The Meaning of Life 75
except the owner of the bunker will get to it if something
happens. Another company specialized in training people
how to escape by foot from New York to a safer place.
But no one in the television show is as extreme as Elon,
who want to escape to other planets. “I really believe it is
a matter of when and not if, and that when is probably
a lot sooner than most of us are comfortable thinking
about,” Elon said. “Things have happened quickly. It took
us millions of years to evolve into what we are, but in
the last 60 years, with atomic weaponry, we’ve created the
potential to extinguish ourselves. And if it’s not us, it will
inevitably be something else. If not a meteorite in the rela-
tive short term, then the expansion of the Sun’s corona. It
will happen.”^49 He added a number of other threats with the
ability to extinct life on Earth. They include an engineered
virus unleashed by terrorists, an inadvertent creation of a
micro black hole, or a yet unknown technology.^61 To save
mankind from these catastrophes, we need to begin living
on other planets.
When we have begun living on other planets, it will be
a so-called “epochal moment.” These are not moments in
the history of mankind, these are the life’s turning points.
Curing cancer will be a moment in the history of mankind,
but from a broader perspective, no one will remember
when we found the cure for cancer. “People think of curing
AIDS or cancer as being very important, and they are –
within the context of humanity,” Elon said. “But curing all
forms of cancer would improve the average life span by
only two to three years. That’s it.”