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Language: en
when do you think the first human will
step foot on Mars I think it's a good
chance in 2030s that we will be on Mars
in fact there's no physics reason why we
can't do it it's an engineering problem
it's a very difficult and dangerous
engineering problem but it is an
engineering problem
and in my book future of humanity I even
speculate beyond that that by the end of
the century we'll probably have the
first starships the first starships will
not look like the enterprise at all
they'll probably be small computer chips
that are fired by laser beams with
parachutes and like what Stephen Hawking
advocated the breakthrough starshot
program could send ships ship to the
nearby stars traveling at 20% of speed
of light reaching Alpha Centauri in
about 20 years time beyond that we
should have fusion power fusion power is
in some sense one of the ultimate
sources of energy but it's unstable and
we don't have fusion power today now why
is that
first of all stars for mammals for free
you get up punch the gas large enough it
becomes a star I mean you didn't have to
do anything to it and it becomes a star
why is fusion so difficult to put on the
earth because you're not a space stars
are monopoles they are pole single poles
that sphere are there aspherical
asymmetric and it's very easy to get
spherical symmetric configurations of
gas to compress into a star B just
happens naturally all by itself
the problem is magnetism is bipolar you
have a North Pole and a South Pole and
it's like trying to squeeze a long
balloon take a long balloon and trying
to squeeze it you squeeze one side it
bulges out the other side well that's
the problem with fusion machines we use
magnetism with the North Pole in the
South Pole to squeeze gas and all sorts
of anomalies and horrible configurations
can take place because we're not
squeezing something uniformly like in a
star stars in some sense are for free
fusion on the earth is
very difficult but I think it's
inevitable and it'll eventually gave us
unlimited power from seawater so
seawater will be the ultimate source of
energy for the planet Earth
why what's the intuition there because
we'll extract hydrogen from seawater
burn hydrogen in the fusion reactor to
get give us unlimited energy without the
meltdown without the nuclear waste why
do we have meltdowns
we have meltdowns because in the fission
reactors every time you split the
uranium atom you get nuclear waste tons
of it 30 tons of nuclear waste per
reactor per year and it's hot it's hot
for thousands millions of years that's
why we have meltdowns but you see the
waste product of a fusion reactor is
helium gas helium gas is actually
commercially valuable you can make money
selling helium gas and so the waste
product of a fusion reactor is helium
not nuclear waste that we find in a
commercial fission plant in that
controlling mastering controlling fusion
allows us to converse us into a type 1
I guess civilization right oh yeah
probably the backbone of a type one
civilization will be fusion power we by
the way are type zero we don't even rate
on this scale we get our energy from
dead plants for God's safe oil and coal
but we are about a hundred years from
being type one you know get a calculator
in fact Carl Sagan calculated that we
are about 0.7 fairly close to a 1.0 for
example what is the internet the
Internet is the beginning of the first
type 1 technology to enter into our
century the first planetary technology
is the internet what is the language of
type 1 on the internet already English
and Mandarin Chinese are the most
dominant languages on the Internet and
what about the culture we're seeing a
type 1 sports soccer the Olympics a type
1 music a youth culture rock and roll
rap music type 1 fashion Gucci Chanel
attack when economy
European Union NAFTA what have you so
we're beginning to see the the
beginnings of a type 1 culture and a
type one civilization and inevitably it
will spread beyond this planet so you
talked about sending it 20 percent the
speed of light on a chip into Alpha
Centauri but in a slightly nearer term
what do you think about the idea when we
still have to send biological our
biological bodies the colonization of
planets colonization of Mars
Decius becoming a two-planet species
ever or any time soon well just remember
the dinosaurs did not have a space
program and that's why they're not here
today how come they're no dinosaurs in
this room today because they didn't have
a space program we do have a space
program which means that we have an
insurance policy now I don't think we
should bankrupt the earth or deplete the
earth to go to Mars that's too expensive
and not practical but we need a
settlement a settlement on Mars in case
something bad happens to the planet
Earth and that means we have to
terraform Mars now to terraform Mars if
we get raised a temperature of Mars by 6
degrees 6 degrees then the polar ice cap
begins to melt
releasing water vapor water vibra is the
greenhouse gas it causes even more
melting of the ice caps so it becomes a
self-fulfilling prophecy it feeds on
itself it becomes autocatalytic and so
once you hit 6 degrees were rising of
the temperature on Mars by 6 degrees it
takes off and we melt the polar ice caps
and liquid water once again flows in the
rivers the canals are the channels and
the oceans of Mars Mars once had an
ocean we think about the size of the
United States and so that is a
possibility now how do we get there how
do we raise the temperature of Mars by 6
degrees Elon Musk would like it detonate
hydrogen warheads on the polar ice caps
yes well I'm not sure about that
because we don't know that much about
the effects of detonating hydrogen
warheads to melt the polar ice caps and
who wants to glow in the dark at night
reading the newspaper so I think there
are other ways to do it with solar
satellites you can have satellites
orbiting Mars that beam sunlight onto
the polar ice caps melting the polar ice
caps Mars has plenty of water it's just
frozen
you