Joining the Thrillionaires 318
One of the advisers to Planetary Resources is the film
director James Cameron. When Elon founded SpaceX, he
held seminars at the Mars Society together with Cameron,
who has directed movies likeTitanicandTerminator.^60
Cameron would like to visit Mars and he believes we
humans have to begin living on other planets if we want to
survive. “If we discovered a comet nucleus or an asteroid
on an impact course with Earth, we could do exactly what
the dinosaurs did, and we could stare upward with a dumb
look on our faces,” he said. “We need to evolve beyond the
dinosaurs.”^415
To increase our interest in space, Cameron believes
the space industry should contact Hollywood to make the
space more visually dramatic. He compared it with his
movieTitanic. The images we see from space today are
similar to if we had watched theTitanicmovie through
Leonardo DiCaprio’s eyes. It wouldn’t have been a good
movie.^415
Cameron has a movie script ready for a new movie
about Mars. This time a more realistic movie compared
with the earlier movies with a Mars theme. “The Mars
movies have been so bad,” Elon said. “I mean, honestly.
And it’s going to be tricky getting funding for another Mars
movie after John Carter. It was a good comic book, and they
totally screwed up the movie.”^316
When we tried to reach the Moon in the 1960s, some
argued that landing on the Moon would be the noblest
expression of the century, while other argued it would be
the high mark of the fundamental insanity of the time. You