Human motivation to explore and discover has driven us as a species to where we are today. There's nothing more exciting than missions to space. We're going to look back at these next few decades as the moment in time that we transition beyond the Earth to the cosmos.
Space was my guest's first love, but to do the career of Peter Diamandis full justice, we would be here all night. And we're talking, Peter, about turning dreams into reality. Thank you very much for joining us. I talk about space, but in your entrepreneurial career, you're involved in longevity, venture capital, education — but is space your number one, your first love?
Yeah, space has a heartfelt place for me. It was the Apollo program and that scientific documentary called Star Trek that got me going as a kid. And there's nothing more, I think, that sings to the heart and the soul than exploring the unknown of that vast cosmos. We're also going in the opposite direction at the same time, right? We are exploring the world of quantum physics and the world of molecular biology, understanding perhaps why we age, how to slow it, stop it, perhaps even reverse it. And then there's a whole field of brain-computer interface: can we connect the neocortex of our brain with the cloud? Can we think in Google? Can we upload our consciousness? These are all areas that were crazy before and are now, I think, being invested in and being thought seriously about.
So even though we might think as a human species that we've come a long way in 100 years and we've found out and invented a lot in 100 years, I get the sense that you're saying we haven't even started.
No, we have not started yet. You know, Ray Kurzweil, who's my co-founder of Singularity University and Abundance 360, we were talking about this — that the next 10 years we're going to see as much progress as the entire past century. We're in this very rapid period of exponential growth where what used to be thought of as impossible is becoming possible and practical every day. One of my favorite sayings is that our ancestors would see us today as gods.
Can you put some meat on the bones of that? What do we think now that is impossible that will become possible very soon?
Well, I mean, so first of all, the average human lifespan for most of human existence was 30 years old. You'd have a baby at age 12 or 13. You're a grandparent at 27, 28, and then you were not stealing food from the grandchildren's mouths. We've doubled the human lifespan. We're going to double it again. There are species on this planet like the bowhead whale that lives 200 years, a Greenland shark lives 400 or 500 years. It's either a hardware problem or a software problem, and we're going to be able to solve those problems. I think that's a big, a big notion. The other is we're on the verge of making humanity a multiplanetary species. It's this next decade, these next couple of decades, where we're moving off the planet irreversibly, and whatever humanity becomes 100 years from now, a thousand, 10,000 years from now, we're going to look back at these next few decades as the moment in time that we transition beyond the Earth to the cosmos.
Talk about space. Are we talking about living in space?
I think we're talking about many things. So, first of all, you know, we just saw the successful fifth flight of the Starship that Elon built. This is twice as big as the Saturn V. It's the vehicle that will take humans to the surface of the moon and to the surface of Mars. It is really the workhorse for the next decade or decades ahead. And so we will see humans permanently on the moon inside of this next decade. We'll see humans on Mars as well this next decade. And then we'll begin to go and start to utilize the resources in space. Every bit of fuel ever expended in space has been brought from the surface of the Earth into space, whether we're going to Jupiter, Mars, or Pluto. And so we're going to start to gain access to the resources in space to use them in space. We'll begin to mine asteroids. Again, it's just the beginning.
Peter, let's talk about AI and ASI, artificial super intelligence. To what extent are you worried, if you are, that it might be too much for us? We might lose control of things in the long run.
I'm not worried about it at all. In fact, I think that having this digital super intelligence is going to be one of the most important stabilizing factors for humanity in the near term. My concern is not artificial intelligence, it's human stupidity. It's the use of AI by humans to get ahead of others, to do them harm, to do things which might be unethical. I think ultimately the safety we're going to derive in the large-scale use of AI will come from AI stabilizing things and making them safer. I'm not a big believer in the dystopian worlds that Hollywood paints. I think increasing intelligence is actually something that makes the world a safer place. I think wisdom comes from higher levels of intelligence. I think ultimately, you know, when we have artificial super intelligence, your ability to get it to do things that are dystopian — it'll say, 'No, I'm not going to kill those million people. That's a ridiculous thing to do. I'm going to go talk to the other AI and we're going to figure this out.' See, we're living in a world and a universe of near-infinite abundance. There's nothing that's truly scarce. Technology is a force that takes whatever was scarce and makes it abundant. We've seen this with energy. We used to kill whales on the ocean to get whale oil. Then we ravaged mountainsides to get coal. And now we drill kilometers under the ground. But we're living on a planet that is bathed in 8,000 times more energy from the sun than we consume as a species. We're about to see the breakthroughs coming on in fusion and even what's called low-energy nuclear reactions, LENR, cold fusion. There's so much coming that is making more and more access to abundant resources that our need to fight for them, I think, is going to be diminished considerably.
Peter, let's drill down on a couple of things. You're so synonymous with the XPRIZE Foundation. On your website, it says solving the world's grand challenges. What's that mean exactly?
So, the XPRIZE is a global organization. We run large-scale competitions not for ideas but for people who build and demonstrate technology. So we've launched $600 million worth of prizes driving about $10 billion in R&D. So for example, a few years ago I got Elon to fund a $100 million prize for carbon sequestration, you know, challenging teams to pull gigatons of carbon out of the atmosphere and out of the oceans. So that's ongoing right now. We just launched, in partnership with Evolution here in Saudi, a $101 million Healthspan prize asking teams to demonstrate a therapeutic that could reverse the ravages of aging for cognition, immune, and muscle — back at least 10 years, a goal of 20 years. We have out of Abu Dhabi a large-scale XPRIZE for desalination. So our goal is: how can we drive breakthroughs that reinvent how we provide food, water, energy, healthcare, education at a global stage far more efficiently and uplift humanity? So this is the work that we do at the XPRIZE.
