Cofounder, Offworld
Make a dent in the universe: Erika Ilves at TEDxStavanger
Erika Ilves is an innovation strategist and author on a mission to recruit more people for the ungrateful job of starting hyper-visionary ventures.
How well are we, as a civilization, allocating our time and resources? If our goal was to survive and keep evolving as a species, then the answer is "very, very poorly". At least that is the conclusion Erika Ilves arrived at after three years of extensive research that culminated in the co-authored book "The Human Project". In the book, Ilves puts forward an agenda for a species that's serious about its own survival. Now her life's challenge is to...
About Erika Ilves
Erika Ilves, cofounder of Offworld, has given TEDx talks in which she argued that humanity is allocating its time and resources poorly and called for a shift toward "hyper-visionary ventures" aimed at species-level survival. In a 2013 talk, she cited Elon Musk's SpaceX, Modern Meadow's lab-grown meat, and the B612 Foundation's asteroid defense as examples of such efforts, and she urged audiences to "consider letting go of the rope and going for Superman" — a phrase she used to describe pursuing audacious, long-term goals. She described a "starter kit" for this approach as "cosmic perspective, science fiction, and nerves of steel," or more simply "read, steal and ignore." In a 2011 talk with Anna Stillwell, Ilves discussed "The Human Project," a framework she co-authored that proposes an agenda for humanity's survival. She argued that humans have the freedom to create and reach for the stars but that one billion people still lack access to basic survival needs. She suggested ideas such as crowd-funding a satellite to expand internet access, creating a "human technology road map 2050," and building a space-faring civilization. She stated that "from the human perspective it's a matter of survival it's a must we must create a space faring civilization to survive."
Transcript (14 segments)
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Erika Ilves0:10
Talking about here is a general career progression outlined by Nature a century ago: man is a rope tied between beast and Superman. Here's the same thing for the visual thinkers just in case. So what I've been asking you to do today is to consider letting go of the rope and going for Superman. To give you a sense of what that might entail, I'll give you a few examples of people who are already on their way. Elon Musk started a rocket company, SpaceX. He wants to turn us earthlings into a multiplanetary civilization. The plan is to get 880,000 people to Mars over the next few decades, and this is just one of his ventures.
It's a nonprofit on a mission to defend Earth from asteroids. The problem we are facing right now is that we've got hundreds of thousands of potential city and country killer rocks that we can't see with our current telescopes. What do you do if you discover such a problem? Of course, you start working on a space-based infrared telescope that you launch into orbit around Venus. You can point it away from the Sun, which gives you a broader span of vision, and this would be the first deep space private deep space mission. Chris Lewicki, he's a president and chief engineer at Planetary Resources. These guys want to mine asteroids, and the intention here is one of them.
So why do we need more Superman? I got interested in hyper-visionary ventures five years ago. I was working as a strategy adviser in a consulting firm, and to get our clients to think bigger about corporate social responsibility, we asked a very simple question: if you were the world CEO, what would be on your agenda and why? It was all fun and games in the beginning. We got the usual answers: poverty, recession, terrorism, pandemics, climate change, education. But let's face it, few of us in the corporate world take the time to give it a half-serious thought. So we went on to look at what people do.
Matrix. The vertical axis is space; we'll split it into Earth and the rest of the universe. The horizontal axis is time's arrow; we'll split it into the next five years and the rest of time. Now the question is: where do we as a civilization spend most of our time, energy, and resources? If you're judged by the global agenda lists, we are sitting tight inside the Earth now box. Why is that a problem? Well, it's a problem because this is the playground of a beast doomed to extinction. You have many challenges to our existence that lurk outside this box, from asteroid impact, supernova explosions, and an aging sun.
Civilizations we could join, and yet we spend more time on lipstick and dung beetles than we do on the future of human civilization. I believe that this one species, one planet strategy is a very dicey one, and to keep the human project going, we have to expand the window we have. We need more people who can think in universe and eternity and start hyper-visionary ventures. Now I have to be honest with you: the current headcount of Superman is very small. It would probably take you less than an hour to follow all of them on Twitter, which is not that surprising if you think about it. We have hardwired fail, and grand failures are not really celebrated in our culture. Even if you succeed, you probably won't see the fruit of your labor because a hyper-visionary venture would typically take decades, if not lifetimes. And yet we've got several oddballs who defy the gravity of our cultural baggage and go for it. So what is wrong with them, and how can more of us get it? So I have something for you to get you started on your Superman career. It is a Superman starter kit. Right now it has just three items, so it's not too heavy: cosmic perspective, science fiction, and nerves.
The good news is, of course, that our minds can go places our bodies cannot. And that was known already 20 centuries ago when Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius observed: we have the power to possess for ourselves a large room, embracing in thought the whole cosmos and to consider everlasting time. Today you can get yourself that large room at the price of a book. If you read big history, it's a 20-year-old discipline that started with a very simple idea: why don't we put everything we know about universe, Earth, life, and humanity into a single narrative? So now we have dozens of big history books.
It makes it much harder to worry about the next board presentation or fret over what analysts might say. And sooner or later it leads to big existential questions, and that's where the super motivational juice for hyper-visionary ventures is. So we're going to try this out real fast. You contemplate 13.8 billion years of cosmic history: the Big Bang, the births and deaths of stars, the formation of galaxies. You zoom on the Milky Way, our solar system, the third rock from the Sun. You see life emerge almost 4 billion years ago. Biological evolution kicks in with its endless stream of mutations. You have millions of species come and go. Fish comes out of the ocean onto the land, and 400 million years later, in that blink of evolutionary time, we get 100 billion people walking the surface of this planet, inventing some seriously awesome things like space rockets and cup holders. And now it's our turn. But you can play it forward. You can see trillions more could be born if we don't screw it up. You can see thousands of asteroids heading for Earth. You can see super volcanoes erupt causing multi-year winters. You can see climate zigzag between ice ages and warmer spells. You can see a supernova maybe going off in a cosmic neighborhood and blasting Earth with deadly radiation. You can see our sun age.
What are you going to do about all that on Monday morning? For Elon Musk, he figured this is the first time in 4.5 billion years of history that we can extend life beyond Earth, so he starts a rocket company. Ed Lu decides to knock off at least one existential risk off our to-do list. And Chris Lewicki becomes an asteroid miner. So if you let it, the cosmic perspective will mess you up. At the very least, it will get you to think bigger about what you're doing with that precious one-off shot at existence that we call life. So let's for argument's sake say you've got the cosmic perspective down. You are one-third of the way to Superman.
Just not the creative type? Well, you don't need to be. Vinod Khosla, founder of Sun Microsystems and a prolific investor, was recently asked where he gets his big ideas from, and he gave a sublime answer: I steal them. Most big visions are stolen ideas or a remix of stolen ideas, and the place you go to steal them is science fiction. We've got more than 100,000 authors and almost 300,000 titles. It's a gold mine. So Elon Musk was influenced by Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. They were written mid-last century, but by the 1950s, Earth is a footnote in human history. We have colonies spread out throughout the galaxy, and that's how we get to Asimov worrying about the fall of the Galactic Empire in the Foundation series. Asteroid mining is at least 100 years old. Martians started it in a story by Garrett Serviss. We have humans deciding to go to Mars, and on their way to the red planet they encounter a big giant golden asteroid, and Martians were mining it. By the 1940s, asteroid mining is as common as brushing your teeth.
Rematerialize it as food and water, which comes in very handy because it cuts out the need to stock provisions on starships. But actually, I'd have you know that the first startup working on creating organic matter was looking for funding already at the end of the 19th century in another story by J. So when it comes to civilization advancing visions, they are in super abundant supply. You can just pick one or two as you wish. That truly is the easy part. The more difficult part is to work your way back to the present. A journey of a thousand miles starts with the first single step, and the trick is to find a first step that is sane. The first step is generally when you need to involve other people like co-founders, investors, employees, volunteers, and it is generally advisable to come across as somewhat sane. For SpaceX, the first step is to bring down launch costs. That's not just saying that; it's very much in demand from NASA to commercial companies launching satellites. Who wouldn't want cheaper launch costs? Just to give you a sense, a seat on a Russian Soyuz rocket cost $70 million today. SpaceX says they can do it for $20 million, and once they figure out how to do reusable rockets that don't burn up in the atmosphere...
Around trying to sell lab-grown meat to Teslas and the like, their first step is bioprinting leather. It's a very respectable $63 billion market, and they hope to get their first bioprinted leather into fashion accessories already next year. If that works, they'll focus on scaling, scaling, and scaling. And if that works out, then perhaps we'll be more open to getting our meat this way as well. So steal your vision and work your way from the macro madness of the vision to the micro sanity of the first step. So we're two-thirds of the way to Superman. You don't need to be a whole Man of Steel, but nerves of steel is a must.
There will never be a shortage of people who will tell you you're crazy. I'm quite familiar with that particular feedback. They will tell you that you're wasting investors' money, that you're going to ruin your reputation forever. Ignore them. When Elon Musk turned to space exploration, the general consensus said he's nuts. His friends were showing him videos of rockets that were blowing up and were trying to talk him out of it. Their premise was that he was going to lose all of his money. Unfortunately, that didn't work out because for Elon Musk, that was his expectation anyway. He just thought we weren't expanding beyond Earth.
Himself as just another mining executive. The modern mad guys typically throw the crazy right back at people who challenge them. If you think lab-grown meat is crazy, check out what we do today. We raise and slaughter 60 billion animals who take up one-third of Earth's ice-free land, drink 8% of global water, and account for 18% of global emissions. If cattle nation was an actual nation, it would be the third largest emitter, trailing only the USA and China. So we start with animals when we could start with cells, and do you know cultures based on cells which would have a fraction of an impact?
So there you have it. Superman starter kit: cosmic perspective, science fiction, and nerves of steel. We could also restate it simpler: read, steal, and ignore. And that does sound more doable, doesn't it? Human civilization needs Superman. If you already are one, please carry on. If not, do consider letting go of the rope and going for it. Make a dent in the universe. From the cosmic perspective, not much else is worth doing. Thank you.