Elon Musk SPACEX Plans!!!

**Astronaut Man** (0:00)
Latest interview of Elon Musk.

**Elon Musk** (0:04)
How do you decide what progress a civilization has made? That's the most objective metric that any alien species, say, visiting us, would calibrate how much progress we've made as a civilization. And one of the most objective ways to do that is the amount of powers that any given civilization has been able to harness.
And there was a Russian physicist, actually, by the name of Khodyshev, who thought about this. And I think it's a good way to characterize it, which is you can have, you can assess how well a civilization is harnessing the power available on the planet. That's type one. And then type two would be how much of the stars power are you harnessing? And then type three would be how much of the galaxies power are you harnessing? These are very objective and measurable numbers. So right now, we're very low on the Khodyshev-1 scale. Like if you say, what proportion of our planet's power are we harnessing? It's a very, very tiny number.
And basically, we're harnessing almost nothing of our stars power. So the sun is truly an immense thing. It is difficult with words to characterize just how immense the sun is. But this gives you sort of a sense of scale.

**Astronaut Man** (1:47)
Yeah. It's a big difficulty jump going from level one to level two.

**Elon Musk** (1:53)
Very big difficulty jump, yes. And level three, and we don't even know how to do level three, really.

**Astronaut Man** (1:58)
We'll get there.

**Elon Musk** (1:58)
Yeah, exactly. AI will figure it out. One way to appreciate the size of the sun is to think about how heavy is the sun compared to all the rest of the mass in the solar system. So the sun is about 99.86% of all mass in the solar system.
It's, everything, and then all the remaining 0.14%, most of that is Jupiter, one planet.

**Astronaut Man** (2:25)
So we're still lightweight.

**Elon Musk** (2:28)
Yes.
The entire mass of Earth is in the tiny miscellaneous category. We're like, Earth is a tiny dust mote compared to the sun.

**Astronaut Man** (2:38)
But how much energy are we talking, like coming from the sun, especially compared to what we're using here on Earth? Because it feels like...

**Elon Musk** (2:47)
Yeah. The incident solar energy on the cross-section of the Earth is roughly a half billionth of the sun's power output.
And the vast majority of that we cannot use because 70% of Earth is water. Technically, our planet should be called water, because there is 70% water, and I think an alien civilization visiting us would be like, why are they calling it Earth when it is mostly water?

**Astronaut Man** (3:14)
Were the Greenlands not green of the solar system?

**Elon Musk** (3:19)
Yeah. A bunch of the... Exactly. Even where 70% water and over 30% less land, a bunch of it is Antarctica or Siberia type of thing. Very Northern Canada type of thing. Very difficult to... Not places people typically want to live, and you're not going to get a lot of solar power at the poles. So the actual usable area of land where you can get solar power is quite small. Anyway, in order to ascend the Kardashev scale or in order to get to any meaningful percentage of the sun's energy harnessed, you have to go to space. If you want to get to say a millionth of the power output of the sun, you would have to increase civilizational energy harnessed by much more than a million.
So, we currently use much less than a trillionth of the power output of the sun. And a trillion is a million times a million.
So basically, we're basically practically nowhere on the sort of the Kardashev to scale, practically nowhere.

**Astronaut Man** (4:34)
So on Kardashev scale, we're all still failing.

**Ian** (4:38)
We're non-existent.

**Elon Musk** (4:42)
We're not even, yeah, we're so, we're not registering.

**Ian** (4:48)
Not even in Microsoft.

**Elon Musk** (4:49)
Yeah, we're no.

**Astronaut Man** (4:51)
And so to actually-

**Elon Musk** (4:52)
Microsoft would be an epic, epic achievement relative to where we are right now.

**Astronaut Man** (4:56)
Something to aspire to.

**Elon Musk** (4:58)
Yeah. Yeah, that's our goal.
And like, this is, I think, both simultaneously and incredibly adventurous goal relative to where we are, and yet not particularly adventurous as a percentage of the sun's energy to try to achieve power harness being one millionth of what the sun outputs.

**Astronaut Man** (5:20)
And so to actually start-

**Elon Musk** (5:21)
A micro-soul.

**Astronaut Man** (5:22)
To actually start getting there though, we're not just going to throw solar arrays in space, try to soak up a bunch of the sun. There has to be a need. Like, you want to go up there and do something meaningful. And obviously, until this point in human history, like, there hasn't really been a need.