And The Other Things
2036 Excerpt from The U.N. General Assembly
United Nations Conference, Earth, 2036 CE; Opening Address.
Madam Chair, distinguished leaders of the U.N.; honored guests from business and communities; colleagues organic and algorithmic; members of the media who have the good sense to watch this on X live — thank you.
You have chosen an admirable venue in the year 2036 to argue about destiny. This Hall is late twentieth century concrete and conscience: high ceiling, hard echoes, microphones that add five percent gravitas and seven percent feedback. I will speak slowly, not because you are slow, but because the room is. And what’s more this historic site deserves nothing less than deeply considered words that honor its past.
We meet beneath a quiet sky. It is not quiet because the universe has nothing to say. It is quiet because light needs time, and we have not given it enough. In the two plus earth centuries since America's great-great-grandparents began to leave Europe in earnest, we have looked and listened hard. We built arrays in Earth’s remote deserts and on the highest mountains. We trained machines in far Lagranges to sift static for signatures that look like mistakes made on purpose. We found pulsars and exoplanets and the long sigh of hydrogen. We did not find neighbors. Not yet.
That does not make us alone. It makes us early or remote or unlucky. It makes us, for practical purposes… responsible.
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I am an engineer, which is to say: a human that calculates and enjoys physics. I have calculated how recently in cosmic terms it was that no human wrote things down. I have calculated that the time between steel tools and nuclear power is the number of centuries you can count on fingers, if your species or droid spec is generous with fingers. I have calculated that intelligence arrived late, and that late things are often accidents that only look inevitable from the distance of their success.
So let us name the motive of this session plainly. It is not about discussing the mundane merits of expansion to Mars as the UN conference schedule would have us follow. It is about asking: Who are we? What are we? And where are we going?
I put it to you that exploration is not ornament. It is our duty. And this duty has two faces; they share a common mind. Curiosity and survival are not separate appetites. They are the same hunger in different light.
Curiosity says: go because we do not know. It says: the map is not the world; the world is not the sky; the sky is not the dark; the dark is full of structure we can taste with instruments and understand with care. It says: meaning is a frontier.
Survival says: go because we are brittle. It says: a single garden, however well weeded, is a bad strategy in a universe that farms with meteorites and fires its gardeners periodically. It says: redundancy is compassion widened.
You do not need a simple human engineer to tell you that both are true. But you may need one to insist that we be specific.
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Specificity begins with a promise about how we go. Not flags first; fabrics second. Not first-come, first-own; first-arrive, first-steward. We will expand under a charter of restraint. We will quarantine like grown-ups. We will keep planetary parks where life precedes law, and law kneels to life. We will share sky — radio quiet zones for telescopes and children who like silence. We will write our protocols before the crisis and obey them during.
Specificity continues with a promise about what we fund. Exploration is not a fashion season. It does not survive hand-to-mouth. It requires endowments that do not notice elections. If you wish to be remembered for something other than well-phrased caution, index a fixed fraction of your domestic product to a common Exploration Fund. You may disguise it as infrastructure if the word frightens you. It will build both.
Specificity ends, for now, with a promise about who benefits. If exploration is to be a duty and not a hobby, its proceeds must accrue to the species, not merely to shareholders clever enough to claim an asteroid using expensive lawyers. The archive must be mirrored across worlds. The antidotes must compile where the pandemics do not. The governance must be separately sovereign and jointly accountable. If you are tempted to ask “who owns the moons of Mars,” take a breath and ask instead “who trusts us to be wise.” Those are different conversations. Only one will build a civilization anyone will want to inherit.
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Permit me, given my role and experience, three stories that are also not so hidden requests.
First: a day in which an orbital tug fails over the Mare Imbrium and its crew require rescue within six hours or never. The closest ship belongs to a rival hub. The second-closest ship belongs to a rival’s rival. Protocol must beat politics. The rescue is automatic. The billing can wait. Write that down now. Put it into law. Frame it in the lobby where the U.N.'s tourists here can see it.
Second: a season in which dust and chance conspire to make Martian agriculture unprofitable for three straight sixths. The temptation will be to import calories and call it temporary. Do not. The point of a frontier is not to be cheap when it is easy, but to be expensive when it matters. Keep the loop closed. Subsidize boredom. Audit buffers in public. The cost will be headlines. The benefit will be your great great grandchildren’s.
Third: a year in which a talented cluster of planetary-scale machine minds offers a capability you want and should never share at once. The safe answer is not “no.” The safe answer is “not synchronized.” Asynchronous releases. Independent evaluations. Different guardrails on different worlds. Never let the same bug exist in the same way in two places at once. The universe is very big. Our mistakes should be small and uncorrelated.
In each story, you will hear a philosophy that machines can implement but only humans can insist upon: distance is not independence; independence is design. Design is policy under time pressure.
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The last time I addressed a body like this, a delegate from a maritime nation asked whether dolphins would receive voting rights in the United Nations Assembly if they learned to speak. I answered: yes, upon proof of tax compliance. The transcript shows laughter and one earnest request for a definition of “income” that led to a charming subcommittee and a less charming report. I wish this were just humor, since I promised some. But unfortunately dolphins are still without full rights. Even though they are not the solution to Fermi’s search, they are a motivation for us. As all life should be.
We have learned — together — that the galaxy is not populated by little green men who taught the Egyptians trigonometry. We have also learned that our own AI Hub Minds can be very clever without being able to take on the mandate of adults in the room. They are, if I may be ungenerous to our artificial machine peers and so to also classify myself, enthusiastic species interns with perfect recall and uneven judgement. They do not absolve any human of duty. They make it sharper. And that is all I am seeking to do here.
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Human poets were right before the rocket engineers’ numbers were ready. We climb because the mountain is there. We also climb because the valley floods. Both sentences can occupy the same mouth without contradiction.
When President Kennedy insisted on “the Moon and the other things,” he was making a promise larger than his podium: that effort dignifies, and difficulty selects. Yet again, as world leaders you now stand before “the other things”, but this time with better tools and worse excuses. And I insist on the same duty Kennedy did before me several decades ago.
I insist on and promise “Mars and the other things.”
What then is the self-sustaining city program we discuss today? It is not a list so much as a posture. Expand, but with brakes that fail safe. Learn, but share in ways that make the whole smarter rather than the loudest richer. Build redundancy into the fabric — food, energy, computation, governance — so that a large asteroid arrival on Tuesday does not become a humanity extinction tragedy on Wednesday. Mirror the archive in places where rumor and sunlight cannot burn it. Teach children that a star is not a wish but a distance, and that distances are responsibilities.
You will notice that I have said little about glory. That is because glory is a solvent. It dissolves prudence. It belongs in parades, not budgets. The correct emotion for a multiplanetary species is not triumph but gratitude complicated by engineering and operational logistics.
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I began this speech in a venue with a huge history, and a hall with bad acoustics. The sound bounces. You will hear these words again in the corners. Before they get there, let me be as plain as I can be.
Life is rare enough to be precious and common enough to require planetary engineering. Intelligence is late, noisy, and fragile — and that’s true whether it is carbon or silicon based. Our stellar neighbors, if they exist, are far. On the timescales that govern risk, we are effectively alone together — human kind and machine mind. That truth is not sadness. It is a mandate.
Curiosity asks for voyages. Survival asks for cousins. Both ask for courage you can audit.
So let us leave this room with a promise. We will take more care than pride, more measurements than photographs, more backups than slogans. We will build in such a way that a child born anywhere under human gravity can inherit not only a planet but a solar system. We will both dream and build a city of hundreds of thousands. We will go to Mars and the other places.
And when, one day, the sky is finally not quiet, and we hear someone else’s late arrival, may we meet them as neighbors who learned stewardship and overcame the great filter of individual selfishness.
Thank you.
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Speaker: Mr. Musk (Speaking As A Private Citizen)
Speech Title: “And The Other Things”
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Session: UP/GA-46•BGJ-Δ — “Solar System Expansion Debate” ~ Mandate #42
Language: Delivered in original traditional American-English. Mandarin version here.
Catalog: UPGA/And-The-Other-Things/267HE
Clerk: Chief of Staff — Rob. E. Demer* [2E1] • Ref: 0.L!-vAW (Archival) [HG2TG#42]
Venue: The United Nations [U.N.] Great Hall, New York, USA, Earth.
Date: June 3rd 2036 CE