Elon Musk and Peter Diamandis LIVE on $100M XPRIZE Carbon Removal

the xprize foundation runs incredible large-scale competitions around the world that set very clear measurable objective goals competitions and prices can actually bring innovation to solve not just any problem but really big challenging problems we don't care who you are or where you come from if you're able to accomplish this task you win are leveraging the genius of folks from all over the world the tinkers the entrepreneurs the engineers we're looking for something that is audacious and achievable problems that the markets have failed to solve people about setting a high bar you want to set a goal for people that's inspiring it's also hard so no matter what challenge you want to solve join us on this journey just don't be satisfied doing nothing welcome welcome everybody uh welcome to a special live stream on earth day in here we are on earth on earth in a beautiful uh by nature yeah yeah do it better for 21 earth day yeah um here to talk about the launch of the largest prize ever a hundred million dollar x prize for carbon capture and here with a very special guest uh probably one of the greatest innovators engineer of our time the ceo of tesla of spacex of a bunch of other companies uh and someone i'm proud to call a friend elon hey peter good to see you good to see you yeah it's uh it's the perfect setting for our conversation today yeah yeah we've known each other for a long time now yeah um 21 years i think it was like 2000 yeah whoa it is i think it was two thousand in like uh brazil brazil was actually a similarly nice uh sort of a setting yeah is it deo's birthday yeah florianopolis for annapolis yeah and uh you're trying to convince me not to start a rocket company i was trying to convince you to fund the original x prize well i met anusha yes but also like really advised me not to start art company because i lose all my money which i thought uh i thought you were probably right so i thought you know ten percent chance of success but anyway seems to worked out i'm sure you're glad you didn't follow yeah oh my god so we're going to um talk a little bit about the rules uh try and encourage teams around the world to register for this thing yeah there's many innovators students talking about it uh yeah i mean our goal is like basically to uh do something that uh you know to have it be sort of interesting fun and ultimately useful um and to spur uh uh creative ideas for what is actually the smartest way to take the trillions of tons of carbon that we we've removed from the ground and we'll remove from the ground um from deep deep underground and and and we've we've placed that carbon in the atmosphere and oceans which obviously changes the the chemical constituency of the surface of the earth yeah um and um you know i know i i i i should sort of um measure measure my statements in that um i think i think we the earth like i don't i don't think we're currently doomed to be clear there's a very important uh very importantly um you know there's there there are people on all parts of the spectrum from ranging from nothing to worry about uh co2 is just makes things better to uh we're doomed and there's nothing we can do about it i am somewhere in the middle um so my concern with the co2 is not kind of where we are today um or even you know the current rate rate of carbon generation but really uh if it could if we if common generation keeps accelerating and we keep getting um a uh that uh increase in the in the keeling curve you know the co2 plus million atmosphere and if if if we keep going and if we're complacent uh then i think we we could there's some risk of of um sort of non-linear climate change um so um so you know that's why we that we've seen the co2 possibly be fairly linear on on our time scale uh although it looks very exponential on uh geologic time scale um and uh but there are certain potential non-linear events like uh if we raise the temperature to the point where we um melt the siberian traps or something like that and methane escapes yeah there's just a massive amount of of sort of frozen dead plant animal matter um in um in siberia there's potentially trapped uh uh gases deep in the ocean if the ocean warms yeah that could be released so uh you know these this is just these are just risks that are not wise to take um and since we know that uh long term we're going to have to have renewable energy anyway um because we'll we'll run out of oil and gas it's not going to last forever um so we know we know where this ends up this has to end up with uh renewable sustainable energy um it's taught logical um it's really just a question of do we try to get there sooner or later you know and we should try to get there sooner it's obvious why run like why are on the ex how long do you want to run this experiment yeah it's also true that even if we stopped co2 production that's probably still not enough that we do need mechanisms for extraction of co2 from the atmosphere and the oceans that don't exist right now you know i said i i am people sort of think i'm sort of like i i'm kind of in the middle of the spectrum you know i think if we stopped co2 production today which obviously we could not do without civilization coming to a grinding halt um and mass starvation and all sorts of terrible things happening um so we could not stop co2 generation today but i think at the you know the sort of 400 possibly even 500 ppm level i think it's probably probably okay um but if uh you know as as the world industrializes and we're sort of at 8 billion people get to nine billion people um have a lot more industrial output per person um you could see the you know you know at what might be okay it's sort of four or five hundred um parts a million co2 in the atmosphere might become quite dire at a thousand yeah um and the trend is certainly in that direction if we don't do anything about it so um that's why i think it's just probably an unwise experiment to to run um even if you think that the this is this is why i think it should be a compelling argument to even those who um would assign a low probability to um increase co2 causing problems like let's say you think it's 99.9 percent likely that uh that adding all the co2 to the ocean's atmosphere is is going to be fine so so you're saying there's a point one percent chance of disaster well there's only one way right now we only got one planet even a point one percent chance of disaster why are on that risk that's crazy so um so i think what's likely to play out is that we will continue to add a lot of uh a lot more co2 to the ocean's atmosphere um and also you know ocean acidification as you know is also an issue it's you know what you don't sort of add carbonic acid to the oceans and change the ph level um because it destroys reefs and all that so which it's actively doing right now as we're watching yeah yeah yeah exactly um yes so this is a problem no i remember when i first met you elon uh you had it was about 2 000 and i remember you had two massively transformative missions it was one making the making humanity multi interplanetary yeah and the second was bringing us to a sustainable economy yeah a sustainable energy economy right exactly and i think you've done pretty damn good are you are you happy with the progress you've made um yeah i think it's uh it's hard to complain it's probably you know the outcome so far has been been great um although obviously to be you know we've we've not uh we've not yet sent anyone to mars and um and hopefully we'll in the future and um in fact just uh a few days ago or last early last late last week i guess um nasa awarded spacex awesome 2.8 2.9 billion dollars for the next lunar lander yeah so spacex a spacex craft will be the the next craft to put humans on uh on the moon i believe the first human will be a woman actually this time so uh this is great that's great yeah um so um but of course we have to actually do it um and uh and uh then we've got tomorrow we've got the uh our third asteroid launched before we dive into the to the carbon removal uh rules and so forth yeah uh i mean it's obviously a better dichotomy because our rockets do produce carbon you know true like high what a hypocrite sure no no you guys obviously just he's always just in for the money um but but let's talk about let's talk about the crew crew i feel like i should address this this is a good vibe you're watching rockets that produce carbon uh here's the problem is uh right now there is there's really no way to get around the physics of a rocket so i think it's important for the long-term uh preservation and and ultimately the expansion and extension of this the scope and scale of consciousness and the long-term uh probability of survival of humanity and life as we know it we must become a multi-planet species uh because all these risks that we can't control existential risks asteroids strikes yeah yeah yeah there's like super volcanoes and we could do it you know we have world war three uh or something you know there's um like i'm optimistic about the future but you but you can also say like okay well so how long do you think civilization will last before there's a catastrophic event if you say infinity you're this is not correct yes okay this is this is not uh history does not suggest that it's just yes we do dumb things to uh civilizations all the time you know and and you know those ancient egyptians the romans ancient romans where are they now let's do the video series where where are they now the sumerians the yeah you name it you know so um so there's been many civilizations that risen in fallen and anyway we've got to preserve we're going to become multi-planetary and right now the only way to do that is with um with rockets that do burn fuel but we do have a long-term plan for sustainability of um of even rocket flights uh by generating uh propellant uh using um sustainable energy wind and solar to generate starting first with liquid oxygen um and for our starship vehicle uh it's uh almost 80 liquid oxygen yeah and 20 uh liquid methane and the oxygen it's obviously pretty easy to create that uh you just use wind and solar electricity and um and you do air separator because you've got the oxygen already in there the plants are making the oxygen um so you can use this you can just use electricity basically remove electricity to create 80 percent of the propellant on the rocket and then for the remaining uh 20 you can use the body a process where you take you actually take co2 out of the atmosphere and you combine that with water to create ch4 and more o2 um and that's and that's in fact what we would do on mars sure to generate propellant sure so so there is a long term plan for sustainable generation of propellant for the rockets i do want to emphasize that um and if there's some if there's some other way to do that now we we certainly would yeah but i'm i'm just trying to try to sort of address this apparent inconsistency in um you know if darian carvin is bad what why why are you doing that with rockets yeah and listen i think it's a moral imperative for the human race to be able to move off earth while we have the opportunity everything we know is right here and just because it's like it's um it's it's not it's just one of the other christians so much feels like oh is this some escape hatch for rich people no no you know they think it's like so you know going to mars reads like that ad book for shackleton going to the antarctic you know it's it's dangerous uh it's uncomfortable it's a long journey you might not you know come back alive um but it's a glorious adventure and it'll be amazing an amazing experience and your name will go in history yes you might not probably won't have good food and all these things you know so if if an arduous and dangerous journey where you may not come back alive um but it's a glorious adventure sounds appealing and mars is the place and you still have thousands of volunteers if not millions of volunteers would want to go i mean honestly a bunch of people probably will die in the beginning it's it's tough sledding over there we're an exploring species yeah yeah exactly not for everyone we don't want to make anyone go so it's volunteers only you have a you have a uh a dragon capsule on the pad crew 2 is nominally or you still go for launch tomorrow yeah awesome you want to just spend two minutes uh talking about the crew 2 mission yeah so um yeah we've got hopefully a great mission plan for tomorrow uh this will be our third flight of people to the space station we have the test mission with two astronauts then the first sort of operational mission with four the second operational mission with four um there's an international crew um a great group um i was just looking online they're sort of you know picking their sort of uh you know hopefully not final meal but you know they're gonna fit whatever their favorite food is you know from their country and um so i'm actually heading over there tonight to just to um wish him wishing well i was out at pad 39a uh to see the stack yesterday uh a couple of things one pad 39a historic yeah because this is where people went to the moon yeah 11 from that pad from that pad the first space shuttle launched back in 81 sts and uh so that's it's a lot of like karmic responsibility to be operating yeah it's like times square the time square of launch pads it's amazing yeah amazing and uh and the first stage has a beautiful patina on it does it's uh this will yeah there'll be the it'll be it's a reused stage so um when the stages come back they they kind of get scorched yeah so the black there some people think is that sort of something no that's it got scorched from reentry your team said they used to wipe it off to clean it and then it's just like why bother it's kind of hard to wipe off it doesn't wipe off easily yeah because it's kind of like baked on there and it's interesting you kind of have to repaint it really we're having a discussion about is it safer to use a stage that's flown already versus a new stage yeah so um i i think what we'd say is like flight proven flight proven yes yeah so it's like election airplane uh do you want to be on the first flight of that airplane when it comes out of the factory or do you want to be on a later flight i'd say let somebody let the test pilots do their thing before you you you know if they fly a plane so you flying a plane you want to see that plane is flowing a few times before you get an i think yeah i i think it should be on balance better um and then uh and then we'll also we'll also be re-flying the start reapplying the the spacecraft the dragon yeah the dragon spacecraft beautiful so we're trying to get so reusability is obviously very important um in many arenas so reusability is important everybody's building rockets is important i remember uh being in hawthorne seeing your first your falcon one there and it was just amazing it's coming so there's some funny pictures of uh of basically the the sort of spacex as a kind of like a kindergartner um and me but being like what are 20 years younger um and uh yeah we're just in this tiny little warehouse in el segundo yeah i remember well yeah before we go to jump into the guidelines one last question update on starship because that's what i mean starship's taking us to the moon taking us to mars and it's it's the it is audacious can you compare it to the apostles compared to the apollo vehicle uh the saturn v for comparison for a second for folks to know get a sense of it sure well i think the thing that's least obvious from when it's um on the ground from the front of the videos and pictures is the size of it so it's um it's gonna be the largest flying object ever so it'll be uh twice the thrust and uh weight of the saturn v amazing so that's uh just for a sec and taller so including the launch escape tower so it's a very tall rocket um 120 meters tall and because it's so wide the proportions uh are obscure that fact how big it is yeah you can see in some of the pictures that have been released when it's landing on the moon and the the people look like ants it's very it's a big rocket this is this this rocket is uh capable of um you know at least 100 tons and probably closer to 200 tons of useful payload to the surface of the moon so and it was designed to be far in excess of nasa's requirements yeah um and so it's really intended to be something that you know that can enable a permanently occupied uh base on the moon so you know we've got obviously from the occupied base in in antarctica um and it would be great to have one one on the moon as well yeah um and you can do you know i think a lot more research if you have the scientists actually there and we could have some some very powerful telescopes no it's the moon you know there's some great sayings from uh from robert heinlein that said if you know if god had wanted humanity to have space flight they would you know she would have given us a moon right exactly it's a great staging place exactly it's sort of it's just just off the coast um mars is is much much much much further one last question uh yeah so but i think most actually more important than the size of starship is the fact that it is intended to be fully and rapidly reusable yeah so this is the fundamental holy grail breakthrough needed for for access to space uh to make humanity a true space bearing civilization we must have a fully and rapidly reusable rocket now we've made some progress in that direction with falcon 9 where the booster is reusable and the uh dragon spacecraft upper portion is reusable um but the the the the second stage is not reusable um and the and i would say right now i would not say the falcon booster spacecraft and uh and fairing they're not rapidly reusable like it takes a fair bit of effort uh less effort than the much less effort than the space shuttle took yeah um but uh but it was a turnaround every year or so yeah yeah exactly and it took taking about a year a year to turn them around um you know we're getting it down to um a few months basically and soon i think probably under a month uh to turn around a booster um but uh landing out to see and then having to bring it back and then sort of uh taking a month or so to to get it ready for launches still i wouldn't call that rapid by aircraft standards um whereas um starship is intended to be both fully and rapidly usable so the the booster comes right back to the launch pad um literally is caught by the the the launch tower yep so it's it lands and is actually caught by launch tower arms aspirationally i mean there's certainly that looks like science fiction excitement guaranteed um so the booster gets it comes back about six or seven minutes later and it's called so it's uh right there and then caught by launch tower arms and placed right back onto the launch stand amazing and then the the ship is i actually want the ship also to be caught by the um the launch tower uh now the ship will take it takes at least 90 minutes to over the earth yeah and um we may take more than one it may take uh three or four orbits to get uh the ground track realigned with the um landing zone the lighting zone depending on where you are but the point is that the ship will come back and be pla be right land right by the tower and be placed right back on and so uh like a 767 just refuel and go it's it's intended to be such that the booster can be used i don't know uh a dozen times a day and the ship wow the ship could be you know like basically every couple hours and the that's mostly about reloading propellant and um and mounting the ship and then the ship could probably be used um you know probably every in theory every three hours if you can make the ground track match but certainly every say six to nine hours or twice a day for the ship and we'll make more shifts than there are boosters so and i think if once we have the uh floating space platforms we we can set the put the um position them such that the ship can come back in a single orbit amazing um so there could be like three you know let's say if you get three ship launches per day that's a thousand flights a year of each with a hundred 150 tons now now we're talking a real space program let's go to uh let's go to the questions on on the carbon removal price we'll be going to your questions at in twitter in about about 20 minutes 15 20 minutes so elon this is the largest prize ever ever uh largest incentive prize ever and i would argue for one of the most largest of uh civilization scale challenges we have sure and uh we get into the rules in a second so that folks who are looking at creating teams can understand why why we created those rules but why did you fund this let's start with the the why there yeah i think i wanted to spur ideas and thinking about the long-term need to capture carbon um and uh you know i think this is one of those things that's going to take a while to figure out what the right solution is um and especially to figure out what what the best economics are for uh for co2 removal um and uh and and all the things i think through all the consequences you don't want the cure to be worse than the disease yeah uh so uh you know sometimes people say well just plant a bunch of trees i'm like that's not so easy you know like like a trillion trees sure exactly and then you've got to like okay well how you get fertilizer are you going to water them where's the water going to come from uh what habitat are you potentially destroying where the trees used to be it's not it's not just a no-brainer if there's go crowd plan about it but it's not to say that's not a good viable option we should plant some trees i i'm in favor of planting trees it's just not a question of like okay um you know there are like vast sections of like like the sahara desert or or uh the you know the some large barren areas very dry areas in the u.s um where you couldn't very plant a lot of trees but you're gonna need a lot of water yeah and you're gonna need like like call you're gonna have to cultivate them it's not like uh they don't just throw some c's on the ground um or drop them from orbit yeah and i mean so just i think it'll be good to sort of uh kind of frame the the frame the debate and and understand okay what things are really going to move the needle how much are they going to move the needle um you know if we're talking about getting tens or hundreds of billions of tons of carbon in what form will that carbon be yeah will it be stable over time um and like i said like what is this gonna cost humanity to do however it's paid for what what is it gonna cost what's the thing that's uh gonna be take the you know be most affordable um i think there are a lot of open questions on this there are let me let me chunk the rules for uh for those listening and uh you and your team amazing team and uh marcus extravoir and xenia tata and their team work really well together so the first thing is that for a team to win this and we'll talk about the prize amount and so forth they've got to actually build something that works and demonstrate something that can extract a thousand tons per year a kiloton of carbon per year as a demo scale model yeah i think um by the way we're very much open to adjusting the rules to be clear to everyone like like meaning um if things aren't working or whatever reason like uh we need to adjust rules we'll address the rules the the the fundamental goal is to um have spent uh 100 million and actually end up being probably like 120 million or whatever with um you know cost of managing the prize and everything um so they'll be you know the other day probably something like 120 million spent um and uh hopefully this spent well and usefully um and that what comes out of it is something that um uh matters to the future um so that that's that's the goal to be clear um and so if people have you know uh ideas for adjusting the rules um yeah we're going out as guidelines yeah and uh we're gonna have i think until mid-may for get public feedback tell us if we missed something right we will turn them from guidelines to rules once we get really feedback and we've gone out to so many of the amazing clients scientists out there yeah and it's yeah unless the rules need to need to be valid uh for the for the four years of this prize duration yeah so we're super open to critical feedback um don't hesitate to you know yell and and say this this is how it should be different in some way or whatever you know um the goal is just to like let's have it be a useful exercise and and have people have a good time trying to figure out this problem i think it's sort of a it's a fun problem to try to to work on um and uh yeah we just wanted to be useful at the end of the day you know and and and have it not be sort of uh an academic exercise or something that never amounts to anything i think one of the things that you've said and i've said is you know everything works on powerpoint everything works improper that's exactly you could have a powerpoint presentation for a teleportation system to the andromeda galaxy and and even have a simulation of like look here we are boom you're in the according to this slide you're now teleported to andromeda so like uh but it doesn't actually work so to win this prize uh a team actually during the four years has to build something that can at minimum pull out a thousand tons of carbon per year yeah so they can show us that do they have to do they have to pull out a thousand times or just show that the rate it works no they have to pull out like a literal thousand times we'll weigh it on scale and we're gonna we're gonna like you know maybe we could calculate it to be a thousand bucks but the rate at which yes they'll have to run it for a year to get a thousand times out but if they run it for a month that's okay probably it's okay okay all right and i mean i mean if there's a month they have a you know like a hundred times and then it needs to fit on our weighing machine or something you know like i don't get away tomorrow we'll use what are we no ships um and you know part of the the actual physically doing it is that they can they have enough data to calculate costs which are going to be important uh but we're we're not looking for theory we're looking for practice and yeah and you know how hard it is to make something real it's very hard to make something real i think and in my view prototypes are trivial and production is hard yeah um and there's the general um generally people think it's the prototype that is the hard thing prototypes are well i mean obviously you're gonna have that one percent of inspiration but as the saying goes one percent inspiration 99 perspiration yeah um ideas are plentiful actually getting it done is very hard you could say for example what about the you know the idea of going to the moon it's easy going to the moon is hard that's why it's not the idea man there's plenty of ideas all right so the second was my idea to go to the moon i've patented it okay good see you there yeah uh the second thing is and this is a term that you that you use first is that the teams have to be able to calculate the fully considered costs of pulling out the co2 and what does that mean to you yeah so i think fully considered cost actually just means that if there are um you want to look at both the benefits and the cost actually so if uh if in um sequestering carbon removing it from the uh atmosphere oceans uh uh it has has some uh have some environmental impact uh which might be small but it's not negative that certainly needs to be taken into account um and uh uh and then a bystander token if uh what's done is in extracting carbon is a useful product sure that from which you can generate revenue then that should count too right so and i'm just sort of saying for argument's sake like let's say uh you could create um you know um construction material like you know um cement cement yeah which we just i'll talk about that later some kind of useful rocks that are rocks that are useful or sand or i don't know yeah um something that's useful for construction um then uh you could say okay well this is what we could sell it for and uh you know and then just fully consider pros and cons and and and say okay this is what you know if um if we need to pay to have it done in the future which you probably will have to do then um what's the what's the lowest net cost and and to be clear the the working teams what they do has to be net negative right it's not a break even it's not play out a thousand tons and then emit a thousand tons in fact one of the things we talked about absolutely one of the things obviously yeah one of the things we talked about this can be worse than the disease yes how how long do you need to sequester the carbon for us we had a big debate you want to share what you came up with there what the team the the rate of carbon sequestering used to far exceed the radar which say it is uh potentially dissolving back into the atmosphere yeah um so um you know like if if uh yeah um and so one of the rules is that you have to sequester for at least 100 years right so we yeah we set a target does it look forever yeah you know a year is not long enough um so we said you have to demonstrate that your methodology is gonna contain the the co2 in some fashion for a hundred years at least yeah maybe with maybe there's a small amount that that is lost maybe it's not perfect yeah i think we'll probably want to set it to you know um a hundred percent for a hundred years out but if it's like i don't know 90 for 100 years that's probably okay you know so it just needs to be something that if we scaled it up would it work yeah and that's the third part obviously and that's the third part of the common sense text test really yes and the hardest thing is that the winning team has to prove to our judges that their approach can actually scale to a gigaton level otherwise it's not going to be useful exactly it can't be a niche yeah it can't be inherently niche and if anybody knows about scaling up i i think yeah you do uh yeah scalable scaling is hard yeah so yeah i i don't know what the answer is here really um but i think if a lot of smart people work on this there could be some really creative solutions something generally useful for the world yeah in that regard absolutely um yeah and i think just be clear like looking for pragmatic solutions it doesn't need to be perfect um you know but it's got to be something that's just fundamentally if we scaled it up would it would work yeah that's it so let's talk about the prizes that are up for grabs um first place is going to be 50 million yeah which is significant our hope is that it's going to attract enough cognitive surplus out there to focus in on this yeah um 30 million split between sort of a second third and fourth place prize and one of the things that you and your team put forward is maybe it might be split into different categories right different approaches yeah i mean we want to reward people who have done great work yeah fun fundamentally i'm open to increasing the price size too over time so if it turns out like hey somebody really really kicked ass and and uh and somehow there's not a price for them we'll also add some more to the price that's that's extraordinary yeah absolutely i want somebody to have like spent like you know massive blood sweat and tears have done something useful and they get nothing for it that would be pretty bad yeah so um but i think also um you know this somebody's gonna probably get a company out of this you know because i think this will be a need long term and you know so uh and and uh so this is kind of like you can also think of it as like you know free venture money yeah you know non-diluted venture capital yeah free free money for your company and hopefully we're also creating a massive marketplace and proving to people that there is there's a there there here yeah so 50 million uh for the first 30 million split among second third and fourth in the next year we're taking 15 million dollars and distributing a million dollars to the top 15 teams that appear to be making the most progress the most real just giving some people some seed money basically yeah and then uh you've set aside five million for student teams yeah which is really important you want to talk about student teams i know you're passionate about that yeah yeah we've done a lot of student competitions for example hyperloop um he's trying to uh you know spur ideas and advanced transportation um and it's really just basically a an electric car and a vacuum tube to be precise i mean uh and we've had several of them and and um you know the the last half-life competition they actually i got like i think halfway to the speed of sound so yeah it's pretty impressive and the the thing was you had to get to the fastest speed and then and then stop without crashing yeah um so um that's pretty it's kind of exciting it's like is this thing going to you know get what speed is going to get up to are they going to slam the brakes on in time or is it going to hit the crash barrier at the end so it was pretty fun and then we kind of got to we i put that on pause and now we're doing uh tunneling competitions because nice change that yeah that technology has not changed that much in a century you know honestly i think we're we're gonna you know i mean for i don't know five or seven years i for a long time i was like people ask me what opportunities do you see i said tunneling and then i think i was joking but um i think this is the way to solve traffic in um congested cities and almost every major city is congested so and and with uh as autonomy uh gets better and better and you have robo taxis and everything um the robo taxes will be cheaper than a bus or subway and people will want it and it'll take your point to point it you know even when it's like raining and snow uh and it's uh you know so it's gonna be better also i think for you know from public health standpoint like if there's another pandemic and you know how to get around you know it's like you know it's just difficult to go into in crowded spaces so um then uh anyway so i think tunnels are gonna be really important in the future for relieving congestion in um in cities so um you know i hope others start tunnel telling companies um and just improve titling technology and um that you can have effect these warp tunnels just going all the way through you know 3d like multiple levels and um we're the first operational one in vegas that's uh it's going to go into operation i think in a few months uh you know we could sit here and talk about macaque monkeys playing pong as well link that was amazing yeah that was awesome yeah but i'm not going to go though i'm going to focus still on on our on our i played mine against the monkey he did did it no but uh what but it hadn't practiced as much yet so now it might be able to beat me monkeys have very good agility right they've got to catch the branch they can swing through the trees and we cannot not very well um yeah so i think a monkey actually could play like a fast twitch video game really well that's great better maybe better than a human you can sponsor a team yeah exactly esports it's just monkeys yeah against the best teams yeah turns out the monkeys actually love playing video games and uh and so don't mind drinking smoothies no it's just like humans i mean basically humans love snacks and video games and soda monkeys you know oh that's awesome yeah um we're about to go to questions in uh in two minutes i know we've got a stack of them i just want to hit on there are four categories that teams can can put their approaches forward first is direct air capture pull it out of the air any comment on that uh sure well i mean this you can certainly pull out there's a lot there's lots of ways to get carbon out of the air yeah um it could absorb it many different ways yeah category two is ocean sort of algae kelp plankton a lot of co2 in the oceans people don't realize that category 3 land trees i mean mark benioff has you know been backing a trillion trees project i mean that is where they're going to be planted we'll find out okay there's by the way when people say that earth is being overpopulated that's not true it's like look out the window and i know you and i have had this conversation that you're more worried about under population oh yeah yeah um earth is going to face a massive population collapse yeah uh in in a over the next 20 20 30 years massive yeah um and it's this this is definitely you know more civilization you know a question of like a civilization could die with a bang or a whimper this would definitely be dying with the whimper yeah we need birth rate is very low yeah it's been dropping right it used to be five six children per family globally it's like 2.4 below in the u.s it's below below replacement levels fourth i mean in in most of europe russia japan korea singapore um you know uh it's uh it's it's well below replacement um but i would still say are you i mean when we spoke last about this area you're still a sort of abundant optimist that the world is getting better on many levels yeah i think the the the world is generally getting better um you know i have some concerns about advanced ai like you know that that's a risk if i say like existential risks i'd say um super advanced ai is one um and and probably the second biggest risk after that is population collapse not an asteroid impact no the population collapse the thing about demographics is both ways you know what's going to happen in 20 years because you know the birth rate last year it takes like 20 years for a person to grow up yeah so we know what the adult population is going to be 20 years from now because we know what kids are born last year um i think it's we have a serious issue with population collapse um that's far bigger than people realize um and and you know just the the social networks and everything i mean that the social support networks were not really set up for a high ratio of retirees to workers somebody so so then well thank god we got robots coming in yeah the romans exactly we'll need those we'll need those robots but you don't want to have the youth effectively enslaved to take care of the elderly you know which is what would kind of happen if you have an upside-down demographic pyramid um let's get to the questions first of all if you're interested in the guidelines or to register a team go to xprize.org you can download the guidelines again up until i think may 13th we're looking for a public comment please tell us what we could do to improve it and then please register you know as a team so we can communicate with you if you're interested uh before we go to the questions and you go to uh xprize's twitter account at xprize to ask questions uh let's go to a short video from uh dr marcus extravoir we call him dr x he is the lead for us an amazing brilliant individual uh who leads our carbon and climate work um all right let's uh let's see what dr extra wars to say i'm looking for a hundred million dollar answers that can help change the course of human history and help heal our planet but what's the question in the next 100 seconds i'm going to explain i'm marcus extivor vice president of energy and climate at xprize the question is how do we take centuries of co2 emissions out of the air and oceans if you've got the skills to answer that question we'd love to hear from you today now let's start with the basics we've got to reduce our co2 emissions and get to net zero but net zero is not enough we also have to go carbon negative and we need to get there fast that means taking co2 that's currently in the air and oceans removing it and storing it for a long long time do you know how to remove co2 using the land oceans rocks or even taking co2 directly out of the air we've got to get the co2 from up here and locking it away down here we know plants and trees can do this and been doing it for a long time they're great at this but do you know how to help plants and trees sequester that co2 in the vegetation and soils in a way that's durable and can last for centuries how do we use the oceans to sequester vast amounts of co2 kelp and sea grasses are great at this and about a third of our emissions are already in the oceans do you know how to remove it and sequester it safely what about rocks and helping them remove co2 many rocks can do this naturally but the process takes thousands of years on its own do you know how to dramatically speed that up now you might already have an amazing idea in direct air capture in soil sequestration or tree planting or farming or maybe kelp farming in seagrass marine biology ocean alkalinity enhancement geologic sequestration mineralization and enhanced weathering or maybe a technique no one's heard of before we want your 100 million dollar ideas enter the largest incentive prize in history visit xprize.org to find out how to register a team and get involved together we can help balance earth's carbon cycle and protect our climate for future generations what a 100 million dollar answer look like it looks like any other crazy idea it just has to work yeah yeah it's just uh we're so we're so lucky to have amazing people which is what spacex and tesla i mean people who care about about changing the world all right we're gonna go to uh some questions um let's uh we have some over here the first one is from chuck brady in austin chuck is uh one of our innovation board members one of the earliest funders that did the background work in the climate for here and so i found this question uh super fascinating so he says if the bogey is 10 gigatons per year uh and the global economic output is 87 trillion dollars at least it has been the last year then at 200 per ton uh to sequester uh cost sequestration is two trillion or about two percent of the global gdp so it seems like a reasonable drag in overall economy uh if we could stop reverse climate change the shortcoming right now is we don't have a scalable way yet to capture and sequester co2 that's the background that seems like a reasonable estimate so here's his first question uh should competing teams prioritize scalability over cost and what lessons from tesla and spacex have you learned uh to help teams thinking about the design of their solutions well i think it's not unless the cost is affordable it's not scalable i mean i thought the prior math was was pretty sensible there um you know we could we could afford something perhaps which is um one or two percent of gdp but it would be extremely painful if it was 20 of gdp yeah um we started having to cut into health care and and all sorts of you know social care programs um and if it's 200 of gdp it's not happening at all yep um so we want to just let them know that the audio feed is coming up yeah uh uh chuck uh has a second question i also thought was really important says uh while we want the lowest cost uh that will do a gigaton per year or more inevitably they're going to be trade-offs between cost and scalability uh no actually i think um something's not scalable unless the cost is uh is low yeah so uh or at least if the cost at scale is low mm-hmm um uh yeah i mean i mean it gets tossed and scalable you could say like i could plant a tree yeah sure okay um yeah yeah but uh we just need to solve the problem and and so both uh cost and scalability need to be addressed um it's like is it gonna be remove enough carbon to matter and can we afford it as a civilization yeah those are the two things that that matter yeah and then just obviously making sure that it in in sequestering the coven we're not uh at the same time creating uh some new environmental issue um so i mean that's an important point right that we're not creating a new environmental issue at the same time that we are yeah yeah or or maybe it is but it can only be basically the cure is going to be much better than the disease yeah obviously yeah um so just like you know you take take some medication some maybe there's like slight side effects but but you generally want the medication to be much better than the disease so it just got to make sense like we can see a path to this um to working at scale and solving a problem yeah it has to have some chance of that paresh galani from los angeles one of our vision circle members says who do you think should be paying for the cost of carbon capture is it government oil industry attacks across everyone do you have a sense about that well generally the market systems work very well when prices are accurate and the problem we have right now is that we're not correctly pricing the cost per ton of co2 in the atmosphere and oceans so and there are various attempts to try to get get at this with subsidies and whatnot but but really the market system will work work well if the market systems work well if there is not a pricing error yeah and we have a pricing error in that we are not paying for this externality it's in classic economics it's just an unpriced externality in the uh we're we're not paying for our garbage removal uh so then you know so and so the the logical thing to do and i think the you know vast majority of economists would agree is to uh put a tax on coven and then you can find ways with with tax rebates and whatnot to make sure it's not an aggressive tax that it does not unfairly um you know negatively disproportionately negatively affect uh people on low incomes uh with with uh tax rebates and stuff so i think that's the way to that that's the thing that systemically i think is important to address it if you correctly price something the market system works yeah prices are just information we have the wrong information so uh giulio from dublin says uh do you expect the technologies coming out of this competition to have any uh use on on mars for example and ps thank you for what you're doing for humanity uh yeah i think so interesting thing on mars is um that mars is a primarily co2 atmosphere though it also has some nitrogen and carbon and other trace elements nitrogen and argon i should say in addition to primarily co2 so in order to produce propellant on mars uh would i we would take the co2 from the atmosphere combine that with water ice um mars has a lot of ice under the dust it's amazing that we didn't that 20 years ago that wasn't known i mean we're discovering it every place now yeah yeah mars is just it's basically covered in ice yeah um it's just got dust too so it's hard to see the ice under the dust but uh there's there's i believe um if if you warmed mars up you'd have an ocean with an average death depth i think almost a mile or something like that on the northern part of the of the planet it's like something like 40 of the planet would have an ocean potentially up to a mile mile deep or something like that extraordinary like like a big it wouldn't be like just a little lake or something like that so um so so you take uh the water ice h2o and combine that with the co2 in the atmosphere i use something like this body a process where you run it over a ruthenium catalyst and you get that basically methane yeah again methane ch4 and o2 oxygen and that's um that's actually why we designed the starship to use uh methane oxygen is because we can actually create that refrigerator sustainably yeah in fact literally by pulling the co2 out of the atmosphere that's combining with water and then uh and then using that as propellant and so uh actually by its very nature mars has to have a sustainable um sustainable energy it's a sustainable rocket propellant yeah so let's go to uh india uh rohan kumar from mumbai says why don't you simply implement the available technologies on a larger scale like which technology yeah tree planting i mean i i think there should be more trees i think the i would say that there currently does not exist technologies that can scale to the gigaton level at a reasonable cost and that's the underlying purpose of this competition is to uh to either either demonstrate existing technologies can and teams can use whatever technologies they want or to really innovate and come up with new approaches like yeah yeah it will the thing is that uh generally if if trees can grow somewhere they generally you usually do grow they they you know they like unless they generally yeah there's no one there pulling them out other than humans in the amazon yeah i mean the amazon is quite a thick quite a big big jungle i've flown over the amazon many times and that is one hell of a jungle in fact that like you would fly for long periods of time and see nothing no lights no fires no nothing um just darkness and then eventually like fly over brazilian capital and like out of nowhere there's a bunch of lights um but but there's just this you know in in order to have a big increase in uh in tree biomass we would have we would have to irrigate uh and um you know um provide manure you know like basically fertilizer and we'd have to cultivate make it have hospitable for the trees to grow yes and then you say okay well what's the energy cost of the of the fertilizer and the getting the fresh water there and um you know just making it habitable for trees it's it's you've got to factor in the you know the energy cost the fertilizer and and energy cost the water and all that so it's like okay what's the actual net carbon result it's it's not as good as people might think it's again i'm not saying i'm anti-tree i'm pro-tree but it but it would just be very difficult to blanket the sahara with trees so let's this is an important one here as teams are coming together so grant in washington dc says what is elon's and peter's process of building a strong team and ultimately i think the quality of your team is everything uh yeah sure absolutely so once you get things done how do you i mean when you start a new company like like neuralink or boring uh how do you recruit that first core team well neural link and boring are very small companies they should emphasize like these are um tiny compared to spacex and tesla which is sure well well over 90 percent of what i do is just spacex and tesla so you know near lincoln warren company i reached just a few hundred people um but how do you these teams have 80 000 people that's incredible dude yeah so it's because spacex is like over 8 000 people so but how do you recruit that your initial team to work on something i said do you put out word do you uh do you know somebody typically do you build around somebody else do you pull from your existing companies well it varies i mean um my i mean the first company way back in the day uh zip2 um what i did was um i just wrote software you know so i don't have any money so i came out to what's up two i came out to go do grad studies at stanford um i had a hundred thousand dollars in like student debt and one computer um and i was gonna actually work on um advanced capacitors for using electric vehicles i remember that you're saying that way way back in the day yeah um so and i spent a couple summers working on that before in silicon valley before going to stanford and then that that summer i was like well you know the internet's going to be something that really changes the it's going to be one of the biggest impacts on on humanity you know it's like humanity communication will go from being like osmosis to humanity having a nervous system where you could access any part of humanity's knowledge from from anywhere from any connection anywhere you could be in the middle of the amazon jungle and have access to all of humanity's information more than if somebody was living in the library of congress so it's like well i want to be part of creating that and so i just started writing software i've been writing software for a long time but um i actually wrote the first maps and directions on the internet first white pages first yellow pages by myself um and then you know we hired a few interns and then my brother joined another friend of mine greg currie has passed away and and then we got some venture funding um i thought it was crazy that these guys were gonna give us like they gave us like three million dollars and i was like this is insane it's just us and some interns uh and they're giving us three million dollars this is crazy look at that that makes me mad so i i think what i'm hearing you say is if you know the the first most critical part of the team is you as the as the founder and the passionate news useful things um let's try and squeeze in a few more well i mean i think like yeah the things you get over like for for for spacex it was just literally like okay we we we should become multi you know multi-planet species and um but these are like long answers so but i think in general if you want to recruit people that are you know really talented and driven you have to say you have to state what the what's the mission what's the problem we're trying to solve yep and and uh and just be clearly willing to you know pour a lot of blood sweat and tears into it um and have a convincing argument for why it matters um you know there's gonna say like there's three three major things for um in terms of motivation uh it's like first of all somebody's gotta look forward to coming to work in the morning like if they're like are they enjoying the the work itself intrinsically um that's very important um and uh the right work environment can really make make a big difference there i think the ideally is that they also feel like that their rewards will receive um fair uh financial compensation like that they're that you know that the financial rewards are are good and fair uh and then third for the really the best people in the world they'll want to know are they is what they're doing in a matter yeah like so uh if they spend 10 years doing this it will make a difference in the world or you know will people notice but what matter you know can i get the next question please uh lise uh from san diego says the x prize just awarded 20 million in prize money related to carbon removal uh can you explain what the difference is between that and the musk foundation's x prize uh we had a 20 million dollar uh energy cosia prize for pulling co2 out of the smokestack of a natural gas and coal plant and turning it into a product more profitable in the cost of extraction and we just the two teams that won that were creating uh concrete and uh right they're up and scaling so it's a you know now it's instead of just out of the plants right now and thank you to wyoming uh for their support there it's now can we pull it on a global global level okay um but what sort of tonnage are they able to do uh i actually don't know the answer but uh uh nandan from india says can a 17 year old register uh given that i have the resources and ideas uh yeah i think so sure i think it's not age level there's no age limit where in fact student teams are going to be important um oli from london says technology is a piece the climate change solution but how do you change behavior and habits what do you think about that i think changing people's behavior and habits is tough or basically if you're trying to convince people to make life more miserable for themselves this is a hard argument to win um so with with tesla when we created tesla we're like okay look we we got to make a car that's exciting and and fun and looks good and then people don't have to if you're trying to convince people to that in order to save the environment you have to wear a hair shirt and and make life miserable and your food is going to be terrible it's that's a this is an uphill battle okay so at tesla we're like we're just going to make electric cars that are better than gasoline cars faster yeah lower cost per million they look beautiful they're faster then they have also you know cool advanced technology they're more fun um you don't have to go to gas stations which are nasty um and so you know but you've got to solve long distance problems with superchargers um so i think it is actually you know uh gonna be way more palatable to people if if if it's uh if whatever solution is is removing carbon does not make their quality of life worse yeah one last question here from uh from godfrey in new york um i know godfrey he has got als and uh he is loving his fully self-driving model s okay what i mean it's not fully self-righteous yeah i know but but it's getting there it's getting there it's getting there and uh and so he's i mean for people who are disabled it's extraordinary technology it's coming and he's a brilliant uh brilliant human being he says hi elon big fan of your work massively and eternally grateful to you for being a powerful source of inspiration to me can you please share uh who and what inspires you and drives you to be so insanely productive uh at a superhuman level so what who and what um well i don't know i think i i i was uh i was always kind of like a crazy kid i suppose um i was just very curious about the world and um how do we come to be here what's the meaning of life and all that and i always had a really intense desire to understand things and learn um yeah i mean i had sort of an existential crisis i guess when i was 11 or 12 or something trying to figure out what it's all about you know and uh ultimately came to the conclusion that um we don't really know the answer but uh but if we increase the scope and scale of civilization then we have a much better chance of understanding the meaning of life and why we're here or even what are the right questions to ask so therefore we should strive to expand the scope and scale of consciousness to better understand the questions to ask about the answer that is the universe yeah well on behalf of uh the human race on behalf of everybody watching elim thank you for all that you do i know you you worked 24 7 and driven by passion so thanks yeah um just uh grateful for what you've done and thank you for supporting and launching this uh this x prize it's meaningful beyond belief and hopefully now it's everybody else's turn to try and dig in and form teams yeah i hope you'll have a good time and and get some some productive stuff coming out of it that'd be great yeah that would be awesome um for everybody uh tuning in i know we have literally thousands of questions we're going to be going to uh to twitter spaces live which is twitter's new audio chat feature dr marcus extravoir and xenia tata and i will be there to engage and answer as many questions as we can about the rules just like twitter's clubhouse this is twitter's clubhouse yes yes okay awesome so um pal uh again uh i'm gonna be there tomorrow morning good luck with the launch yeah it's gonna be a late night i'll i'll be up uh all night um because launch is pretty early in the morning so yeah um i'm gonna i'm gonna tap on you for my invitation to the uh to boca chica for a uh sure a starship flight it's pretty wild seeing that that feels like the future it's pretty insane yeah yeah buck rogers here we come yeah yeah all right see you guys on twitter spaces elon all right thanks peter all right pleasure thank you thanks you

Channel: XPRIZE

Views: 836,437

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Id: BN88HPUm6j0

Length: 79min 22sec (4762 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021

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