AGU Fall Meeting
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (6)
Transcript
0:00ModeratorClearly blown through those. So how do you think about that and how do you focus on getting by those obstacles?
0:08Elon MuskWell, I'm a big believer in the sort of science or physics framework of trying to analyze problems, particularly if they're new. So if something's new, then analogies don't work very well because it's, if it's new, I mean, the way we get through daily life is mostly by analogy or by sort of copying things with minor variations because it's a computational shortcut.
0:36Elon MuskBut if you want to do something that's fundamentally new or particularly that's counterintuitive, then you have to do a first principles analysis and take things from the what appeared to be as fundamental sort of simple fundamental truths and then reason it from there.
0:58Elon MuskAnd I mean that requires a lot more thinking and you can't do that for everything. But if you're trying to figure out something new, I think it's really the only way to go.
1:10ModeratorSo I mentioned that I was in Paris and I know that you were there too. And as I listened to presentations first, there was a real sense of optimism at this cop that I don't think was there before, but there was still an overwhelming sense of a lot of work that we have to do.
1:32ModeratorAnd I was struck by some comments that you made when you were talking to a group of students at the Sorbonne and they were talking about sustainability and you said regarding the carbon cycle, this is analogous to not paying for garbage collection.
1:51ModeratorIt's not as though we should say in the case of garbage, have a garbage free society. It's very difficult to have a garbage free society, but it's just important that people pay for the garbage collection.
2:03ModeratorSo we need to go from having an untaxed negative externality, which is effectively a hidden carbon subsidy of enormous size, 5.3 million trillion a year. And we need to move away from this and have a carbon tax.
2:20ModeratorSo can you talk a little bit about that? Especially from the standpoint of being in.
2:27Elon MuskYeah, and essentially prices are just information, the primary information to allow for labor allocation. They sort of tell people what to do and what things should be favored or another thing.
2:44Elon MuskAnd so when the prices are wrong, then the wrong thing happens in the economy. So when you have sort of a tragedy of comets, like the CO2 capacity of the oceans and atmosphere, and it's unprisofied, price is much lower than it should be, then the wrong behavior happens.
3:06Elon MuskSo effectively we're incenting bad behavior. And I mean, I just talked about how analogies are imperfect, but it's kind of like if we had high taxes on fruits and vegetables, low taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, that wouldn't make sense.
3:31Elon MuskThat's sort of what we have right now with respect to energy. And we're very powerful forces trying to keep it that way.
3:40Audience MemberSo
3:44Elon Muskit will eventually correct. And we are seeing some good movement in that direction with the Paris climate talks. It sounds like it's directionally correct and there'll be some movement.
3:56Elon MuskNot as much as there should be, but it's encouraging. And I think it's worth noting that generally when the government disappears in the economy, that usually results in a pricing error increase.
4:16Elon MuskBut in this case, I think it's hard to miss. Like any sort of copy tax would reduce the effect of error in the system of crisis of the environment.
4:31ModeratorI want to shift directions. While we are a research community, we're also an education community and we have crowdsourced some questions for today event and one of them comes from the education community.
4:47ModeratorSo this came to us on Twitter from Regina Brinker, Brinker Science, if you want to follow her. And she says, I teach middle school stem. What should students be learning to be prepared for and contribute to the future workforce?
5:07Elon MuskWell, I think, I mean, software engineering is probably the single biggest area that people should learn. And I think I'm always sort of a fan of physics and general economics and critical thinking.
5:25Elon MuskI think those are. We really should teach critical thinking a lot more.
5:37Elon MuskThat may seem like a simple thing, but it's, it's just,
5:41Audience Memberyou need to
5:42Elon Muskjust tell people like this is how you know whether you should believe something or not.
5:50Elon MuskYeah,
5:53Moderatoryou, you can tell how much everybody presents.
5:56Elon MuskI think I'm preaching to what you voted here. Yeah, but yeah, it's, yeah, just teaching people. These are the general types of fallacies and this is how people will generally trick you and how to avoid being tricked.
6:08Elon MuskAnd I think it'd be really great.
6:11ModeratorLet's do it. At the fall meeting here, we also try to stress the importance of transdisciplinary research and how science informs other areas like policy and so forth. So another question we received from Twitter came from Lori Ziolkowski.
6:33ModeratorShe's at extraneutri, who asked. So you didn't mention geoscience in that list of things that people should know about.
6:46Elon MuskI do think geoscience is very important.
6:52ModeratorWhat do the engineers of the future need to know from geoscience and how can, how do we influence that and work together?
7:01Elon MuskWell, I mean, I think in general, I think that if we could in General people to know about geosciences and to know how our actions as a civilization will affect the future or in how we can positively affect it, how we might be negatively affecting it.
7:19Elon MuskYou know, on the assumption that we want the future to be good, we want to direct our actions to, with respect to geosciences, to a good outcome. So generally it's sort of quite surprising how little actually people know about geosciences.
7:39Elon MuskI mean even pretty straightforward like the carbon cycle. I mean, I've had conversations with quite, quite smart, well read people who don't understand that there's like a surface carbon cycle and then.
7:54Elon MuskBut if you dig stuff up deep underground and add it to the surface carbon cycle, that fundamentally changes the chemical equilibrium of the surface of the earth. And they're like, wow, really?
8:07Elon MuskYeah. And there's just conservation of mass is not totally obvious to people. You know, like you can't just create your common from nothing
8:25Moderatorand you can't of course disappear.
8:28Elon MuskYeah, it doesn't disappear. Yeah, exactly. So, you know, just like basic stuff like that. Right. So keeping on
8:41Moderatorterrific. We're sort of bouncing around, but I have some, you know, we got great input from all of you when we asked for questions and I want to make sure we try to touch on a lot of different topics.
8:56ModeratorSo I want to talk about the roles of the private and public sector in ensuring the advancement of scientific research, research and innovation. And where do you see the roles of the private sector versus the public sector?
9:14ModeratorAre there places where they overlap? Are they totally separate?
9:18Elon MuskI think the public sector is when you have something that's kind of a small amount of good for the whole population or for the whole country or the whole world.
9:29Elon MuskBut it would be really difficult to go and collect like $10 from everyone to understand, you know, more about the nature of the Earth or the solar system, the universe.
9:41Elon MuskSo it's sort of, it's not efficient to go to try and, you know, collect service. If you've got, say, you know, $3 billion project, you're going to get $10 from everyone in the United States.
9:53Elon MuskIt's like it's better to do that by the public sector. And you have great things like the Hubble and I think most people would say that's quite a good thing, or the Mars missions.
10:11Elon MuskSo I think where you have these things which are a small amount of good for a lot of people, it makes sense for public sector, for government to do that where you can more concretely close the economic loop.
10:29Elon MuskThat's where the private Sector makes sense. So for example, at SpaceX we do a lot of launches of communications and broadcast satellites and that can sort of close the economic loop because then people can listen to XM radio or get direct to you or something like that.
10:50Elon MuskAnd that kind of makes sense. But then we'll also do missions forward NASA to resupply the space station so we can sort of learn more about living in space.
11:00Elon MuskThat makes sense as a public sector thing. So I think that's the basic, basic difference.
11:08ModeratorSo in that public sector, not only geoscience but a lot of sciences seem to very flat funding at a time when other nations are investing, at a time when there's tremendous opportunity.
11:23ModeratorHow do you think that the private sector can help us turn that around and focus on what the benefits will be for society for public sector investment in research?
11:40Elon MuskWell, I'm certainly a proponent of increasing investment in science in general from you know, both the public and private sector. And I'm a super pro science. So I, and it is, it's interesting to see like the logic lighter.
12:02Elon MuskYou know, that was, that was really a great effort there in Europe and you know, we sort of canceled the Superconducting Super Collider here in the US and that was sort of a sort of sad thing that we did there.
12:18Elon MuskYou know, I really think we should increase funding for science. Absolutely. Across the world.
12:24ModeratorReally great. We have the director of the National Science foundation in the front row here. I'm sure she's in violence.
12:33Elon MuskYeah, definitely.
12:36ModeratorSo you mentioned Mars and in your interview with Stephen Colbert you said that Mars is a fixer upper planet. Yeah. But you've also been a proponent of colonizing Mars.
12:54ModeratorWhat are some of the challenges that you think we would face in traveling to Mars? I know you're very interested in this. How do you think about that?
13:02Elon MuskSure. Well, I think first of all I should say, you know, why do I think this is important? And that's if I sort of unpack the sort of philosophical basis for that.
13:16Elon MuskAs far as I'm concerned, it's the reason I came back crucial is that, you know, I think that we don't. There's so much more to understand and learn about the nature of the universe and that understanding will grow proportionate to the scope and scale of human civilization.
13:37Elon MuskAnd the probable lifespan of human civilization is much greater. If we are a multi planned species as opposed to a single planet species for a single planet species, then eventually there will be some extinction event either, you know, either from humans or some natural thing.
13:59Elon MuskSo I think and now it's the first time in the history of Earth that the windows opened where it's possible for us to extend life to another planet. I mean it's been 1/2 billion here, so that's one time.
14:16Elon MuskAnd that window may be open for a long time and hopefully it is, but it may also be open for a short time. So I think the wise move is to make life multi planetary while we can.
14:28Elon MuskAnd this ultimately is what will lead to a huge amount of new science and ensure that, that we have the highest probability of understanding the nature of the universe.
14:43Elon MuskSo that's actually the reason that I think it's important. And I also think it would be a great adventure. And you know, there need to be things that people look forward to when you wake up in the morning.
14:59Elon MuskLike it's exciting and inspiring and you know, we need those things.
15:08ModeratorI'm old enough to remember the landing on the moon and getting up that day and thinking about that and the change.
15:20Elon MuskYeah, exactly.
15:23Audience MemberSo.
15:25Elon MuskBut it will be super hard to do this and it will take a long time and I suspect I probably would look to see it become self sustaining. But if we had to aim for that objective then there are important technological steps that are needed to get there.
15:49Elon MuskOne of them for example being reusable rockets equipped reusable rockets. We can reduce the cost of
15:59Moderatoraccess
15:59Elon Muskto space by probably two orders of magnitude and misfortuning that for the Falcon 9, which is about a 16 million dollar rocket to build, the cost of the propellant is only about $200,000.
16:17Elon MuskSo it's much like ratio I guess they're 47% like that. So it's really a massive difference if we can make reusability work. And then we also need scale, we need to have really big rockets and you need to do local propellant production on Mars.
16:41Elon MuskSo if we can do those things then I think we can establish a self sustaining civilization on Mars.
16:47ModeratorSo I understand that you're going to be launching your newest rocket next week. And this is the first launch since Falcon 9 back in June. And I've lost some scientific gear that was pretty expensive in the ocean
17:06Audience Memberand
17:06ModeratorI know what that feels like. Maybe not maybe I don't know how it scales but you know, if this is successful, it's clearly historic. And how do you think about that issue of you know, failing forward?
17:34Elon MuskWell, I think I pushed for a success board. Yeah, it's quite emotionally traumatic actually. And yeah, the last fight, which Phil actually did, sold my birthday, which throw down her.
17:51Elon MuskYeah. So yeah, it's robins of hard.
18:05Elon MuskI mean, if gravity was just a little lighter and much easier. Actually if gravity was a little, a little stronger on Earth, it would be basically impossible to do with chemical rockets.
18:15Elon MuskIt's amazing how much gravity affects things. Small change in G and it's like, wow. You look at say the Saturn V, which was like the size of like basically an office building to take off from Earth and yet to take off from the mirror was just the top half of the Eagle Lander.
18:39Elon MuskSo it's wow. It's like a crazy difference. So anyway, so for, in order to make things work on Earth for rockets, you have to really push everything to the maximum.
18:53Elon MuskSo you have to have really advanced materials, really optimize the design. Everything's got, you can't have huge amounts of margin expansion in the rocket, otherwise it just won't get to orbit at all.
19:07Elon MuskAnd then it's really hard to test everything in the ground in the exact circumstances that you would experience in flight. Because there's just no, there's no test facility that can do that.
19:20Elon MuskExactly. You're making it close, but not exact. But for the closest upcoming flight, there are a number of improvements in the rocket. And one of the things we're doing for the first time, the first time I think anyone's done it, is deeply cryogenic propellant.
19:39Elon MuskSo we're subcooling the propellant, particularly the liquid oxygen, because it's two thirds liquid oxygen close to its freezing point, which increases the density quite significantly and, and the thrust is higher.
19:57Elon MuskWe've improved stage separation system. We stretch the upper stage of the rocket to add more propellant to that. There are a number of other equipments in electronics, so it's I think, a significantly improved rocket from the last one.
20:16Elon MuskAnd then I should say what is important about reusability as far as the boost stage is concerned. The key sort of figure of merit is the speed transfer transfer energy.
20:28Elon MuskSo if you take the potential energy and the kinetic energy and say how much has been transferred to the output stage by the root stage and what's the mass?
20:41Elon MuskSo basically, yeah, basically connecting to the transport, that's something that, that's the figure of merit. So the VU stage of Falcon 9 is capable of transferring a transfer velocity to the alpha stage of 8,000 kilometers an hour.
21:00Elon MuskSo it's really, it's pretty fast. A bullet from an assault rifle, it goes at 2,000 kilometers an hour. So it's four times faster than a bullet from an assault rifle.
21:12Elon MuskThat's a transfer velocity of roughly 100 kilometers and to a mass of about 120 tons. So it's accelerating 120 tons to four times faster than a bullet.
21:27ModeratorI loved the way that you just compared something that people wouldn't have any conception of to something that they would and if they would be really impressed by. I mean, was that amazing communication?
21:43ModeratorThat was terrific. Yeah.
21:51ModeratorI wanted to ask you one last question and then we're going to throw things open for the, the audience. When you talked about Mars, you said, I don't think I'll ever get there.
22:02Audience MemberWell,
22:06Moderatorcan you talk a little about, you know, a lot of us get involved in projects that we don't know if we'll see the realization. And can you talk a little bit about how you think about that and trading off, you know, I get to do it versus don't come later.
22:30Elon MuskWell, you know, going back to the sort of my underlying sort of philosophical rationale for doing it in the first, you know, doing it in the first place. The.
22:40Elon MuskYou know, basically I sort of was thinking about this when I, when I was a kid and trying to find some meaning in life, like what's the meaning of life?
22:49Elon MuskAnd I was quite sort of sad about it actually, when I was a teenager and then I read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which basically said like the real, the real basically universe is the answer to figure out the questions.
23:12Elon MuskSo I think, you know, that's. If I can help kind of figure out the questions, then I consider that to be meaningful.
23:25ModeratorAbsolutely. Maybe we can all use a battlefish.
23:30Elon MuskRight? Exactly.
23:33ModeratorOkay, now it's time for you and I'm going to go. We're going to alternate between questions from the audience and questions from the. No, Joan, we're not.
23:49Audience MemberWe won't.
23:50ModeratorOkay. Just the audience. Okay, so it's your turn. Questions for your mind, Please come to the microphones that are in the, in the aisles and there's somebody at this microphone.
24:04ModeratorGo ahead.
24:04Audience MemberThank you very much for appearing today. Two weeks ago, the Los Angeles Times featured prominently on its Grandpa store Word in which described many self described venture capitalists from this area who were by a new and as yet unspecified technique of distributed power generation.
24:23Elon MuskIt did not.
24:24Audience MemberIt was promised. In the article, the technique was different than those demonstrated at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. The I'd like to ask if you had what your critical thinking skills would be when approached by people offering you to invest or become involved in new and undefined nuclear power techniques.
24:47Audience MemberYou know, what they're talking about. And two, what do you see as the future for nuclear power in our efforts to restore the earth to the conditions that it might have existed more closely at the start of the anti per se?
25:00Elon MuskSure. Well, I see. I mean, I think there's nothing wrong with nuclear power, whether vision or fusion. I think if you have a properly designed vision, power system is actually fine, particularly if it's in an area that's not subject to natural disasters.
25:22Elon MuskSo, you know, for example, France has a lot of fission power and that I think makes a lot of sense for them. But for California it's more questionable. Or Japan.
25:36ModeratorSo
25:38Elon Muskthen fusion. I definitely think fusion is a solvable problem. The reason I sort of haven't done anything in direct fusion is that I currently think, and I may be wrong about this, that indirect fusion from the big fusion explosion in the sky called the sun is, you know, and having photovoltaics is probably going to make the most sense economically.
26:15Elon MuskAnd in the north, in the high latitudes, in the north building hemisphere, you tend to have a lot of hydropower power. So that really helps solve the, you know, how you make power with a dark problem or in the middle of weightlift type thing.
26:33Elon MuskSo I don't want to discourage people from pursuing fusion, but personally I think the economics are going to favor indirect fusion of multiple potable tables overwhelming degree, particularly when combined with batteries and high voltage lines running east, west and north south.
26:59Elon MuskI mean you can completely solve all the power, the Internet with a fairly small percentage of the surface area. I mean for the United States, you could take basically a corner of Utah, Nevada and power the entire United States with solar power.
27:20Elon MuskSo I think that's, that's mostly how it will get solved.
27:27Audience MemberThis is a bit of a follow up on that. Solar power has been doubling basically every two years. And we all know that exponential growth is a powerful thing.
27:37Audience MemberSo we're only seven doublings away from everything being powered by solar power. And do you think that that doubling rate will keep pace?
27:48Elon MuskI think it'll probably slow down, but it's still going to be a high percentage growth rate every year. Once you reach a certain percentage of solar into the grid, you really need to add batteries and go to a low level and kind of cash power.
28:09Elon MuskBut solar combined with battery is really, I mean you kind of, like I said, you can completely solve all of those power with just those two things.
28:21ModeratorGreat. Is that Victor?
28:22Elon MuskYes, it's worth noting. I think probably people are aware of this, but you get there's 1 gigawatt per square kilowatt of solar energy.
28:37Audience MemberI'm Victor Zakishnarish. Mitch, massive fan of your work, particularly fighting the carbon pollution. And actually follow up on this battery question. We tend to start understanding how powerful the carbon pollution is, but battery related technology and the fluid takes has its own production cycle.
28:57Audience MemberI was wondering if you could maybe share your thoughts on what the consequences and maybe a radiation recycling of that would be.
29:05Elon MuskYeah, well, all of the battery packs for Tesla are currently recycled, so they're recycling centers in North America and Europe and Asia. And it kind of makes sense because you can just think of the battery packs as really high quality ore.
29:20Elon MuskIt's way better to mine a battery pack than rocks. So it kind of makes sense to recycle them economically. Yeah. And that obviously reduces the cost of production quite a bit for the gigafactory that we're building in Nevada that will have recycling built in.
29:42Elon MuskSo we completely stoke, you know, close that cycle and it will be in the long term fully sustainably powered. So solar, wind and geothermal. Yeah.
30:01ModeratorAnd the microphone.
30:04Audience MemberHi, I'm Jim Crow from Arizona State University. I was listening to Dr. Chris McKay, another advocate of human so much Mars. He was talking about when we do go to Mars, if we find life either currently there or extinct, we should consider removing human presence so we can allow that life to thrive.
30:27Audience MemberI was wondering what your thoughts on that were.
30:30Elon MuskWell, it really doesn't seem like there's any life on, on Mars. I mean if they're on the surface of leaves, we're not seeing any sign of that. I think if we do find some sign of it, then for sure we need to understand, you know, what it is and try to ensure that we don't extinguish it.
30:53Elon MuskI think that's, that's important, but I think, I think the reality is that there isn't any life on the surface of Mars. There may be microbial life deep underground where it's sort of shielded from radiation and from the cold and.
31:16Elon MuskYeah, so that's a possibility. But in that case, I think anything we do on the surface is really not going to have a big impact on the subterranean life.
31:27Audience MemberYeah. Thank you. Hi. With a decision coming out of COP21 just a few days ago, with the world now appearing to be on track to decarbonize the energy system, renewable energy and of course storage is going to become increasingly important and likely the development will accelerate.
31:50Audience MemberI'm really interested in what Tesla's doing on batteries that will help smooth the intermittent, the renewable Generation and would really like to hear your discussion of where you see Tesla going on battery storage for renewables and generally the whole issue
32:04Elon Muskof storage for renewables. Yeah, well, definitely battery technology is super important to sustainable energy. What we're doing with the big factory and that we're pulling in Nevada is really trying to take economies of scale to the limit.
32:29Elon MuskSo it's like the biggest factory we can consume in order to maximize economies of scale. And then obviously there's the underlying technology itself, which there'll be, I would say, moderate improvements in the underlying technology.
32:46Elon MuskTechnology, not giant, but not small, but kind of medium. But then over time, I would expect those technology improvements to get better and better. And from Tesla standpoint, we're always interested in trying to figure out how to, how to make it better.
33:03Elon MuskI do think that batteries are one of the hardest technology problems out there because there's so many constraints on creating a useful battery. I mean, so many super smart people have broken their pick on improving batteries.
33:20Elon MuskSo it usually ends up being on average like about a 5 to 8% improvement per year in energy density and economics, although I think we'll be able to improve the economic element a lot more just by the economies of scale.
33:38Elon MuskBut anyone who's interested in doing batteries, I'd certainly encourage them to research better batteries. It's a super hard problem and a critical one to solve.
33:54Audience MemberWhat do you think are the main steps in a low carbon energy transition? And in that vein, what technologies, what technological developments do you find very interesting that you're not already working on things that aren't batteries or electric vehicles, but that you think are cool areas for
34:14Elon Muskpeople to go into? Well, I think electrification and transport in general is important. So aircraft and boats, that's very important. And, and then heating and cooling. Electrification of that.
34:37Elon MuskYeah, I mean, I think, I mean the nuclear stuff could be, could be quite interesting, but we just have to sort of see how it competes against solar. But yeah, and any, anything which, any form of energy transfer, generational consumption, which, if you extrapolate into the future, goes on for a very long time and still has the world being good.
35:03Elon MuskAnd I think we should just do that.
35:10ModeratorOver here.
35:11Audience MemberGood morning. Keisha Cooper from Purdue University. My question pertains to science, access and energy within a global context. And I was wondering how you see any or all of your companies and ventures trying to address the inequity of science access or access to energy, or
35:37Moderatorwhat types of things that you're hoping
35:38Audience Memberto do within that context to try and really expand those Resources and make it a time to everyone.
35:48Elon MuskSure. Well, as I mentioned earlier, Tesla made all the patents open
35:57Moderatorand
36:00Elon MuskSolarCity is actually going even a step further than that, which is that they're making the technology available to, to developing countries and they're offering to have people come from those countries and actually sit in the factory and see how it's done.
36:22Elon MuskSo I think they're trying to be helpful in that respect.
36:30Elon MuskBut I do think that the Internet is a great equalizer of access to information.
36:42Elon MuskThis is maybe not talked about as much as it should be, but you can learn anything. If you have $100 Internet device, you can just learn anything, which is amazing compared to the past.
36:53Elon MuskYou don't need access to a library in principle, you can learn whatever you want for free. That's a pretty big part of the future that we're in right now.
37:10Audience MemberHi, Kehoe park from Sandia National Labs. Tesla has done a great job creating infrastructure for electric cars in the country so far. But I don't think electric cars themselves solve greenhouse gas problems because we're still generating greenhouse gases from HO and natural park natural gas power plants, which are not as efficient as gasoline cars.
37:35Audience MemberSo how did you originally envision the future source of electricity and how do you envision it now?
37:43Elon MuskActually, it's worth noting that even if the grid was completely powered by coal and natural gas, electric cars would still generate less CO2 even when you extract when we take all the way to the power plant level.
38:02Elon MuskThe reason for that is that when you're not constrained by mass and volume, you can make the efficiency of energy extraction much better in a power plant than you can in a car.
38:16Elon MuskSo if you take say
38:21Moderatornatural gas
38:21Elon Muskpower plant from GE, it's, it's over 60% efficient. So you take the source energy 60% efficient in generating electricity, so it's really good. Whereas typically a gasoline powered car over the drive cycle will be less than 20% efficient.
38:40Elon MuskAnd that's because you know that it's a bit natural gas turbine. It can be really heavy, it can be really bulky, and you can take the waste heat and then run a steam turbine and get even more energy out.
38:57Elon MuskSo your efficiency is just fundamentally much better. And so even when you take into account the transmission losses and the charging losses, you're still way far ahead with electric cars than your old gasoline cars.
39:10Elon MuskSo. So even if you can do this with any source fuel, coal, anything, you're just always going to want, even if everything's powered by CO2 sources, then of course everything isn't powered by CO2 sources.
39:29Elon MuskYou have hydro, geothermal, solar, wind. And as was pointed out by one of the earlier questioners, the growth of solar is very dramatic. So the percentage of the growth that is sustainable energy is increasing over time and then particularly when we add batteries to the mix, that will further increase the rate.
40:02Elon MuskSo I think we're headed in a positive direction. It's just a question of how long it will take to get there. In fact, one of the things I really emphasized in the Paris talk was that it is a certainty that we will move to a sustainable energy economy.
40:20Elon MuskBecause the alternative would be to mine all of the carbon based fuels from the ground, burn them, and then either move to a sustainable economy or the entire economy collapses because then it doesn't have the energy.
40:35Elon MuskSo we know for sure that we'll move to a sustainable energy economy. The question is just when and how many billions of tons of CO2 are in the atmosphere versus in the ground?
40:50Elon MuskThat's really the only question. What ppm number will we, you know, stabilize? Yeah, exactly. So, you know, given that we know we will end up which is a sustainable energy economy, it seems like we should, we should terminate this experiment as soon as possible.
41:14ModeratorWhy not?
41:24ModeratorI'm sorry, but we don't have time for any more questions. When I was walking in, one of my friends was telling me how excited he was to be here.
41:34ModeratorAnd I wrote down what he said because I think it's something we all share. He said, it's such a rare thing to see a person devote themselves to coming up with real solutions to the biggest problems and then doing it.
41:49ModeratorThank you so much.
42:10ModeratorPlease come back later on in about an hour to hear from France Cordova, the head of the National Science Foundation.