hopefully, that's an upward-sloping sine wave that continues on to be really great in the future. But maybe it doesn't, maybe there's some bad thing that happens.

For 1% of our resources, we could buy life insurance for life collectively, and I think that would be a good thing to do.”

MIT AeroAstro, October 24, 2014