Impossible: Elon Musk and the Politics of Possibility.

both in our personal lives and in our
political lives both individually and when you scale it up and speak on the level of the community the neighborhood the city the nation we make decisions in the shadow of a million options we never truly gave consideration to because we presumed them to be impossible the distinction between the possible and the impossible is thus of paramount political and emotional significance in our lives what most people never learn to do is to think through in a systematic way a series of comparable options and alternatives to move past the simplistic notion of impossibility in their heads to instead have a nuanced sense of the advantages and disadvantages of each possibility now when you look at a towering tyrannical over-the-top figure like elon musk you were talking about possibility and impossibility in a very crude sense but nevertheless we all have something to learn and starting to reflect on again even in our own lives personally in moving past a simple sense of this is impossible now to have one spaceship move back and forth between the earth and mars hundreds of times or one thousand times and to carry a small number of people between earth and mars on each trip would have a cost in the trillions of dollars the numbers being dealt with are almost impossible to imagine almost impossible to imagine that doesn't mean it's impossible to do that's not what elon musk is promising what elon musk is promising is that he will build 1 000 ships that will make the trip simultaneously in an armada so the number of trillions of dollars is here increased by more than a thousand-fold the costs are astronomically higher now let's just say you picture your entire family your circle of all your friends and relations everyone you know and care about in the city you're living in and let's just say you learned that due to global warming your city was going to be underwater so you all have to move to some other let's say you have to move to an empty field up in the mountains somewhere on higher ground say okay there are two ways i can do this i can rent one bus and have a bus make a trip back and forth again and again over months or it can have 1 000 buses we're gonna have one thousand we're gonna rent one thousand bucks for something we're all gonna get loaded up together at the same time and move from one location another which one is gonna cost more money now when we're dealing with space travel when we're dealing with the cost of taking things from the surface of planet earth and lifting them into orbit just as step one so this is not just the metal that the devices are made out of every pound and every ounce costs an enormous amount of money in jet fuel to elevate out of the earth's atmosphere but all the water people are going to drink all the food they're going to eat all right it gets ridiculous it's much much more difficult than planting a bus strip but nevertheless you can understand the difference between having one bus go back and forth in bus trip and 1 000 buses going simultaneously now if somebody said to you that building a city at the bottom of the ocean encased in a glass bubble is impossible you could very easily in this context say no it's not that's not impossible at all but we get into some really interesting and challenging questions on this scale of magnitude when we're thinking about possibility and impossibility the political costs and economic consequences if you build a city at the bottom of the ocean encased in a glass bubble it's probably has absolutely zero scientific value if nearly zero economic value has some tourist value some people are going to pay to go down in a submarine or something for the novelty of it one could say much the same as much of the space program frankly um if you start to estimate the cost of doing that they are so much lower than sending just one team of human beings to mars to live permanently on a space station maybe even if just one person or two people living on a permanent you know base on mars that it starts to seem like the easiest thing in the world now what are the advantages of being at the bottom of the ocean well you have access to hospitals like if someone gets sick while they're in this little bubble at the bottom of the ocean you can put them on a submarine bring them to the nearest city or you could take a doctor from the nearest city put him on a submarine center the boat wow what a cost savings they have access to air oh you might think air is hard to get at the bottom of the ocean try getting air on mars okay try getting air in earth orbit okay it's quite easy to bring air to the bottom of the ocean it's quite easy to bring food it's quite quite easy to bring potable water or to convert you have gravity in fact the advantages you have of having a colony so to speak at the bottom of the ocean over building a colony on the surface of mars or the surface are so extreme the number of trillions of dollars you would save it's so radical that you can also make a kind of moral case for this you can say morally ethically it's superior to build a city in a plastic bubble or a glass bubble everyone think about translucent bubble at the bottom of the ocean this is like a moral cause we should support and we should stop fantasizing about or wasting billions and trillions of dollars on the possibility of lunar bases orbital bases you know permanent cities in orbit and and building a colony on mars so that's how much th that's how much the cost that makes it there's a civil war in myanmar right now some people want democracy and some people don't how much would it cost to build an earthly paradise in myanmar compared to building a city encased in glass at the bottom of the ocean an orbital platform with a million people living on it permanently a colony on the surface of mars are permanently inhabited moon base how much would it cost to raise the standard of living in each and every town in myanmar to be equal to disneyland california let's really set our sights high and let's do a cost estimate where the quality of public bathrooms and schools and roads and democracy is better than anaheim california it's not perhaps not paradise perhaps perhaps 20 better than anaheim would qualify as paradise and let's let's throw in some rides every single town has got to have at least a flume ride or a ferris wheel we can do cost estimates how much does it cost to have uh okay ten thousand ferris wheels for myanmar okay that may sound ridiculous that may sound like a waste of money you say the burmese people don't need ferris wheels they need democracy i say unto you these things go hand in hand they need ferris wheels and they need wave pools they i can't even think of other examples they need roller coasters whatever i i never go to disneyland and these kind of places it's not my thing you know if you say we are going to attempt the disneylandification of myanmar and you come up with a cost estimate it's going to seem cheap compared to the space program it's going to seem cheap compared to building a base on the bottom of the ocean and you can already imagine why i've sketched out some of these demographic demographic factors and it will have tremendous positive knock-on effects here on planet earth now nobody is talking about building ferris wheels in myanmar nobody is talking about building paradise in myanmar no one is talking about life in myanmar being potentially better than life in anaheim california nobody even thinks it's possible and we live our lives personally professionally emotionally and politically within a cage of what we perceive to be possible and what we presume to be impossible i can't count how many people i've spoken to who said to me that they'd like to learn sanskrit but it's impossible and i gotta sit them down and talk them through exactly how possible it is all right whether it's sanskrit or it's pali or it's latin or it's ancient greek and most time when you talk to someone face to face you can find some other activity they're doing in their life that takes up about this much time say oh do you go to the gym when do you go to the gym every day oh okay really so that adds up to 15 hours a week okay guess what the same amount of time you're spending at the gym now you could be learning latin you could be learning ancient greek you could be learning sanskrit pali whatever the language is talking about and i'm in a position i have enough experience i can talk them through exactly what that's like exactly what is attainable and what's unattainable and how much help you need or to what extent you can just do it with your own mobile phone you know what i think you can do which is with applications download the internet and the dictionaries you need to get i can i can really give someone valuable advice on those steps if they want to do it but you know what changes when you realize it's possible guilt shame responsibility because now you realize it's been possible all along and your concept of what's possible and impossible has been an excuse it's an excuse you've been hiding behind and it's even a mask you've been wearing that kind of prevents you from seeing reality around you in all of its detail you know it's a mask that kind of cuts off your view of the full range of options and possibilities in your life and you've been wearing it for all these years right and now you have to face up to what's possible and the only thing lacking in the equation is you your effort your will your resolution your decision your your willingness to to make it happen right now most you know futurology most talking about like what's what's attainable in our glorious unthought of future has a lot more to do with the self-indulgent fantasies of elon musk than it has to do with the study of latin or sanskrit or pali or chinese or any other language right it's tragic the fantasies tell us a great deal about human nature and one of the most central aspects of human nature is after all laziness that's really what we're all we're all struggling against there yes wouldn't it be nice if someone else went ahead and made a made a colony on mars for us to you know sit back and enjoy and nobody's oh yes wouldn't it be wouldn't it be wonderful if elon musk gets to live out his dream of farming corn on the surface of mars and they're not interested in the fact that mars has not only no atmosphere to grow corn no soil to grow corn no gravity to grow corn it also doesn't have sunlight to grow like the most obvious thing would literally it would literally be easier to grow corn at the bottom of the ocean then to grow it on the surface of mars if you start with it okay okay what what a great fantasy and then you never stop and look at your own life and think i could have i could have bought a farm i could get land i could take up farming as a hobby or as a career could i could go from having it as a hobby to it really taking over i could have done something productive and creative and innovative and oh i could have done something with my life if i think that's heroic this vision of you know going out to new frontiers and farming corn what does that say about me and what does that say about my life and what i presume about what's you know what's possible for me the one that comes up most often in canadian politics okay okay if we're keeping all the way real what comes up most often is weight loss what comes up most often is exercise and physical self-transformation because people are shallow and people live with a million different excuses for why they can't lose weight why they can't get in shape why they can't change their diet why they can't change their habits and you live surrounded by people who have excuses why they can never read a book a book that's you know in their first language like they speak english first time through some book and it's like dude if you if you write it down if you write it on a chalkboard so you wake up in the morning every day it reminds you to read this book you're going to get it read you know there are things people live with the illusion that they're impossible and unattainable but the one that comes up most often in this political context of the united states and canada genocide and the obligation so many of us feel to learn an indigenous language rather than just letting them go extinct so if you if you're watching this and you're from england or something if you're from spain from some other country some other continent you may not know what it's like to every day drive your car down a highway and have cities with unpronounceable place names in extinct languages or nearly extinct languages you know or languages where you've never met anyone who know you can understand them or know what it means i've actually been on i studied ojibwe and cree so i said all the time i primarily studied cree my program also contained the unit on ojibwe if i just say cree people don't know what language i'm talking about so i normally say cree and ojibwe i studied those languages at first nations university canada and several times i went on wikipedia and other websites and i corrected the explanation for the name of a city or town in canada you know maybe once it was a river but normally it's a city or town has one of these names and the the funniest thing was you know they had sources so they would have a wrong explanation for why the town was named what it was and they'd have a footnote you know it's the wikipedia style and i could click and i'd go and be able to find the book it was published then there are people out there treating these and i i would i would provide a footnote and i would actually name the the pages of the dictionary like yeah oh yes well allow me to do the incredibly in-depth research of looking the word up in the dictionary but you know in canada almost nobody has access to a dictionary for cree or ojibwe i think this is the level of ignorance okay people live their whole lives with the assumption that there is this process of genocide there are these languages disappearing and there is nothing we can do about it that nobody can learn the language not even the people who genetically are linked to that to that history and the answer is no you can learn latin you can learn greek you can learn hebrew you know you can do it you know what it's it's all up to you this is not impossible it's possible what the part that's difficult the is caring the part that's difficult is having the will and the self-discipline and the commitment to do it and you know looking at the reality of canada the united states today what if there aren't even 500 people let's let's let's people what if there aren't 500 white people willing to do the hard work to learn cree to learn ojibwe to learn any other indigenous language you can name do you think they're going to be 500 chinese people who are going to do it do you think they're going to be 500 people at the linguistic research institute in africa how about in france or germany right and i'm saying white people because i mean people you know none of us were born speaking latin come up with an estimate when people are learning that all right either this is possible or impossible all right if it's actually impossible let's think through the implications of that and if we can admit to ourselves that it's possible let's really deal with the implications of the fact that nobody is doing it and nobody is going to do it all right in this way the sense of shame the sense of guilt the sense of responsibility begins with an awareness that some alternate course of action is possible most americans and most canadians are resigned to the idea that our first nations people our indigenous people live in third world conditions oh yeah they don't really have drinking water and electricity and roads the way we do because they live on these reservations that we kind of force them on and this is just seen as normal right yeah i guess they kind of have a separate school system and look i know a lot more about this in the average person i'm here putting on the voice of the average white canadian or white american most people have never thought it through if you ask a white american oh yeah yeah you know there are those african-american colleges and universities the special black people black power kind of what do you what do you think the situation is for the navajo what do you think the situation is for the inuit what do you think the situation is for your own indigenous people the vast majority of americans will just be dumbfounded they'll just say i don't know they'll just say i know are there universities for those people do those people have their own universities the same way black people would say in africa they do have you ever been tempted to enroll there yourself how about have do you know anyone do you know any white people who wanted to compete to get into one of those colleges did your high school counselor encourage you to apply because they're they're across america like geographically they're spread out i mean i can say something similar for canada right this is un unthought of is it possible is it possible to provide our indigenous people with world-class running water and electricity and internet connectivity and primary schools high schools and universities why don't you do a cost estimate of what it would take to raise the quality of life on canada and america's indian reservations first nations territories whatever you want to say to raise the quality of life there to be equivalent to anaheim california what would it take to raise the quality of their high schools and their universities to be comparable to the university of california berkeley to be the most prestigious the most excellent universities in the united states of america and canada and you know what you might have to make some people uncomfortable you might have to go to some other universities and shut down some of their departments and say no no we're closing down this department at this university of big city and we're going to take your professors and we're going to go make them live in the middle of nowhere because we don't want it to always be the middle of nowhere we're actually going to reallocate resources including human resources and we are going to put you out on the frontier to do something new and bold and different oh oh oh sorry that [ __ ] you oh sorry oh do you find that depressing you find that challenging would you rather go to mars would you feel more pride tilling the soil of mars or the surface of the moon oh i'm sorry you don't feel any sense of adventure or do something new yeah you know what there are first nations people there are indigenous people out in remote areas of montana and western ontario you know and you know what we're not going to accept the fact that they live in conditions that are worse than myanmar right now we're not getting the fact that their status in this democracy is less democratic than the status of indigenous people in myanmar i defy you look it up but totally totally racist colonialist system of government in canada that was never meant to represent or include indigenous people and it still doesn't because we never reformed it we never wrote a new constitution we never came with new electoral practices nuclear is ridiculous but we've a worse than apartheid system of extinguishment towards our indigenous people oh yeah you know what some of the most pampered comfortable people in all of canada and all the united states are probably going to have to pack up and go to a new frontier which is a lot more comfortable than living under a glass bubble at the bottom of the ocean or in a lunar colony on the moon on mars and they're gonna have to learn to take pride in that and say we are the generation that decided this is possible this is our priority it's necessary it's happening now the whole tide of history of these languages disappearing and our political leaders saying these people don't matter and they're going to be forgotten we're going to turn it around we're going to go in the other direction even if it costs 1 trillion because if you look at the annual budget for nasa if you look at the amount of money being wasted on nasa year after year after year and you think what if that budget was going into first nations education indigenous people's education and even indigenous peoples plumbing and electricity and some of those things that i mentioned what do you think the cumulative effect of that would be after just 10 years after just 20 years it would change everything and it wouldn't just change things for native americans it would change things for white americans and black americans and hispanic americans and everybody else okay and it has to start with a commitment all right in the same way that the absurd idea of building a city under a glass bottle at the bottom of the ocean in a glass bottle it's a good way of putting it at the bottom of the ocean and the same way that that ridiculous idea starts to seem moral starts to seem like a moral imperative when you compare it to the absurdity of elon musk's mars colony all right in that same way when you start to compare what the government actively is wasting billions of dollars on like the bombardment of afghanistan and iraq and the space program and all these things when you start to compare what the money could be spent on and what is spent on to this possibility all right becomes necessary to make a commitment and say you know what building a base on the moon sounds like fun sending another rover to explore mars and map it and everyone it sounds fun but we have to make a commitment that we are not going to do that we have to write it down in the constitution or in the highest level of federal law that you got we are going to make a commitment no more money spent on mars no more money spent on the moon until our own indigenous people have caught up until they have schools and roads and democracy every bit as good as anaheim california or better hey hey let's shoot for the moon let's let's not be satisfied with mediocrity let's actually try to build a utopia not in myanmar we're here right here in the united states of canada let's ask ourselves what would be possible and let's push up right against those limits of what we presume to be impossible