#264 - Tim Urban: Elon Musk, Neuralink, AI, Aliens, and the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast

30 minutes of reading a day = 1000 books in 50 years

“Elon Musk is sane in a way that almost every human is crazy” – Tim UrbanThe world moves so fast that conventional wisdom does not translate across generations as well as it used to  Reasoning by first principles: knowing when and how to abandon outdated forms of knowledge

SpaceX exists for two reasons: life insurance for the species & the greatest adventure in historyTim begs that we don’t politicize Mars like we do everything, it should be uniting and inspiringTim wants to be sent to Mars and blog about it

What are the important skills to transfer to a new multi-planet civilization?Mass farming, mining, electrical engineering, plumbing, manufacturing, supply chain, transportation, and more.  We take for granted our infrastructure, replicating it will be no easy task

Everything in the world is getting better but the amount of hate and polarization is on the rise.  “Everything’s amazing and no one is happy” – Tim Urban quoting Louis C.K

“I think science is very young. I think eventually we will figure out that there is something much much bigger going on and that humans are just a curious little side-effect of a much bigger thing” – Lex Fridman

Progress is challenging, not due to a lack of imagination but due to the lack of a blank canvas  Maybe Mars is the blank canvas we need to bring us all together

Humans don’t build anything individually; collectively humans build everythingPencil problem: One human can not make a pencil from start to finish. You can put it together, but the materials (wood, paint, eraser, metal) are all collected and crafted separately.